Bulldog Drummond by H.C. McNeile

In H.C. McNeile’s 1920 adventure novel, Bulldog Drummond, Captain Hugh Drummond, back in England after years in the trenches on the Western Front, finds life in peacetime London boring.

Looking for something interesting, challenging and dangerous to do, he places the following ad in a newspaper:

“Demobilized officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential.”

Several responses come in, but the one that intrigues him is from Phyllis Benton, a young woman whose father has fallen into the hands of manipulative criminals.

These bad guys are led by a cunning mastermind called Carl Peterson – which may or may not be his real name – a European gathering a group of agents to disrupt British industry and the government.

McNeile uses Peterson’s plan the way Alfred Hitchcock used his McGuffin. For the director, the word meant the thing the bad guys want which puts the story in gear, but that the audience (in this case the readers) do not care about. The McGuffin in Bulldog Drummond should not be analyzed too closely.

The bad guys are using a mansion close to Phyllis’ home as their base of operations. Drummond takes up the challenge but soon finds he is up against a larger force than expected. To combat Peterson’s henchmen, he calls on his pals who served with him in France. They, like Drummond, jump at the chance for a little action.

As he gathers his troops, Drummond’s friend Algy Longworth tells him, “Toby Sinclair is running round in circles asking for trouble Let’s rope him in.”

Beyond the tongue-in-cheek romp of their adventure, the glimpse of post-war veterans was interesting.

Bulldog Drummond is lightweight stuff. But a lot of it will test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. The two wackiest instances are when Drummond discovers a secret room in the bad guys’ headquarters is guarded by a cobra, and when the baddies sick a gorilla on Drummond. These enemies of England spend a lot of time dreaming up bizarre ways to kill Drummond when they could have shot him and dumped his body in the woods.

The character, Bulldog Drummond, has been compared to James Bond. But reading this book, I pictured a younger John Steed, the character played by Patrick Macnee in The Avengers TV series.

Readers today may be offended by the intolerant attitudes of Drummond and his friends. While I picked up the book for a breezy read, there are passages that jumped off the page and made me think we have come a long way in 100 years from the prejudices of the past. But have we?

Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), who wrote under the pen name “Sapper,” turned out this first plus nine more Drummond novels. An additional nine were by other authors. The Bulldog Drummond character was adapted for film, radio and television. McNeile died of cancer at age 48.

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

A lot of years have gone by since I last read anything by Ian Fleming. The last was Thrilling Cities, a non-fiction collection of travel essays. I found a paperback copy in a used-book store in the 1990s. But I could not tell you the last time or title of one of Fleming’s James Bond stories.

Something on-line triggered an urge to dig out my paperback copy of From Russia With Love.

Fleming’s 1957 book featuring British agent “Double-O-Seven” was far better than I remembered the series. Of course, when I first read his novels I was interested only in the adventure and the hot parts.

From Russia With Love is still a damn good adventure, but by today’s standards, the hot parts are pretty tame.

Interestingly, in his fifth Bond story, Fleming does not bring his main character on stage until about one-third of the way into the book.

The opening chapters describe Red Grant, or Granitisky, as the Russians call him, the immensely strong, murderous psychopath who defected to the U.S.S.R. in the 1940s and whom the Soviets use as an assassin.

The scene then switches to the Kremlin where the heads of intelligence, the secret police and other agencies hatch a scheme to upset the British Secret Service and to throw a scare into their own people to keep them in line. Fleming obviously knew his stuff when laying out the functions of the agencies inside the walls of the Kremlin. Another reason for the plotted attack on the British was the Soviets' embarrassment over recent defections to the West. Fleming has the Russians fuming over the defections of Tokaev, a real-life rocket scientist, and Khokhlov, an actual KGB officer.

The Soviets' plan is to lure a top British agent into a trap and kill him. This agent must be a top man, one with a double-O rating. The one they choose is 007, James Bond. The two lures they use are a portable decoding device and a beautiful young Russian woman working as a government clerk.

When Fleming brings Bond into the story, the agent is between assignments and bored. His days are a dull routine of going to the office, doing paperwork and attending meetings. He is itching for action.

Bond gets his wish when his boss, M, tells him about a Russian woman assigned to a Soviet office in Istanbul who wishes to defect to the West and will bring with her one of the decoding machines. Bond and M know it is a trap, but they want the device, so Bond goes to Turkey.

In Istanbul, he meets Darko Kerim, head of the British secret service branch in Istanbul, and a lovable, middle-age, bon-vivant and ladies' man.

A local organization working with the Russians has targeted Karim for assassination and tried to blow up his office. Luckily, Karim was not sitting at his desk at the time, but was over on the couch engaged in a nooner and the blast only heightened the climax.

Some of the absurdities Fleming put into the book, like the submarine periscope installed to peek into the Soviet headquarters in Istanbul, are fun without knocking the story off track. Fleming tempered the joke of the periscope with Bond’s and Karim’s journey too it through a rat-infested tunnel.

Quite a bit of the book found Bond in grubby environs and eating unappetizing foods. When Bond arrives in Istanbul, he checks into a once grand hotel with a great view but which fell into decline and now is a dump. After his first night there, Bond wakes with bed-bug bites. The book is not nearly as glossy as the movie made from it.

A bit of Bond trivia: From my reading, Bond is older than might be assumed. Fleming says Bond came to work for the secret service in 1938. Others speculate Bond was born around 1920. That would make him 18 when he joined. Fleming also notes that he went to college in Switzerland. Bond may have been recruited into the service as a student, but I saw him as older. From Russia With Love takes place in 1955. I pictured Bond in his late 30s or even 40, which made his encounter with Red Grant all the more dangerous.

Revisiting the Bond books today, made the Cold War seem like ancient history. It has been 30 years since the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union started coming apart. Fleming wrote his series of spy novels about 30 years prior to that. So, it is pretty old stuff. But the writing is still crisp and the From Russia With Love is still a page-turner.

(And, if you enjoy fast-paced stories, please check out my book, Lyme Depot. Thanks.)

(For more posts on books, head over to Todd Mason’s blog.)