Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed. Mike Ripley

produced an initial print run of 15,000 copies of From Russia, with Love and it is difficult now, knowing how famous the title became, to understand how the book could not have been the top-selling thriller of 1957. The problem was that Bond was being out-gunned and out-actioned – if not ‘out-sexed’ – by another sort of thriller. The Guns of Navarone, a rousing, wartime adventure thriller and the second novel by a newcomer called Alistair MacLean, reputedly sold 400,000 copies in its first six months.

      MacLean was just one of several new thriller writers to make their mark in the decade of James Bond’s creation – along with such as Francis Clifford, Berkely Mather, John Blackburn and Desmond Cory (who does have something of a claim to having beaten Fleming to producing the first ‘licensed to kill’ secret agent). None were, in the long run, likely to seriously compete with Fleming and Bond, but for a while, MacLean certainly did. However, once Fleming’s books started to be filmed (something Fleming had been very keen on from the start – perhaps, as it turned out, too keen), Bond’s iconic status was assured of immortality.

      Fantasist though he might have been, even Ian Fleming could not have seen the future and the scale of the industry his creation would become, but he did have the wit to acknowledge the man who had shaped the more realistic modern spy thriller: Eric Ambler.

      As James Bond faces execution at the hands of assassin Red Grant across a compartment on the Orient Express in one of the most famous scenes in From Russia, with Love, both men have books to hand. Grant has a copy of War and Peace which is actually a cunningly-disguised pistol (Bond has given his own gun to Grant, proving perhaps that he wasn’t always the sharpest throwing-knife in the attaché case) but Bond has a copy of Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios, into the pages of which he slips his gunmetal cigarette case. When the assassin shoots, Bond whips the armour-plated book over his heart and stops the fatal bullet.

      It would be stretching a point to say that without Eric Ambler there would have been no James Bond, as Fleming took his inspiration from a more fantastical school of ‘blood and thunder’ thrillers and played up the fantasy element, rather than down. But in one way one could have said in 1957 that without Eric Ambler there would have been no more James Bond …

       Chapter 3:

       DO MENTION THE WAR

      In his 2012 study ‘British Crime Films – Subverting the Social Order’, Barry Forshaw surveyed crime movies over the period book-ended (roughly) by the two versions of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2010, and he put up a valiant defence of films unjustly forgotten or ignored by a generation of cinema-goers who have never seen a black-and-white film. His central thesis was that crime films acted as a prism through which British society, its attitudes and morals, could be viewed and indeed subverted by the film-makers and posed the question as to whether it was possible ‘to read a nation through its popular entertainment’.

      Reviewing Barry’s book at the time I suggested that, certainly post-1945, their comedies and, in particular, their war films might provide a more accurate insight and were a far better way to ‘read’ the British.

      The satires of the Boulting brothers in the mid-to-late Fifties, especially I’m All Right, Jack, took a scalpel, if not a harpoon, to the white whale that was the British class system, but the war films of that decade did not attempt to prick or cut away accepted British attitudes. In fact, they reinforced the certainties – that Britain won the Second World War, that simple British pluck could defy and defeat a tyrannical enemy, and that we were all in it together; especially when we stood alone, guardians of an empire on which the sun never set. It was only in the early Sixties, with films such as Tunes of Glory, King & Country and Guns at Batasi, that the British love affair with their armed forces began to be questioned. Significantly, none of those movies were actually set during World War II.

      The effort and sacrifice of 1939–45 was such an ingrained part of the British psyche that film-makers seemed loathe to challenge it. Heroism, sense of duty, making do, carrying on and stoicism in the face of overwhelming odds were the values expected by cinema-goers of their military men (and of course their women) and these were faithfully reflected by the film-makers, be the characters on a suicide mission in a midget submarine, dropping dam-busting bombs or escaping from a POW camp.

      Whether or not the war films of the Fifties can be said to be a way of ‘reading’ British society at the time is still up for debate. It was always a precept of the sociology of cinema that when times were hardest, popular cinema responded with carefree, escapist fantasies; the example always cited being the Hollywood musicals of Busby Berkeley which waved a feather boa in the face of the American Depression of the 1930s. Britain was not replaying the Great Depression in the Fifties, but austerity was the watchword (and a word somewhat diluted in strength in the far more comfortable twenty-first century) as economic recovery from the bankruptcy caused by winning the war – if not the peace – came painfully slowly. This was surely a time when British cinema could have stepped up and lightened the mood with some spectacular dance routines or a few show-stopping musical numbers. Yet British audiences seemed to prefer squads of khaki-dressed soldiers (or POWs) drilling on a parade ground and the nearest they got to a musical number was the obligatory scene in an RAF Mess featuring a sing-song around a pub piano over half-pints of flat mild ale.

      If the war films of the Fifties provide an unreliable lens through which to ‘read the British’ they certainly influenced what the British read when it came to popular fiction.

      Cinema admissions in Britain declined throughout the Fifties and by 1962 were roughly a quarter of their peak in the post-war year of 1946. The biggest single factor in this decline was the growth of television, with a second broadcaster, ITV, challenging the BBC’s monopoly from 1955. The number of domestic television licences grew from around two million in 1953 – the year when an estimated television audience of twenty million viewed the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, presumably ten people watching each set – to over ten million licences by the end of 1959.¹

      The growth of television, a medium always hungry for product, may have torpedoed cinema-going but it provided a life-raft for British war films in the form of a new audience – teenage boys obsessed with all things militaria and who, after 1960, no longer had the opportunity to vent their excess adolescent energy in National Service.

      War films became regular fare on television, particularly in the BBC’s Sunday ‘Film Matinee’ slot, and British studios and producers had ensured there was a healthy back catalogue of stories of derring-do featuring familiar faces (John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Jack Hawkins were rarely seen out of uniform) and they, almost invariably, guaranteed a British victory.

      Taking the period between the first Bond book (Casino Royale) in 1953 and the first Bond film (Dr. No) in 1962, the British film industry refought the Second World War on land, in the air and on – and under – the sea and a surprising number of these films still surface on British television in the twenty-first century, some of them quite regularly The Cruel Sea, Malta Story, The Red Beret, Albert R.N., Appointment in London, The Dam Busters, The Cockleshell Heroes, Above Us the Waves, The Colditz Story, Battle of the River Plate, Reach for the Sky, The Man Who Never Was, A Town Like Alice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ill Met by Moonlight, Yangtse Incident (not actually WWII but close enough), Battle of the V-1, Carve Her Name with Pride, Dunkirk, I Was Monty’s Double, Ice Cold in Alex, Sea of Sand, The Silent Enemy, Danger Within, The Long and the Short and the Tall, The Guns of Navarone, The Password is Courage. With only a few exceptions, where big American stars were parachuted into productions to secure funding or transatlantic release such as Alan Ladd in The Red Beret, William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone, these were very British films (in spirit if not finance) celebrating British pluck, decency, and the fine