From Russia, With Love – Ian Fleming, 1957 ★★★★½

Saying it with Roses

The novel that put James Bond on the cultural map holds up amazingly well. Other 007 books feature better remembered villains or Bond girls; From Russia, With Love gives you the best Bond story and, for maybe the first and last time, a fully invested author.

What can you say about a Bond novel that holds our interest for 100 pages while keeping the man himself offstage? I’m used to haphazard plotting in other Bond books; here the story builds effortlessly and ruthlessly from strength to strength until one is ready for Bond like a corrida is ready for the matador.

Fleming was at the top of his game and it shows, from the opening chapter that features a sensual, yet hardly sensuous, massage:

By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swimming pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her. But that wasn’t what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man’s back. It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen.

The body belongs to Red Grant, top Soviet executioner. His hulking menace is combined with the brains of chess master Kronsteen and the viciousness of SMERSH spymaster Rosa Klebb in a fiendish trap designed not only to kill Bond but embarrass his employers.

Why would the Russians be so keen to embarrass the West? Fleming brings up the real-life story of this guy, KGB agent Nikolai Khokhlov, who defected to the United States in 1954 rather than carry out an assassination order. Fleming's Soviet boss General "G" notes the affair "did great damage to our country." Image from https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nikolai-khokhlov-kgb-paranormal.

Right from the beginning, Fleming develops his story with finesse and care. A persistent motif of roses is weaved into the narrative: Grant takes his rubdown in a rose garden, is slathered up with rose-infused oil, and takes time to notice the roses in summertime Crimea. His first name is Red and his boss is Rosa.

There is also Tatiana Romanova, a beautiful, quiet government clerk used both as pawn and queen in the chess game against Bond. She is tasked to supply Bond with a motive to come to Turkey by pretending to offer him a device that will decode Russian signals. In exchange, she must demand sex with Bond, a matter over which she has no say. Bond jokes about “pimping for England,” but in fact he and Tatiana are working farther down the food chain.

That decoding device, by the way, is called a Spektor, an echo of an independent organization Bond will do battle with in novels to come. Here, however, the enemy is very clearly established as the Russian SMERSH counter-espionage unit with whom Bond had tangled before. Despite Tatiana’s erotic wiles, that With Love in the title is ironic.

The British first edition of From Russia, With Love employs both the rose motif that appears often in the book and a .38 revolver which doesn't. The latter was a late addition by artist Richard Chopping when gun expert Geoffrey Boothroyd convinced Fleming to give his spy something more powerful than a .25 Beretta, which he dubbed "a lady's gun." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Russia,_with_Love_(novel).

No wonder then that From Russia, With Love impressed so many Cold Warriors in the years after it came out, most famously President John F. Kennedy, who listed it as one of his ten favorite books in a 1961 Life magazine article. It’s definitely a product of the early Iron Curtain era, with the bad guys clearly defined:

A great deal of killing has to be done in the U. S. S. R., not because the average Russian is a cruel man, although some of their races are among the cruelest peoples in the world, but as an instrument of policy. People who act against the State are enemies of the State, and the State has no room for enemies.

Giving Bond new LIFE: The featured article in the March 17, 1961 issue of Life magazine listed JFK's ten favorite books. From Russia, With Love was listed ninth, between Byron In Italy and Stendhal The Red And The Black. Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/LIFE-1961-MARCH-17-Magazine-Sheila-Finn-Model-Irish-Peace-Corps-/263537669584.

This approach proved too heavy-handed for the later Bond films, where Russians always came off as frenemies and a kind of mildly suspicious détente was emphasized ad nauseum.

The next generation of thriller writers, like John le Carré and Len Deighton, brought us revisionist spy novels where both sides played equally rough. Here, however, because the scales are less balanced, the result is masterfully satisfying. No need for moral dilemmas. With the Soviets clear heavies, we can focus more on rooting for Bond’s escape.

Grant is a crazed killer, driven to homicide by the full moon and rewarded by his masters with trips to prison to kill its inmates. Rosa Klebb uses poison and torture to get what she wants. Fleming explains: “Her urge for power demanded that she should be a wolf and not a sheep. She was a lone operator, but never a lonely one, because the warmth of company was unnecessary to her.”

The most indelible character is Bond ally Darko Kerim, the British secret service’s man in Istanbul who helps Bond meet Tatiana and does a lot of heavy lifting in the story.

Bond was six feet tall, but this man was at least two inches taller and he gave the impression of being twice as broad and twice as thick as Bond. Bond looked up into two wide apart, smiling blue eyes in a large smooth brown face with a broken nose…Bond thought he had never seen so much vitality and warmth in a human face. It was like being close to the sun, and Bond let go the strong dry hand and smiled back at Kerim with a friendliness he rarely felt for a stranger.

Bond (Sean Connery) can't resist the charm of Darko Kerim (Pedro Armendáriz) in the 1963 movie version of From Russia, With Love. Armendáriz was deathly ill during its filming and died before its release, but the vitality of his performance jumps off the screen. Image from http://www.warpedfactor.com/2016/01/bond-10-things-you-may-not-know-about_11.html.

When he is not lifting the conversation with wonderful observations about life (“Too many tensions and too much thinking. It takes the blood to the head instead of to where it should be for making love.”), Kerim becomes Bond’s guide to Turkey, escorting him to a knife fight at a gypsy camp and the killing of a Soviet operative near a lonely railroad cutting. Each of these episodes showcase Fleming’s mastery of action sequences, his famous “Sweep,” in a major and then minor key.

Kerim also allows Fleming to indulge his least politically correct observations about the power dynamics between men and women. At one point, Kerim tells of a lover he kidnapped and chained to a table. By the time his English mother intervened, the girl wouldn’t leave him.

At least that’s Kerim’s story, but in the macho universe of Bond you sort of believe it.

Kerim also explains why Turks and democracy are a bad fit: “They want some sultans and wars and rape and fun.”

An early U. S. mass market paperback edition of From Russia, With Love, without the titular comma. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Russia,_with_Love_(novel).

Yes, it’s a new century now and wrong to think like that. But there’s something vibrant about the manner all this gets presented. Fleming has no problem filling out his canvas with a scene where two naked women savagely fight to the death over a man who agrees to marry the winner.

From Russia, With Love does the best job of any Bond book in telling a pure spy story. Once Fleming sets the trap, he works the suspense by recalibrating the story in media res from Bond’s perspective. Because you the reader know more than Bond does about what is going on, you pick up on what will go wrong and wonder if Bond can do the same:

Behind his reasoning, Bond calmly admitted to himself that he had an insane desire to play the game out and see what it was all about. He wanted to take these people on and solve the mystery and, if it was some sort of a plot, defeat it.

But of course, as he must realize by now, it is a plot! Why else does he think those guys followed him on the Orient Express?

Roll over, Dame Agatha. Fleming sets the murderous climax to his novel on the Orient Express. Image by Robyn McCoy from https://startsat60.com/travel/travel-bloggers/venice-simplon-orient-express-luxury-train-ride-robyn-mccoy.

Just how bad a spy is 007, really? Back in the first novel, Casino Royale, Bond blew the company bankroll at baccarat and survived only by dumb luck. Three novels later, he blew his cover shooting up Las Vegas in Diamonds Are Forever. Here he knows there is a game afoot but proceeds anyway. Darko’s fatal warning (“Go home my friend. Go home. There is something here to get away from.”) falls on deaf ears.

Yet Bond is so cool you still enjoy the ride. In a way, you need Bond to be a lunkhead or else the story would be over before he and Tatiana have their final confrontation with Grant.

As it is, the story winds up being over just a little later, and with it the whole Bond series, at least as Fleming originally conceived it. The last paragraph in the novel shows a poisoned Bond apparently breathing his last, and that was all he wrote for Mr. Bond – at least through the rest of 1956.

Then Fleming realized the character might still have some legs, at least of the commercial variety. So 007 was brought back for a new novel, Dr. No, with reference to an extended convalescence.

Ian Fleming at his desk in Jamaica. Writing about Bond made him a rich man, if not always this happy about it. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/5911043232838482/. 

The sudden ending might be more to others’ liking – imagine a Bond novel where Bond finally did cash out for keeps – but comes off now as anticlimactic, not only because you know Fleming isn’t going through with killing his hero but because with his mission done and the trap sprung, there is no reason for Bond himself to be further involved in the story.

That’s the only real knock I can make on From Russia, With Love. I enjoy the pure energy of this book and the descriptive power Fleming brings to every scene, from a dragonfly buzzing lazily through the backyard where Grant suns himself to the thoughts of various attendees at a tense meeting inside SMERSH headquarters where the idea of killing Bond is first floated.

Even a routine plane flight Bond takes to his mission is elevated by a sudden electrical storm which gives Fleming a chance to describe Bond’s turbulence-coping mechanisms. He focuses his vision on a spot on the chair in front of him and mentally retires to a “hurricane room.”

Big gun, check. Leggy babe, check. This must be the paperback from the 1970s. Yes, a 1978 Triad Panther edition, to be exact. Image from https://www.etsy.com/.

Fleming lays out the basic Bond mindset:

Never job backwards. What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple – or dead.

Moments like this serve to humanize Bond, making him easy to root for in what is for me his most involving and accomplished adventure. No wonder even Fleming couldn’t kill him.