Fleming Lines That Tickle You

Ahhh, remember this one? Well, I was inspired to revive it after participating in this thread: Fleming and Breasts

The way Fleming strings together words is like a dance to me. I sway back and forth as I read, if only in my mind. It's musical and has a distinct rhythm that pleases me. He's also very funny. And sometimes the line are funny or tickle just because they are so right with the times in which they were written but seem extraordinary in our PC world.

So, with that in mind, I'm going to start with a paragraph from Live and Let Die that amuses me:

In Live and Let Die, Fleming wrote:

As Bond followed Dexter up the steps into the hotel he reflected that it was almost certainly too late for these precautions. Hardly anywhere in the world will you find a negress driving a car. A negress acting as a chauffeur is still more extraordinary. Barely conceivable even inHarlem, but that was certainly where the car was from.

I also love the detail in this paragraph:

In Live and Let Die, Fleming wrote:

Opposite him, leaning forward with concern on her pretty face, was a sexy little negress with a touch of white blood in her. Her jet-black hair, as sleek as the best permanent wave, framed a sweet almond-shaped face with rather slanting eyes under finely drawn eyebrows. The deep purple of her parted, sensual lips was thrilling against the bronze skin. All that Bond could see of her clothes was the bodice of a black satin evening dress, tight and revealing across the firm, small breasts. She wore a plain gold chain round her neck and a plain gold band round each thin wrist.

I encourage all of you to post your favourite bits of Fleming in this thread. If you don't have the exact quote at hand, just write what you remember and someone will post the actual passage.

Enjoy!

Khan and I are partial to the passage where Bond gives Krebs a good kicking.

There's also a good bit where Bond fights the urge to give Irma Bunt the boot in her dumpy, square derriere.

He also kicks one of Mr. Big's henchmen in the tookus, sending him over a railing and to the concrete below where his tie lays across his chest like a squashed adder.

Bond had a mania for punting kiesters. One sympathises.

ambler wrote:

Khan and I are partial to the passage where Bond gives Krebs a good kicking.

We'll start here.. and get to Khan's suggestions later today. :)

In Moonraker, Fleming wrote:

There was no noise in the corridor but Bond saw that his door at the far end was open. He took his gun from under his armpit and walked swiftly down the carpeted passage. Krebs had his back to him. He was kneeling forward in the middle of the floor with his elbows on the ground. His hands were at the wheels of the combination lock of Bond's leather case. His whole attention was focused on the click of the tumblers in the lock.

The target was tempting and Bond didn't hesitate. His teeth showed in a hard smile, he took two quick paces into the room and his foot lashed out. All his force was behind the point of his shoe and his balance and timing were perfect. The scream of a jay was driven out of Krebs as, like the caricature of a leaping frog, he hurtled over Bond's case, across a yard or so of carpet, and into the front of the mahogany dressing-table. His head hit the middle of it so hard that the heavy piece of furniture rocked on its base. The scream was abruptly cut off and he crashed in an inert spreadeagle on the floor and lay still.

Bond stood looking at him and listening for the sound of hurrying footsteps, but there was still silence in the house. He walked over to the sprawling figure and bent down and heaved it over on its back. The face around the smudge of yellow moustache was pale and some blood had oozed down over the forehead from a cut in the top of the skull. The eyes were closed and the breathing was laboured. Bond knelt down on one knee and went carefully through every pocket of Krebs's neat grey pinstripe suit, laying the disappointingly meagre contents on the carpet beside the body. There was no pocketbook and no papers. The only objects of interest were a bunch of skeleton keys, a spring knife with a well-sharpened stiletto blade, and an obscene little truss-shaped black leather cosh. Bond pocketed these and then went to his bedside table and fetched the untouched bottle of Vichy water.

It took five minutes to revive Krebs and get him into a sitting position with his back to the dressing-table and another five for him to be capable of speaking. Gradually the colour came back to his face and the craftiness to his eyes.

In Moonraker, Fleming wrote:

Bond licked his lips as he remembered the crack Krebs's head had made against the dressing-table. Had he kicked him as hard as he possibly could? Yes, his memory reassured him, with every ounce of strength he could put into his shoe.

From Thunderball.

Fleming wrote:

Leiter ordered two dry Martinis. "Just watch," he said sourly.

The Martinis arrived. Leiter took one look at them and told the waiter to send over the barman. When the barman came, looking resentful, Leiter said, "My friend, I asked for a Martini and not a soused olive." He picked the olive out of the glass with the cocktail stick. The glass, that had been three-quarters full, was now half full. Leiter said mildly, "This was being done to me while the only drink you knew was milk. I'd learned the basic economics of your business by the time you'd graduated to Coca Cola. One bottle of Gordon's Gin contains sixteen true measures - double measures that is, the only ones I drink. Cut the gin with three ounces of water and that makes it up to twenty-two. Have a jigger glass with a big steal in the bottom and a bottle of these fat olives and you've got around twenty-eight measures. Bottle of gin here costs only two dollars retail, let's say around a dollar sixty wholesale. You charge eighty cents for a Martini, one dollar sixty for two. Same price as a whole bottle of gin. And with your twenty-eight measures to the bottle, you've still got twenty-six left. That's a clear profit on one bottle of gin of around twenty-one dollars. Give you a dollar for the olives and the drop of vermouth and you've still got twenty dollars in your pocket. Now, my friend, that's too much profit, and if I could be bothered to take this Martini to the management and then to the Tourist Board, you'd be in trouble. Be a good chap and mix us two large dry Martinis without olives and with some slices of lemon peel separate. Okay? Right, then we're friends again."

The barman's face had run through indignation, respect, and then the sullenness of guilt and fear. Reprieved, but clutching at his scraps of professional dignity, he snapped his fingers for the waiter to take away the glasses. "Okay, suh. Whatever you says. But we've got plenty overheads here and the majority of customers they doan complain."

Leiter said, "Well, here's one who's dry behind the ears. A good barman should learn to be able to recognize the serious drinker from the status-seeker who wants just to be seen in your fine bar."

"Yassuh." The barman moved away with Negro dignity.

See, Leiter can be a snob too... but can you blame him?

Ah for the days when you could get an 80-cent martini. Even if it was watered down and olived out.

High time we see some Bondian butt-punting on film.

*blows dust off*

seems we already had the thread started by Kitts no less. Seven years...!


towards the end of Goldfinger as we see and hear how Bond spent the post-Fort Knox operation culminating with:

Yes, it had all been very satisfactory so far as Washington was concerned, but what about the English end? Who in America cared about the Bank of England's gold? Who cared that two English girls had been murdered in the course of this business? Who really minded that Goldfinger was still at liberty now that America's bullion was safe again?


or the other curt epitaph for another Bond girl:


"Poor little bitch. She didn't think much of men."


(indeed, nice little bit where Bond is swimming his way out of unconsciousness during the flight into New York and he wonders about Tilly being in heaven and meeting "the others"....How we would he introduce her to the others, to Vesper for instance?

Interesting bit of commentary, that first quote. I like how this type of reflection/discourse manifests itself in the likes of GE, TND and SF. Adds a bit to Bond's character without pretension.

I always found the second quote amusing too. Only Fleming could treat the idea of heaven as an awkward moment between a man's conquests!

The first quote makes me think that nothing's likely changed in nearly sixty years between the American intelligence services and our own, the British. Fleming might have been on point in 1959 that if such an operation had happened in reality, the CIA wouldn't have cared about Britain's side of things. I dare-say in some bureaucrat's drawer by Craig's tenure, there's a list of "things we're owed"!

The heaven quote made me think if Tracy was thrown into the equation. The woman he loved, women he had either loved in some way or discarded or used. There's a moment in one of the early Gardner's where he mulls over his loves and when he comes to Tracy, the emotions harden and even to a point, make him feel guilty to be laying with another woman. Might've been that, er Q'ute woman

I think Gardner does it there and in another place, plus he makes a few other single mentions occasionally IIRC. Benson also did it effectively from what I remember.

If I start this, I'll wind up typing each book out.

Aside from the spectre/spectre of defeat dialogue in the casino (and thence the film), there's the crowd watching the two (Fleming's description of these scenes entice more than that of golf in GF) and how they feed off the apparent tension between Largo and Bond. I can readily picture Dalton or Lazenby despite the fact some of the exchange is right there in the film.

However...

There was a buzz of comment round the table. 'But if the Italian had stood on his five...' 'I always draw on a five'. 'I never do'. 'It was bad luck'. 'No, it was bad play.'

Slightly foreshadowing OHMSS. Part of me for a moment allowed the thoughts as I read to picture Tracy being in that crowd making a comment. Perhaps where she meets her wayward Italian count or an illicit week away from her father.

(I should say that the mention of the Union Corse earlier tickled but purely for some kind of link to OHMSS. Spectre have 'fine' members- the MVD and the Gestapo to say nothing of the rest!)

"The licence to kill for the Secret Service, the double-0 prefix, was a great honour. It had been earned hardly. It brought Bond the only assignments he enjoyed, the dangerous ones."

Don't know if tickle is the right word but this line from Dr. No sums Bond up perfectly, imo. It's obvious that Fleming actually knew men of that type from the war and understood them.

If you write thrillers, people think that you must live a thrilling life and enjoy doing thrilling things. Starting with these false assumptions, the Editorial Board of the Sunday Times repeatedly urged me to do something exciting and write about it and, at the end of October 1959, they came up with the idea that I should make a round trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in beautiful, beautiful prose.

and so, revisiting Thrilling Cities.

A fair chunk is tickle worthy. It's a time capsule with a man so symbolic of the pre-war Britain and even of the one that changed and vanished by the 1960s. But you also have Richard Hughes, a man whose legendary character I first read in Alan Whicker's Journey of a Lifetime and I suspect was more exposed to Fleming (who travels with him briefly in the book). Hughes was the basis for Dikko Henderson in YOLT.

in Macao (writing about Tongs catching up with someone Fleming visited)

There are always interfering busybodies around when someone tries to give the common people a bit of fun.

Tokyo:

I was full of reservations about Japan. Before and during the war they had been bad enemies and many of my friends had suffered at their hands.

Reminder of Fleming being that rare commodity today (well non existent), someone whose been there at the heart of things and seen the war up close. What makes the Hamburg/Berlin/Vienna chapters different and better than anything written today. The Europe of those chapters already changed.

The Honolulu part has the dramatic mid-air explosion of his jets' engine (the pilot sounds beyond calm. Like an advert) and then you have Fleming trying to surf. I can imagine Bond turning his nose up at it if had ever gone to Hawaii. Nice little bit where he goes to a place called M's Smoke House and writes a little about M himself.

How like the cunning old rascal, I thought! Here he is, quietly salting away Secret Service funds to build up a nice hard-currency nest-egg to supplement his pension


It has a different feel once he makes it to the States. LA has this sprawling part where he sees an old friend in the LAPD (to my mind two opposite characters. The Britisher and the Los Angelino cop). Las Vegas has a nice bit where he says he's hammered the syndicate and then gets a 2am phone call (is it the syndicate after their cut?). Got to like someone from the mob, Fleming's contact, giving him tips (to relay to his readers) on how to gamble sensibly.


But then:


I enjoyed myself least of all in New York. It was my last lap and perhaps I was getting tired, but each time I came back (and I have revisited the city every year since the war) I feel that it has lost more of its heart.


The whole part has a down feeling to it though there's this bewildering remark that two citizens were gnawed to death by rats(!). He is a little down on Thanksgiving.


And up to Hamburg.


Those war-time memories, that one had thought banished forever in 1946, come back in a town like Wilhelmshaven where the giant V-boat pens still clutter up the harbour front, and where vast chunks of blasted concrete lie among tangles of rusted metal. One seems still to hear the ghostly strains of 'Wir fahren gegen Engel-land' whispering of the days before the bombs, the days of iron crosses, of daggers of honour and of secret weapons that would win the war for Germany. And then one hears the giant whistle of the bombs that shattered the dream. It was good to escape these ghosts for the warmth and life of Hamburg.

Even so, he writes about the carnage wrought upon Hamburg in July-August 1942, nine days where 48,000 were killed (again, descriptive of the citizens stumbling into melting asphalt and then incinerated by the firestorm. Here subtly touched upon, contrasting to Richard J. Evans in his Third Reich at War which describes it in nauseating detail).


Learning those grisly facts I remembered how, in those days, studying the blown-up photographs from the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit and reading the estimates of damage, we in the Admiralty used to rub our hands with delight. Ah me!

Have yet to read Thrilling Cities. You've just prompted me to hunt down a copy. Piz Gloria in June is looking further and further away.

I need a good copy of both it and Diamond Smugglers. Not to mention a print version of 007 in New York.

"It was one of those days where it seemed to James Bond that all life, as someone put it, was nothing but a heap of six to four against."
That is perhaps the definition of life itself.

I know that feeling Fields, i.e Piz Gloria.

There are copies out there now I imagine HGTTB. Mine are from when they were reprinted in 2013. Went out of my way in Central London to find copies.

I cleaned off the rest of Thrilling Cities tonight. Fleming's disdain for Berlin is understandable but then the descriptions of the transvestites were slightly smile provoking -I mean they all seemed to be WWII veterans from the panzers etc and the imagery was like a Benny Hill sketch in my mind.


But if I may quote the end of Berlin:


I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother. In contra-distinction to Hamburg and to so many other German towns, it is only in Berlin and in the smoking cities of the Ruhr that I think I see, against my will, the sinister side of the German nation. In these two regions I smell the tension and hysteria that breed the things we have suffered from Germany in two great wars and that, twice in my lifetime, have got my country to her knees. In these places I have a recurrent waking nightmare: it is ten, twenty, fifty years later in the Harz Mountains, or in the depths of the Black Forest. The whole of a green and smiling field slides silently back to reveal the dark mouth of a great subterranean redoubt. With a whine of thousands of horsepower, behind a mass of brilliant machinery (brain-children of Krupp, Siemens, Zeiss and all the others) the tip of a gigantic rocket emerges above the surrounding green trees. England has rejected the ultimatum. First there is a thin trickle of steam from the rocket exhausts and then a great belch of flame, and slowly, very slowly, the rocket climbs off its underground launching pad. And then it is on its way.
Yes, it was obviously time for me to leave Berlin.


At once almost better than half his Bond work and yet, obviously a product of his background and era. Makes me wish we could leap back in time and bring IF back to here so not only could he see what became of his creation but the world we live in now. A different take on Timur Vermes' Look Who's Back.

Then onto Vienna which fares a little better than its German counterpart but not by much. Little bits tickle (and makes me ponder about the influence of these visits on OHMSS)

I drive a Thunderbird. I make no apologies.

The Germans are the most dangerous motorists in the world.

I had not been to Vienna, seriously, for thirty years. It is not one of my favourite cities. followed by a brilliant bit about where he learnt German and from whom and that apparently the Tyrolese are his favourite people in the world. His musings about cars and how the Austrians/Italians drive mention mufflers, throaty horn roars which to me either come from OHMSS or he re-used for it.

I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference or committee. Having worked briefly in the League of Nations around 1932, I believe that all international bodies waste a great deal of money, turn out far too much expensively printed paper, and achieve very little indeed.

onto Italy:

The monstrous autostrada hoardings, demonstrating, even more forcibly than the Italians' total lack of interest in their artistic and architectural treasures, that Italy is a race of Philistines, flip by with the kilometres.

Florence was a rude shock- but Rome- in preparation for the 1960 Olympics- was worse.

Pompeii is still, despite hoardes of tourists, pimps and guides a very great marvel. We nearly killed ourselves there by refusing to hire a guide or buy a guide-book. We had forgotten how big it is and how quickly the giant cobbles, rutted by chariot wheels, murder one's feet.

One final word to the visitor to Naples- don't bother to go up Vesuvius...[…]and anyway the volcano was due to erupt again that year- an even stronger reason to leave it alone

Has me wondering what he would've made of the Vienna scenes in Daylights.

Somehow picture a wrinkle of the nose, a tap of his cigarette and locking himself in his trailer.

One I forgot to mention is in Fleming's chapter on Geneva when writing about Noel Coward ("...instead of allowing him to go slowly bankrupt, his lawyer persuaded him to reside outside England and stay alive."). Fleming comes up with a proposal to alter tax laws.

...but I have a basic alteration to propose in our tax laws which I will call, so that it looks properly portentous on the statute books, the Quantum of Solace Clause.

In The Property of a Lady, Fleming wrote:

Bond raised his eyebrows. Maria Freudenstein was a secret agent working for the Soviet KGB in the heart of the Secret Service

So much said so simply. Feels like we're being let in on top secret information. That Bond is aware of MF being a Soviet spy and the casual explanation that they're well aware of her what she's up to. The "heart" giving the impression of betrayal and access to the innermost workings, which is so carelessly described.

And did he name her after an amalgam of the 'father' of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential works of sci-fi/horror of all time purely for his own amusement, or ... ?

Definitely the Freud part, I'd imagine.

from LALD:

"The scrambled eggs'll be cooked with milk," said Bond. "But one can't eat boiled eggs in America. They look so disgusting without their shells, mixed up in a tea-cup the way they do them here. God knows where they learned the trick. From Germany, I suppose. And bad American coffee's the worst in the world, worse even then in England. I suppose they can't do much harm to the orange juice. After all we are in Florida now.' He suddenly felt depressed by the thought of their four-hour wait in this unwashed, dog-eared atmosphere.

--

then as he goes after finding Leiter pre-discovery of poor Felix.

*He started to sweat profusely although it was quite cool in the hall. He wiped his wet hands on his trousers, fighting to keep from panic. The damn girl didn't know her job. Too pretty to be a nurse. Ought to have someone competent on the desk.*

(I'm not entirely mad on the PS to the he disagreed with something that ate him line. "We have plenty of jokes as good as this")

--

or the climax to the penultimate chapter ("Terror by Sea")

*The first tears since his childhood came into James Bond's blue-grey eyes and ran down his drawn cheeks into the bloodstained sea.*