The James Bond Dossier

***The James Bond Dossier*** is a 1965 book critically analysing the James Bond novel series written by Kingsley Amis. Partly due to his work, Amis was later chosen to write the first official continuation James Bond novel; 1968's *Colonel Sun* under the pseudonym "Robert Markham".

## History

Written at the Bond-mania’s zenith in the 1960s, *The James Bond Dossier* is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming's strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. As a mainstream novelist, Amis respected the Bond novels, especially their commercial success, believing them 'to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more ambitious kinds of fiction’. That was a controversial approach in the 1960s, because from early on, since the mid-1950s, the James Bond novels were criticised by some detractors for their violence, male chauvinism, sexual promiscuity, racism, and anti-Communism.

Despite his intellectual respect for the Fleming canon, Amis's way of writing about it, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, ‘. . . partly guys academic procedures and pretensions by applying them to low-cultural objects’ and, as such, is deliberately provocative. In that context, the *Dossier* can ‘. . . look like a cheeky two-fingered salute to the academic world, a farewell raspberry blown at all things pedantically donnish, in a manner Lucky Jim would surely have approved. For to Ian Fleming's *œuvre* Amis brought the anatomising and categorising zeal he never had devoted and never would devote to more elevated works of literature’.

## From essay to book

Kingsley Amis had several motives for writing the *Dossier*. He had recently retired from teaching and wanted to ‘put behind him the more rigid austerities of university life’. He wanted to expand his range as a writer beyond poetry and mainstream fiction. The need to make more money was also a consideration. Primarily, however, he wanted to show the academics that the literature of popular culture could be as substantive as the literature of high culture. In November 1963, he announced to Conquest the idea of writing an essay of some 5,000 words about the James Bond novels. By late 1964, he had expanded the essay to book length, and submitted it to his publisher, Jonathan Cape. In one hundred and sixty pages, *The James Bond Dossier* methodically catalogues and analyses the activities and minutiae of secret agent 007: the number of men he kills, the women he loves, the villains he thwarts, and the essential background of Ian Fleming's Cold War world of the 1950s.

After Fleming’s death in August 1964, Glidrose Productions Ltd., owners of the international book rights, asked for Amis's editorial assessment of the uncompleted manuscript of *The Man with the Golden Gun*, which Jonathan Cape deemed feeble, and perhaps unpublishable. He reported that the manuscript was publishable, but would require substantial modifications. Because Amis was not the only writer consulted, it remains controversial if his editorial suggestions were implemented, and to what extent Amis contributed directly to the revision of the manuscript. In the event, the *Dossier*’s publication was delayed a year, because Jonathan Cape asked Amis to include discussion of *The Man With the Golden Gun*. Both books were published in 1965; later that year, Amis reviewed *The Man With the Golden Gun* in the *New Statesman*.

## The Dossier

*The James Bond Dossier* includes most of the Bond fiction cycle, excepting *Octopussy and The Living Daylights* (1966), the final collection of short stories, which was published the year after the *Dossier*. Kingsley Amis's argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming's critics said, 'a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life’. He viewed them as popular literature, akin to that of the Science Fiction texts he critiqued in *New Maps of Hell* (1960).

Although written in Amis’s usual accessible, light-hearted style, *The James Bond Dossier* is neither patronising nor ironic — it is a detailed literary criticism of the Ian Fleming canon. In the main, he admires Fleming’s achievement, yet does not withhold criticism where the material proves unsatisfactory or inconsistent, especially when the narration slips into ‘the idiom of the novelette’. Amis reserves his most serious criticism for what he considered to be academically pretentious rejections of the Bond books, a theme implicitly informing much of the *Dossier*.

Each of the 14 chapters deals with one aspect of the novels — ‘No woman had ever held this man’ defends Bond's attitude to and treatment of women: “Bond's habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominating or combative”; ‘Damnably clear grey eyes’ describes M, the head of MI6: “a peevish, priggish old monster”; ‘A glint of red’ is about the villains, who have in common only physical largeness and angry eyes; and so forth. According to his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, the hand of sovietologist and scholar Robert Conquest is betrayed in Amis's precise dissertation upon the genesis and changing nomenclatures of SMERSH, the employer of the villains of the early novels. Three appendices deal, respectively, with science fiction, literature and escape, and 'sadism'. With 'almost parodic scholarly dedication’, Amis provides a ten-category (‘Places’, ‘Girl’, ‘Villain’s Project’, etc.) reference guide (pp. 156–159) to the Bond novels and short stories.

Typical of Amis's approach is where he suggests several implausibilities in Bond's capture by the eponymous villain in 1958's *Dr. No*. However, that ‘Bond is temporarily helpless in his creator’s grip’, does not matter, because ‘three of Mr Fleming’s favourite situations are about to come up one after the other. Bond is to be wined and dined, lectured on the aesthetics of power, and finally tortured by his chief enemy’. Earlier, Amis had discussed the matter of Bond’s correct designation: ‘It’s inaccurate, of course, to describe James Bond as a *spy*, in the strict sense of one who steals or buys or smuggles the secrets of foreign powers . . . Bond’s claims to be considered a *counter-spy*, one who operates against the agents of unfriendly powers, are rather more substantial’.

## References

1. ↑ Amis, Kingsley *The James Bond Dossier* Jonathan Cape, 1965, p.9
2. ↑ Leader, Zachary *The Life of Kingsley Amis* Pantheon Books, 2007, p.524
3. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p.269
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p.267.
5. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, pp.267, 270.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p.269.
7. ↑ ibid
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Leader, Zachary *The Life of Kingsley Amis* Pantheon Books, 2007, p.542
9. ↑ Lycett, Andrew *Ian Fleming* Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995, p.445.
10. ↑ ibid
11. ↑ Amis, Kingsley *What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions* Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York:1970, pp.73–4
12. ↑ Amis, Kingsley *The James Bond Dossier* Joanathan Cape, 1965, p. 10
13. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 270.
14. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p.271.
15. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 270
16. ↑ Jacobs, Eric *Kingsley Amis: A Biography* St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 269.
17. ↑ Amis, Kingsley, *The James Bond Dossier* Jonathan Cape, 1965, p.21
18. ↑ Amis, Kingsley, *The James Bond Dossier* Jonathan Cape, 1965, p. 11