116
Popular Culture Review
From Russia with Love: A 50 th
Anniversary Valentine Title
Ian Fleming
1957
“The naked man who layed splayed out on his face beside the
swimming pool might have been dead.”
With quintessential pulp menace, thus begins Ian Fleming’s fifth James
Bond novel From Russia with Love. Written fifty years ago and published in
1957 to warm reviews and torrid sales that continued for years after its debut,
From Russia with Love looms largest among Fleming’s smash 007 oeuvre not
only for its exceptional story-telling qualities but for the literary and cinematic
bar it set—and so it remains to this day.
The plot of From Russia with Love is both simple and deliciously
baroque, befitting the Soviet nemesis Fleming pits against 007: Embarrassed by
a series of setbacks and under possibly lethal scrutiny by the nascent post-Stalin
Central Committee, Soviet intelligence targets James Bond for death “with
ignominy,” via a lurid sex, spy, and murder scandal with a beautiful descendant
of the Romanovs as the lure and a super-secret Russian decoder as the bait.
Even though this may sound like small beer compared to, say,
capturing the gold of Fort Knox, it is but one indication of From Russia with
Lov 6?’s one thousand fine qualities. The New Yorker, hardly an avatar of hotblooded “entertainments,” proclaimed, “Mr. Fleming has never concocted a
richer brew.” While every bit the trademark Bond novel (insert sex, sadism, and
sensationalism here). From Russia with Love is also uniquely grounded in a real
Cold War world uncommonly associated with both the literary and cinematic
007.
When James Bond enters the novel (on page 99!), he is deep in an
inter-organization tangle, serving on a board of inquiry set up following the
mortifyingly real defections of British agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean
to the Soviets. Bond’s feelings on the matter, at once rueful and combative,
reveal Fleming’s own prescient thoughts on how the game of “red Indians” was
already morphing out of its World War II and Cold War templates into
something unpleasantly new to its players. The parallels to our post-9/11 playing
field are striking.
But so too is the essence of the Soviet plot. Killing Bond, or any other
enemy of the state, is a