The Diamond Smugglers – Ian Fleming, 1957 ★½

A Bond Story that Never Was

You know their names, no introductions necessary: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Goldfinger. Dr. No. Rosa Klebb. Classic villains brought to you by the same man who created their common foil, James Bond 007: Ian Fleming.

But none got the build-up of a villain from another Fleming book: Monsieur Diamant, a. k. a. Mr. Diamond.

As another vividly-named character in the same book, one “John Blaize,” explains it:

“You’ve written about some pretty good villains in your books, but truth is stranger, etc., and none of your villains stands up to Monsieur Diamant. I should say he’s the biggest crook in Europe, if not in the world – not only big, but completely successful.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m already getting goosebumps thinking about a Shirley Bassey/John Barry number that never was:

Diamant his name and murder his game/

A heart so cold it cuts like ice/

Carats he craves and many the graves/

Of those who don’t pay his price/

Monsieur Diamant!

Monsieur Diamant is introduced in the final chapter of Ian Fleming’s The Diamond Smugglers, perhaps the only real book of his that didn’t end up on screen. According to Wikipedia, the film version of The Diamond Smugglers might have starred Steve McQueen, or Richard Todd (the actor, not the quarterback). Fleming even offered to draft an outline for a film, though whether it was accepted or not Wikipedia does not say. Writer Kingsley Amis and director John Boorman were among those attached to the project. But it never saw the light of day.

Read The Diamond Smugglers and you understand why. It is a passively-written, loosely-told narrative that fails to engage either as a story or as what it purports to be, a straightforward telling of how a special security outfit called the International Diamond Security Organization, or IDSO, put an end to, or at least dented, a multi-million-dollar black-market diamond-selling operation in Africa.

Ian Fleming published The Diamond Smugglers in November, 1957, between two of his best-known James Bond novels, From Russia, With Love and Dr. No. Image from httpwww.elmundo.esespeciales2012culturajames-bondnovelas.html.

The story is narrated for the most part not by Fleming himself but by a chief operative of this security outfit, a fellow Fleming dubs “John Blaize.” Perhaps the name was meant to suggest another “J. B.” people think of when they read Fleming. If so, Fleming lets you know that Blaize is a good deal more impressive than any fictional counterpart:

I admire professionals, and Blaize was a professional to his fingertips. More important, he had those qualities which one likes to find in one’s compatriots – courage, humour, imagination, common sense and a warm heart. It had been odd to find these qualities in a spy.

While Fleming may dub Blaize a “spy,” it’s hard to understand given the evidence presented in The Diamond Smugglers. Sure Blaize carries a gun, but never needs it. The only woman he interacts with is the secretary who handles his reports and expenses. He does set up a safe house at one point, and is concerned with undercover operations, but only as an overseer while others run the exposure risks.

Blaize does assure us, in his credited introduction to The Diamond Smugglers, that the work he did on behalf of the Diamond Corporation, a. k. a. De Beers, was something quite marvelous, and that guilty parties the world over have cause to worry. “These men will hear of this book and they will read it, out of fear or vanity, to see if their activities have been revealed or their names mentioned,” he writes.

But what the game really amounted to was plugging minor leaks at mines across South Africa and other diamondiferous parts of the African coastline then under European colonial control.

What follows are a series of stories that Blaize tells while Fleming provides a narrative framework connecting them. These stories include how Liberia, a rare independent African nation at the time with only one puny digging operation to call its own, became a clearinghouse for illicit diamond export snuck in from neighboring Sierra Leone, then a British colony, and exported elsewhere as “Liberian” product. Much of this was transported behind the Iron Curtain for service in the arms race.

Fleming explains how Liberia merited Blaize’s especial scorn:

He despised many of the comic opera Negroes in official positions, but he thought even less of the white men who backed them and often incited them in their venality.

In one chapter, a small-time smuggler who keeps a diamond in an ointment jar is snitched out by a pretend-friend angling for promotion. In another chapter, the IDSO tries to run a double agent, but he comes back with nothing. Blaize pronounces the operation a success anyway.

Another chapter concludes when a double agent is killed in a plane crash just as he is on the verge of cracking a case. Blaize labels it “curious” and leaves it be: “I suppose it was just bad luck, but it was certainly good news for the IDB [Illicit Diamond Buying] ring operating out of Tanganyika and the Belgian Congo.”

A diamond in the rough. ""The trouble with diamonds," John Blaize tells Ian Fleming in The Diamond Smugglers, "is every stone carries the germ of crime in it." Image from httpswww.worldatlas.comarticleswhy-is-the-cullinan-diamond-mine-in-south-africa-so-famous.html.

Often we are told of great criminal figures who spirit away some diamonds and melt into the shadows, but Fleming and Blaize assure us we are safer not knowing their names. This includes a figure Fleming dubs “X” and the aforementioned Monsieur Diamant, a master smuggler whom we are told cuts quite the figure in respected society, visiting London hotels with his own private supply of food and women to satisfy his sundry appetites.

When Fleming presses Blaize for more information on Diamant, Blaize declines, saying Fleming would not be safe if he wrote it up. The book runs on like this a lot.

According to Wikipedia, John Blaize was actually a real person, one John Collard, and not a Fleming character. The Wikipedia entry also notes that De Beers had issues with the original Fleming manuscript, forcing significant cuts.

This may be why the published version reads like such thin gruel. The Liberia story is the most interesting part, as it explains how so much of the illicit smuggling was curtailed not by arrests but good old capitalist ingenuity. Figuring out that much of the non-legal diamond trade in Sierra Leone was the result of local “diggers” just trying to see some value for their labor, the IDSO helped set up buying posts in-country to give people there a better price, and the Diamond Corporation some fresh product. In the words of Peter Tosh, they legalized it.

The Diamond Smugglers is hard to recommend to anyone but diehard Fleming fans, who will enjoy the callbacks to an earlier James Bond novel on the same topic, Diamonds Are Forever, as well as the tangy descriptions. It’s literally barroom journalism, as much of Blaize’s recounting takes place over drinks at the El Minzah Hotel in Tangier, but Fleming keeps you interested if not quite riveted, as when he describes Blaize:

When he was consulting his notes, he was a don or a scientist – head thrust forward, shoulders a little stooped and sensitive, quiet hands leafing through his scraps of paper, but when he crossed the room he looked like a cricketer going out to bat: gay, confident, adventurous.

At one point, the pair become concerned when their meetings attract notice from the hotel’s other guests. To allay suspicions, they concoct a story that Blaize has captured a live coelacanth, the legendary “fossil fish” of then-recent notoriety, and keeps it in his bathtub.

Thought to be extinct in prehistoric times, two different species of coelacanth have been discovered off the coasts of both Africa and Asia, but never in a hotel bathroom. Image from httpsen.wikipedia.orgwikiWest_Indian_Ocean_coelacanth.

Fleming’s many critics will also find plenty of grist here in his placid acceptance of colonialism and the patronizing attitudes taken by the South African diamond bosses regarding their black employees. To be fair, Fleming doesn’t seem too bothered by the smuggling itself, as he openly acknowledges it a means to prosperity far greater than what can be earned legally. He also seems aware of the fact those black diggers in Sierra Leone had at least as much right to what they found through their own labor as did their British overseers.

In fact, the breezy way Blaize looks at the whole situation, offering commiseration for those who get caught in his net, is sort of refreshing, even if it kills any chance for suspense. “He was an efficient chap and it was really damned bad luck that he got caught,” he says of one low-level smuggler who tried to sneak diamonds off an employer’s mineface.

For me, The Diamond Smugglers is most revealing as a glimpse at Fleming’s own main line of work, writing Bond novels. Earlier in 1957, Fleming tried killing off Bond in From Russia, With Love, but had to take it back to satisfy demand for more Bond. Here he lets us know how little he thinks of that 007 guy:

Even in fiction there is very little good spy literature. There is something in the subject that leads to exaggeration, and the literary framework of “a beginning and a middle and an end” doesn’t belong to good spy writing, which should be full of loose ends and drabness and ultimate despair. Perhaps only Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and Eric Ambler have caught the squalor and greyness of the Secret Service.

In that vein, The Diamond Smugglers winds up a pretty mundane detour for Fleming, showing for the most part why it was a bad idea for him to quit his day job. Alas, Monsieur Diamant never got the chance to live up to the promise of that gem of a name.