The Sydney Morning Herald, June 25 1961 |
In its review of Goldfinger on March 26 1959, The Times
noted that:
‘A new novel by
Mr. Ian Fleming is becoming something of an event, since James Bond has now
established himself at the head of his profession, a secret service agent who
indeed plays for England but who has much in common with the highly sexed
“private eye” on the other side of the Atlantic.’
A less frequently discussed indication of
Fleming’s success is that, even before Dr No came to the screen, other
thriller-writers were being influenced by Bond. Just over a month after Dr No’s
premiere, on 12 November 1962, Len Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File was
published by Hodder & Stoughton. Although Deighton wrote the book before Dr
No’s release, Bond was nevertheless uppermost in his mind, as Michael Spencer
Howard revealed in his 1971 book on the publisher Jonathan Cape:
‘Having studied
the James Bond phenomenon, Deighton had devised his own formula on which to
base efficiently successful thrillers, and was determined to write five of them
to prove it.’1
The IPCRESS File was an
unexpected smash, and Deighton defected from Hodder to Jonathan Cape, who
published the sequel, Horse Under Water, the following year. Deighton later
said that this ‘enraged some people, who claimed I was now going to be trained
as the successor to Ian Fleming, who Cape also published.’2 This was an
understandable view, as Deighton was certainly inspired by Fleming’s work: The
IPCRESS File even closes with a mention of SMERSH, an organisation that had
featured in Fleming novels but which would not appear on film until From Russia,
With Love in 1963 – the screenplay of which Deighton worked on.3
The mention of SMERSH can only plausibly
be the influence of Fleming, because although the organisation existed in real
life, it had had little in common with Fleming’s fantastic depiction of it, and
its existence was barely known before the publication of Casino Royale.
Deighton placed the organisation’s headquarters in Moscow at 19 Stanislavskaya
Street, whereas Fleming had it at 13 Sretenska Ulitsa. Despite the
authoritative-sounding specificity, neither was right, as the organisation
had been disbanded and its responsibilities handed over to the Main Administration of
Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 1946.4
~
LEN DEIGHTON wasn’t the only thriller-writer to toy with the Bond formula prior to the films. The Mythmaker by Sarah Gainham, published in 1957, featured a young, handsome half-British, half-Hungarian agent called Christian Quest. Bond was half-Scottish and half-Swiss in Fleming’s novels, and the name is an obvious play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. Gainham was the pseudonym of Rachel Terry, the wife of the Sunday Times correspondent and MI6 officer Anthony Terry, a close friend and colleague of Fleming who had helped him with the research for The Living Daylights. According to Andrew Lycett, Rosa Klebb was partly inspired by an anecdote Rachel Terry had told Fleming about a hideous female Russian agent who had operated in Vienna.5
Several moments in The Mythmaker, published
the same year as From Russia, With Love, appear to have been inspired by
Fleming’s work, especially Casino Royale. Quest is a handsome, young, but
somewhat arrogant novice in both the spy game and matters of the heart:
‘In Kit’s many
small loves his main preoccupation had been to protect himself from involvement
without losing his pleasure. A vulgar concern which was not his choice but
simply the accepted attitude to love of nearly all young men of his kind, and
the very worst preparation possible for the feelings that now filled him. Not
only was Deli a member of his own world and therefore not to be trifled with
without serious consequences, but he found with a momentary fear that only
traces remained of his habitual self-defence against emotion, he was
defenceless against her simply because she was unarmed and brave. Yet he could
not at once give up the essentially hostile posture which had hitherto been his
real attitude to the women he had desired and who had desired him. This fear
and this reservation showed in his eyes after the first flash of recognition,
and in answer to them a familiar smile of ironical understanding came into
Deli’s eyes. Kit looked away from her, shamed that he had betrayed a coarse
caution in a moment that could never return, and spoilt it for both of them.
‘Let’s dance,’
said Deli, still with the ironical smile.’
The dialogue and Deli’s ironical smiles are reminiscent of
Vesper Lynd’s in Casino Royale, but the passage as a whole also echoes Bond’s changing
attitude to women in that novel:
‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and
passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the
subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the
inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola –
sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of
the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom,
the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even
more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play –
the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the
week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the
final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.
But with Vesper there could be none of this.’
Rachel Terry, alias Sarah Gainham |
Quest travels to Vienna to find Otto
Berger, a servant of Hitler’s thought to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and
hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi
revival: the book ends with a chase through the Alps. In Fleming’s Moonraker
(1954), the chief villain is Hugo Drax, revealed to have been a Nazi who
survived the end of the war. Drax’s chief accomplice is called Krebs, the same
name as Hitler’s last chief of staff in the Bunker.7
~
IN THE 1960s and 1970s, neo-Nazi revivals
would become fertile ground for British thriller-writers. One lesser known
example is The Testament of Caspar Schultz by Martin Fallon, published by
Abelard-Schulman in Britain on May 18, 1962, nearly five months
before the world premiere of Dr No. Fallon was an early pseudonym of Harry
Patterson, a writer who would later become famous under another pseudonym: Jack
Higgins.
While Gainham’s book was a literary thriller with a few nods to Fleming’s work, The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a full-bodied homage. In the first chapter, British secret agent Paul Chavasse is summoned in the early hours by telephone to see his superior, who works out of a building carrying the legend ‘Brown & Company – Importers & Exporters’ on a polished brass plate outside:
‘He went up the curving Regency staircase and passed along a thickly carpeted corridor. The only sound was a slight, persistent hum from the dynamo in the radio room…’Chavasse briefly admires the Chief’s assistant, Jean Frazer, whose tweed skirt is of a ‘deceptively simple cut that moulded her rounded hips’, and lights up a cigarette:
‘‘Now what’s all the fuss about? What’s the Chief got on his mind that’s so important it can’t wait until a respectable hour?’
She shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s waiting for you inside.’
Chavasse cursed softly and got to his feet. ‘What does he think I’m made of – iron?’ Without waiting for a reply, he walked across to the far door, opened it and went in.
He frowned slightly. ‘Another job?’
She nodded. ‘I think it’s something pretty big.’
All of this reads very much like a version of the openings of several Fleming novels, such as this passage in Moonraker from 1955, in which James Bond enters a building in London in which ‘Universal Export Co.’ is on a bronze list of occupants in the entrance hall and makes his way to the ninth floor:
The room was half in shadow, the only light the shaded lamp which stood upon the desk by the window. The Chief was reading a sheaf of typewritten documents and he looked up quickly, a slight frown on his face.’
‘As Bond turned to the left outside the lift and walked along the softly carpeted corridor to the green baize door that led to the offices of M. and his personal staff, the only sound he heard was a thin high-pitched whine that was so faint that you almost had to listen for it.
Without knocking he pushed through the green door and walked into the last room but one along the passage.
Miss Moneypenny, M.’s private secretary, looked up from her typewriter and smiled at him. They liked each other and she knew that Bond admired her looks. She was wearing the same model shirt as his own secretary, but with blue stripes. ‘New uniform, Penny?’ said Bond. She laughed. ‘Loelia and I share the same little woman,’ she said. ‘We tossed and I got blue.’
A snort came through the open door of the adjoining room. The Chief of Staff, a man of about Bond’s age, came out, a sardonic grin on his pale, overworked face.
‘Break it up,’ he said, ‘M.’s waiting. Lunch afterwards?’
‘Fine,’ said Bond. He turned to the door beside Miss Moneypenny, walked through and shut it after him. Above it, a green light went on. Miss Moneypenny raised her eyebrows at the Chief of Staff. He shook his head.
‘I don’t think it’s business, Penny,’ he said. ‘Just sent for him out of the blue.’ He went back into his own room and got on with the day’s work.
When Bond came through the door, M. was sitting at his broad desk, lighting a pipe. He made a vague gesture with the lighted match towards the chair on the other side of the desk and Bond walked over and sat down. M. glanced at him sharply through the smoke and then threw the box of matches on to the empty expanse of red leather in front of him.’
Stylistically, these are quite different: Fleming almost fetishised physical detail, whereas Higgins
stripped them back to prioritise pace. However, the content is very similar, and the character of
Chavasse is also like Bond in many respects: a handsome, ruthless, highly
professional British secret agent who speaks several languages, is an expert at
judo, and so on. The clearest indication that Higgins had Fleming in mind,
however, is the following passage:
‘‘There are men
like me working for every Great Power in the world. I’ve got more in common
with my opposite number in SMERSH than I have with any normal citizen of my own
country. If I’m told to do a thing, I get it done. I don’t ask questions. Men
like me live by one code only – the job must come before anything else.’ He
laughed harshly. ‘If I’d been born a few years earlier and a German, I’d
probably have worked for the Gestapo.’’
Again, SMERSH was barely known before
Fleming’s use of it in Casino Royale and subsequent novels, and in reality it had been a
division of Soviet intelligence largely dedicated to interrogating suspected
traitors. Like Fleming (and Deighton), Higgins treated it as though it were still operational, and a major Soviet intelligence organization.
Paul Chavasse is a half-British half-Breton
secret agent. His mission in the novel is to find Caspar Schultz, a survivor of
Hitler’s Bunker who has written a book naming the leaders of a neo-Nazi
movement in Germany. In Higgins’ original draft, the testament’s author was
Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, but at his publisher’s insistence he
changed this to the fictional Schultz.
Chavasse delivers his speech about SMERSH
to an Israeli agent in a first-class sleeper compartment, in a scene
that is highly reminiscent of Fleming’s From Russia, With Love (1958). In that
book, SMERSH’s dossier on James Bond described him as ‘a dangerous professional
terrorist and spy’, a neat alternate look at our hero. Higgins took this idea a step further.
James Bond would never say of himself that he had more in common with a member
of SMERSH than with British citizens, let alone that had he been born a German
earlier he would probably have joined the Gestapo. Higgins was using Chavasse to
play off and comment on Fleming’s creation. He’s an answer to a writer’s
musings: Are all Germans and Russians bad? And: What would a real secret agent’s
motivation be? Traditionally in thrillers of this kind, it is duty, either in
the form of love of country or God or, sometimes, a woman. Sapper’s Bulldog
Drummond started his career because he found peacetime dull, but he was
nevertheless highly patriotic. For Chavasse, however, the job comes before
anything else, and he recognises that he might have been attracted to the work
whatever his nationality, and whatever the cause. This is an elaboration of a
point made by Fleming in Casino Royale, in which Bond worries that Le Chiffe
was right when he said Bond’s game of ‘Red Indians’ is over:
‘‘This
country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are
fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of
Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we
should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly
these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.’’
The Testament of Caspar Schultz
is a lean, sparsely written thriller, with one dominating theme: the conflict
between conscience and the desire for adventure. At several points in the book,
Chavasse is troubled by his own nature. He tells Israeli agent Anna Hartmann
that he was recruited into intelligence work after bringing the relative of a
friend out of Czechoslovakia:
‘‘I’d discovered
things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated
risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the
Czechoslovakian business I realized that in some twisted kind of way I’d
enjoyed it. Can you understand that?’
‘I’m not really
sure,’ she said slowly. ‘Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in
the face each day?’
‘I don’t think
of that side of it,’ he said, ‘any more than a Grand Prix motor racing driver
does.’’
And he repeats what he told her colleague: ‘I’m
a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only –
the job must come first.’
While the use of this idea is rather
heavy-handed in The Testament of Caspar Schultz, Higgins clearly felt it was
important, developing it in five further novels featuring Chavasse. In The Keys
of Hell (1965), for instance, on a mission in Albania, he says to another
beautiful young woman he has fallen in love with:
‘‘If I’d been
born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the
Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient
member of the Sigurmi. Who knows?’’
This concept eventually became one of the
major themes of his work. In The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, Higgins
did not simply have the hero remark how similar he is to a German – the heroes are
German. Heroes and villains had in fact changed parts. In a 1987 interview, Higgins related how one publisher was not best
pleased when he heard the premise of the book, telling him:
‘‘You can’t
possibly expect the public to go for a book about a bunch of Krauts trying to
kidnap Winston Churchill. You don’t have any heroes – these people are Nazis,
for God’s sake!’’8
But the public did go for it. The Eagle Has
Landed was Higgins’ breakthrough, and has sold over 50 million copies to
date. Part of its appeal is precisely the friction of rooting for characters
who were traditionally cast as antagonists. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of The
Jackal and Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, two other landmark British
thrillers of the post-war period, also featured highly professional yet
curiously empathetic antagonists. Higgins’ other major success has been with
the character Sean Dillon, a former IRA assassin who is periodically used by
British intelligence.
In peacetime Britain, when the justification for what SMERSH would classify as terrorist action was less cut and dried than it had been during the war, there was a need for a new type of motivation for fictional secret agents. Higgins hit on the idea of an agent being driven not by traditional causes such as King, God or country, but by an addiction to the chase itself, a love of the profession. Chavasse’s other concern – the broader picture of human nature that allows him to empathise with the enemy and recognise himself in it – became a major theme of Higgins’ work.
~
ANOTHER WRITER who was influenced by
Fleming before the Bond films were made was Geoffrey Jenkins, a South African
who had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times in the ’40s. In his first
novel, A Twist of Sand (1959), we are introduced to Geoffrey Peace, a former
Royal Navy submarine captain now involved in distinctly shadier business. A flashback
to the war gives us another echo of a Bond/M scene:
‘The Admiralty looked bleak and cold in the late London spring;
chill it seemed to me after being used to the friendly bite of the
Mediterranean sun. Bleaker still looked those eyes over the top of the desk.
They reminded me somehow of Rockall, the lonely isle in the Atlantic – they
only changed their shade of greyness, sometimes stormy, sometimes still, but
always grey and bleak with the chill of the near Arctic.’
During the war, as Jenkins would have
known, Fleming worked at the Admiralty, and M is described as having
‘frosty, damnably clear, grey eyes’ in For Your Eyes Only.
Jenkins’ next book was The Watering Place
of Good Peace (1960). The hero, Ian Ogilvie, is a Scot who was crippled by a
shark, also while in the Royal Navy. He joins an organisation constructing
anti-shark barriers ‘a fast car, a pretty girl, and half a dozen drinks’ after
his accident. The plot features opium smuggling and a villain called John
Barrow who is using a submarine to find uranium. Ogilvie also swims through the
wreck of a ship with a beautiful woman who is naked but for goggles and scuba
gear. Many of Jenkins’ subsequent novels featured such tips of the hat to his
former mentor. After Fleming’s death, Jenkins was commissioned to write a Bond
novel, which he did – Per Fine Ounce – but it was never published.
Many thriller-writers have been influenced
by Ian Fleming, but most have probably come to his work through the films. But
Deighton, Gainham, Higgins and Jenkins were all influenced by him before the
first Bond film was released. Fleming was an influential thriller-writer in his
own right, and James Bond a character that inspired his peers even before his
transition to the silver screen.
UPDATE: Edward Milward-Oliver, whose The Len Deighton Companion I cite above and who is currently working on a biography of Deighton, writes to say:
‘Regarding your speculation about Len Deighton’s reference to SMERSH, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t read any of Fleming’s novels until producer Harry Saltzman asked him to write the screenplay for From Russia With Love after Saltzman purchased the film rights to The IPCRESS File in late 1962.
Len Deighton was certainly familiar with James Bond and Fleming without having read the novels. The books had substantial sales prior to the films, and of course they were serialised in the Daily Express where the influential design director was Len’s good friend and fellow RCA student Ray Hawkey. Deighton disliked the fantasy world of James Bond and certainly The IPCRESS File was born of his desire to write something more convincing. Michael Howard is quite correct in that respect. However Deighton was (and remains) a steadfast researcher, and would not have turned to Fleming’s novels as a source! My guess is that SMERSH was an acronym that lived on in publicly available accounts of the Russian security services well past its demise.’
So I guess one could say Deighton was inspired by Ian Fleming without having read his novels, perhaps in a similar way as Adam Hall was inspired to create Quiller by reviews and discussion of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. According to Edward Milward-Oliver, Deighton started writing The IPCRESS File in September 1960. As far as I know, the only publicly available account of SMERSH at that time was Nicola Sinevirsky’s book, discussed here, which I believe was Ian Fleming’s main source of information about the organization. SMERSH was not ‘the counter-intelligence unit of the KGB’, as Deighton claimed in the novel (it was one of several), and had in fact been defunct for nearly 15 years. It had also featured in several Fleming novels and the Express serializations of From Russia, With Love and Goldfinger, and would have been known to thousands of readers as a result. It was barely known in the West before Fleming wrote about it. However, the difference in the addresses given for the organization suggests that, even if Len Deighton had seen the name mentioned in the papers or heard mention of it via James Bond, he researched the organization independently of its appearance in Fleming’s work.
Notes
1. Jonathan Cape, Publisher by
Michael Spencer Howard (Penguin, 1971), p300.
2. The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver (Grafton, 1987), p14.
3. ibid., p248.
4. KGB: The Inside Story Of Its Foreign Operations From Lenin To Gorbachev by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (Sceptre, 1991), pp350-1; and Nights Are Longest There: SMERSH From The Inside by A.I. Romanov (Hutchinson, 1972), p192.
5. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett (Phoenix, 1996), p371.
6. ibid.
7. The Last Days of Hitler By Hugh Trevor-Roper, University of Chicago Press, 1987), p31.
2. The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver (Grafton, 1987), p14.
3. ibid., p248.
4. KGB: The Inside Story Of Its Foreign Operations From Lenin To Gorbachev by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (Sceptre, 1991), pp350-1; and Nights Are Longest There: SMERSH From The Inside by A.I. Romanov (Hutchinson, 1972), p192.
5. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett (Phoenix, 1996), p371.
6. ibid.
7. The Last Days of Hitler By Hugh Trevor-Roper, University of Chicago Press, 1987), p31.
8. Interviewed by Don Swaim on Book
Beat, CBS Radio, January 16 1987. Available from:
http://wiredforbooks.org/jackhiggins/index.htm.
This article is part of 007 In Depth, a series of articles on Ian Fleming and James Bond.
Excellent piece. Could Peter O'Donnell be added to this list? He actually scripted the comic strip adaptation of Dr No and then went to create Modesty Blaise. I read Blaise for the first time just a few years ago and I was amazed how good it was. I'd been expecting a half-assed Bond ripoff, but it was a solid, well-written adventure story.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Cary. I love Peter O'Donnell's work, and was similarly stunned the first time I read him how good he was. And yes, he was strongly influenced by Ian Fleming, and I sometimes wonder what he might have done with a Bond novel had he ever written one.
ReplyDeleteI didn't write about him here because I imposed an admittedly somewhat artificial stricture on what I was looking at, ie books that were inspired by Fleming before the first Bond film had appeared. Modesty Blaise first appeared in May 1963, so a good year after Dr No appeared in cinemas. No doubt it was influenced by Fleming's novels and not just that film, but as soon as the films appear it becomes much harder, if not impossible, to distinguish what is influenced by Fleming's books and what is influenced by the Bond films. But for any book written before Dr No's premiere in October 1962, there is of course no possible danger it was influenced by the cinematic Bond, only the literary one. That's the parameters for this article, anyway! But no matter, really: any mention of Peter O'Donnell is welcome! A terrific writer.
Wasn't Deighton an anti-Bond? Perhaps I am mistaken but I thought I read that he didn't approve of Fleming's work and wrote The Ipcress File in an attempt to do a more realistic portrayal. Maybe I'm getting him confused with le Carre.
ReplyDeleteHi, Brian. Deighton's unnamed early protagonist was widely regarded as an 'anti-Bond', yes, and in some ways he was. But, as I think the quotes and the reference to SMERSH show, I think that's overly simplifying things. Perhaps a reaction to Bond would be a better way of looking at it. The protagonist of Deighton's early novels (who became Harry Palmer in the films), is of a different class from Bond, and he doesn't wear tailored suits, but he's a former military man, loves fine food, lives in London, works for British intelligence, flirts constantly with his secretary, has a boss he often disagrees with, makes laconic jokes, travels the world saving England from the baddies, and so on. In places, the tone and style of the books are quite similar. Funeral In Berlin features a Mossad agent called Samantha Steel, which is really a pretty Bondish name! Deighton's sweep was also much like Fleming's - I can't think of any other spy novels of the period that luxuriate in detail so much, and that explore other cultures so thoroughly. Fleming had his Thrilling Cities, while Deighton had London Dossier and Continental Dossier. In An Expensive Place To Die, there's a whole scene that revolves around an argument about Fleming's Bond novels. Deighton was involved in at least one draft of the film From Russia With Love, as I mention above, and also on early versions of what became Never Say Never Again. He met Fleming, who praised his work early on, and they shared a publisher. So while there were certainly a lot of differences, I think 'anti-Bond' ignores that there were also several similarities.
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't know much of that. I tried getting into The Ipcress File but got lost so I never finished it. I may have to give it another try.
ReplyDeletePerhaps try one of his others, like Funeral In Berlin or Horse Under Water.
DeleteI'll also say that being an "anti-Bond" is also being influenced by Fleming and Bond. Two magnets faced like-pole-to-like will repel one another, and I don't think you can deny that each is being influenced by the other. Similarly, if, as Milward-Oliver states, "Deighton disliked the fantasy world of James Bond and certainly The IPCRESS File was born of his desire to write something more convincing" then I can't see how that pressure to write Espionage fiction that overturned Fleming's "fantasy world" (which, I submit, was far less fantastical than his critics wish to admit) can be seen as anything but a very direct influence.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with that. Also that Fleming's depiction of espionage was less fantastical than is generally thought - The IPCRESS File is no more realistic than, say, From Russia, With Love. In fact, as I was recently told by Nigel West, Fleming had direct help from MI6 for his research with that novel - they introduced him to the defector Grigor Tokaev. Even some of the more obviously fantastic elements, like Rosa Klebb's poison-tipped shoe and the attaché case, were based on real SOE gadgets from the war. Fleming got quite a lot of stuff wrong, and he certainly did create a fantasy world of espionage - but there's also a lot of accurate intelligence in his books.
DeleteFascinating stuff--I didn't think pre-film Fleming was that influential--and I have to marvel at the breadth of your reading.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I spent a good deal of last year reading all of Simon Raven's novels. One of them, "Friends In Low Places," mentions Fleming by name, though it's not a spy novel. Though another, "The Sabre Squadron" contains major espionage elements, Raven's genuine contribution to the spy genre would have to be "Brother Cain," from 1959. It might possibly have some Fleming influence, given Raven's status as a Fleming critic.
If you'll recall, Raven greeted "Casino Royale" upon its release by hailing Fleming as "a kind of supersonic John Buchan" engaged in "taking the best elements of the Cheyney method (speed, controlled savagery, a pungent and sceptical idiom) and yet combining them with the more spacious and gracious atmo¬sphere of old-style international intrigue—-monocles, medals, and milordos. Mr. Fleming is a Cheyney with a Sandhurst accent: or the other way round, a Buchan who has cut his usual ration of gillies, peat fires, and happy marriages with frigid girls in tweeds."
Thanks to your efforts, we know that Fleming likely owed more to Wheatley and Charteris than Buchan and Cheyney, but though he was wrong, Raven was one of Fleming's more notable champions. He defended Dr. No after it was attacked by Bergonzi, and later reviewed YOLT, TMWTGG, O.F. Snelling's Bond Report, Amis's Bond Dossier, and Pearson's Fleming biography. (I'll be posting all of those pieces online, and I'll be sure to give you the link.)
With all that in mind, I wonder if Fleming might have influenced "Brother Cain." On the surface it doesn't seem likely--Raven's book is about an amateur drafted into a rather malevolent government spy unit, and it involves more homosexuality than Fleming would have been comfortable with, but perhaps your trained eye might pick up some traces of influence. Beyond that, the book is a good read, thanks to Raven's concise style and concern for matters of honor.