Time’s running
out. In mere moments, a diabolical
mastermind and his global
organization of evil will murder
millions of innocents in a mad bid
for world domination. But there is
hope...even now, the one man who
can stop this nefarious scheme is
infiltrating the villain’s secret
command base, armed with deadly
gadgets and the nerve to use them.
James Bond versus SPECTRE? Afraid
not. Try Operator 5 versus The
Purple Empire. The Spider versus The
Fleshless Legions. Or G-8 versus the
Vampire Staffel.
Never
heard of them? Not too surprising.
These days the names mean little to
most people, unlike James Bond, the
world’s most high-profile secret
agent. Suffice to say that years
before 007 first whipped a Walther
from his Berns-Martin triple-draw
holster, these characters were
blazing away with Colt .45
automatics to save an unsuspecting
populace from evil of unimagined
proportions.
These
characters were the stars of the
"pulps," and in a way they were the
spiritual forefathers of James Bond.
Though separated from the works of
Ian Fleming by time, cultures and
philosophy, even a casual
examination of the pulps reveals
some remarkable parallels to the
Bond mythos.
The
Bloody Pulps
So what were the
pulps? Just the biggest thing around
between the World Wars, that's all.
On any given trip to your corner
newsstand in the Depression years,
you wouldn't have been able to
escape them. Magazines featuring
works of original fiction, they
replaced the "dime novels" so
popular at the turn of the century
and thrived for about two decades
before losing their popularity to
comic books and the pocket-sized
paperback novels we know today.
The
"pulps" got their name from the
paper they were printed on --
invariably the cheapest newsprint a
publisher could find -- and were
noted for their glossy and colorful
(one might say lurid) covers,
typically showing beautiful women in
skimpy outfits and dire peril.
Though they covered every genre from
romance to westerns to science
fiction, the best sellers were
usually the "hero" pulps, featuring
a recurring lead character with
singular skills who battled a
different menace every month, and
the detective pulps, with their
endless parade of private eyes and
G-Men who looked at life through
cynical eyes and battled crooks with
their own dirty methods.
In both
genres are hints of the Bond mythos
to come. Whether American pulps had
a direct influence on Ian Fleming is
unknown, but they did give birth to
the detective fiction of his era,
spawning characters like Sam Spade
and Perry Mason, and launching the
careers of authors Dashiell Hammett,
Mickey Spillane and one of Fleming’s
favorites, Raymond Chandler. In
England, the pulps also thrived,
featuring the works of authors like
"Sapper" McNeile and Sax Rohmer,
authors whose influence on Fleming
is more easily confirmed.
The
Jaded Hero
At first glance,
the hard-drinking, chain-smoking,
two-fisted character of James Bond
seems a radical change from
traditional English heros, those
pipe-smoking aristocratic sorts who
approached their work with an air of
casual disinterest, solving crimes
to pass the time until their rose
gardens came in.
Actually,
Bond’s arrival had been foreshadowed
by the heros of the English pulps,
beginning with Bulldog Drummond, a
six-foot tall British he-man with a
frame of "hard muscle and bone clean
through." An expert marksman and
boxer with a knack for getting
captured by the bad guys, Drummond’s
love for England was matched in
depth only by his distrust of almost
all foreigners.
Drummond's
adventures were penned by Lieutenant
Colonel Herman Cyril ("Sapper")
McNeile in a no-holds-barred
fashion. In The Final Count, for
instance, Drummond sets out to
retrieve from the wrong hands a
poison that can bring "universal,
instantaneous death." The villain of
the piece employs an airship and
killer tarantulas in his scheme
before falling victim to his own
deathtrap.
There
were also the works of Sax Rohmer,
whom Fleming did acknowledge as an
inspiration. Rohmer's Fu Manchu was
a Bond-caliber villain with more
than a passing resemblance to Dr.
No, right down to his penchant for
centipedes and his habit of
torturing houseguests. He also
shared the common Bond-villain
problem of having female
confederates defect over to the
hero's side at the most inconvenient
moments.
In fact
Bond joined a literal plethora of
athletic, thrill-seeking,
Bentley-driving wine experts in the
action game, but what set him apart
from most was his ruthlessness.
English heros were expected to fight
fair, and in that regard Bond was a
different sort, preceded perhaps
only by Simon Templar, the rather
brutal sleuth and adventurer created
by Leslie Charteris, a frequent pulp
contributor. The "Saint" was the
only pre-Bond English hero, for
example, to make deadly use of
knives, previously a weapon fit only
for murderous lowlifes, and foreign
ones at that.
Also
setting the stage for Bond were the
American pulps, which had long ago
begun the transition from thinking
crime-solvers to the two-fisted
variety. "Black Mask" magazine in
particular was a haven for all
manner of tough-guy detectives,
beginning with "Race Williams" by
Carroll John Daly and including a
virtual who’s-who of private eyes --
"The Maltese Falcon," for example,
was serialized in the pulps before
becoming an acclaimed novel and
legendary film.
The
"heros" of the "Black Mask" were
typically possessed of a detached
cynicism and a certain moral
ambiguity, not particularly renowned
for using their heads and in fact a
bit contemptuous of intellectuals.
The
parallels to Bond are obvious. In
Goldfinger, Bond decides "It was
part of his profession to kill
people...as a secret agent who held
the rare Double-O prefix...it was
his duty to be as cool about death
as a surgeon." The pulp detectives
likewise know the value of a
"surgical strike." Race Williams,
who amounts to little more than a
hired gunman on the side of the
angels, kills a man in "Murder From
the East" and dispassionately notes
the effect on the rest of his
enemies. "A corpse is always a good
thing to begin with," he muses.
"Some pretty tough guys will quit
sneering and threatening if you
shoot a friend dead at their feet."
Hard to
argue with that logic.
What
sets Bond apart from these American
detectives is his fierce patriotism.
Where the private eyes refused to
believe in anything, be it love,
authority, government or even
themselves, Bond was a fervent
British patriot willing to put a
bullet through a man’s head on
nothing more than "M"’s say-so. In
this he is actually more like the
characters of the "hero" pulps,
fellows possessed of a sort of
super-patriotism and an idyllic view
of their nation. Chief among these
was an American superspy who like
Bond acted as....
One
Man Against Doomsday
One of the popular
themes in the Bond books and films
is that of impending Armageddon.
Seems an agent hardly has time to
recover from the last attempt on
humankind before some new lunatic
unleashes an A-Bomb or Omega Virus
or the like. To ne’er-do-wells like
Drax and Blofeld, human life means
nothing in the quest for wealth and
power.
Some
things never change. In the days of
the pulps, mankind was forever on
the brink of destruction thanks to
some dastardly no-goodnik with a
death ray or explosive device, and
whereas in the 60's we relied on
007, Derek Flint and Napoleon Solo
to save our skins, in the pulps we
had Secret Agent X, a master of
disguise whose name we never
learned, and the invincible Jimmy
Christopher, better known as
Operator 5.
Employed
by a nameless American secret
service, Operator 5 fought off a new
threat to national security every
month, whittling down enemy spy
organizations agent by agent until
he got to the evil chief behind it
all. These nasty little cabals
weren’t content to steal secret
documents or bug embassies; their
goal was nothing less than world
domination.
The
high point of Operator 5's
adventures was "The Purple Invasion
Saga," a 13-book long magnum opus
wherein the United States of America
is overrun by the Purple Empire and
enslaved in part one! Before the
saga was over, major American cities
were laid waste by bomber planes and
tank battalions, Mexico and Canada
were a shambles, the Panama Canal
was blasted to dust and the
President of the US had committed
suicide in a fit of despair!
Operator 5 turned the tables as only
he could, taking command of American
forces and leading them to victory
as Bond later would lead the forces
that attacked the strongholds of
Blofeld, Stromberg and Drax in the
EON films.
The
adventures of Operator 5 and those
of James Bond share a deep
undercurrent of tension that sprang
from the headlines of their
respective eras. In the case of
Operator 5, far-off rumblings of
fascism in 1930's Europe were
unnerving a nation still smarting
from the previous global war. In
Bond’s era, the British were feeling
the anxiety of being at Ground Zero
for World War III. Both heros
provided readers a healthy release
of these anxieties, but in their own
way their adventures merely add to
the fear that it’s only a matter of
time before our luck runs out.
Which
brings us to the creeps who kept
putting us in these miserable
situations....
The
Villains
Ever notice how
Bond villains are nastier than any
other villains? It’s not enough to
have a black heart; Bond villains
have to be physically repulsive as
well, as if the evil in their souls
has grown through their skin to
pervert their outward appearance.
Consider Drax’s bad complexion and
orthodonture, Goldfinger’s obesity
and football head, Dr. No’s....well,
everything!
Such a
hideous collection of slavering
ghouls would have been right at home
in the pulps, where all manner of
demented ogres, gnomes, gorillas and
reptiles stretched out their
claw-like hands to rend the flesh of
innocents. With names like The
Yellow Vulture, the Red Skull and
the Deadly Dwarf, you don't even
have to read the stories to know
these guys will never earn the title
of "Sexiest Man Alive," much less
"Humanitarian of the Year."
At work
here, of course, is the primal
notion that good people are
attractive and evil ones are ugly.
One would be hard-pressed to find a
character in the Bond books who
possesses both a kind heart and an
ugly mug (with the possible
exception of Quarrel). The same is
true of the pulps. Both the Bond
books and the pulps tend to handle
characterizations in rather broad
strokes, and we readers know right
away that when we see the fellow
with the twisted features and bad
habits, he's going to be the
villain.
Fleming
provides an interesting twist on the
theme by "ruining" Bond's good looks
with a hint of deformity and thus
evil. Bond is a handsome man, but
with "a rather cruel mouth" that
frightens some women and intrigues
others. His features are also
somewhat marred by a "faint scar"
down the right cheek. The scar is in
place from Bond's first appearance
in "Casino Royale," perhaps as a
tip-off that, although on the side
of the angels, Bond harbors a streak
of cruelty and evil. In contrast,
the pulp heros are invariably pure
of visage.
Interestingly,
these rules seem not to apply to
women. In Bond's world and that of
the pulps, even the most beautiful
female form may hide the darkest
soul of all. Darn those women; at
least the men have the decency to
wear their evil on the outside!
Sex
and Torture
When it came to
women, the pulp heros were a bunch
of monks compared to 007. They
tended to avoid females for various
reasons; because they’re dangerous
or untrustworthy, because a romance
would place them in danger, etc.
It’s implied that being a hero means
controlling your desires; only the
bad guys give in to temptation, and
if the good guys succumb, they will
lose their omnipotence.
They
may have been on to something. In
every Fleming novel where Bond goes
to bed with a woman in the course of
a mission, some disaster ensues to
mar his victories. In From Russia
With Love, for example, he is nearly
killed by Rosa Klebb after his
affair with Tania. Vesper Lynd, Jill
Masterton and Tracy Vicenzo among
others end up dead after dalliances
with Bond. On the other hand, in the
eight novels where Bond at least
manages to hold off sex until the
end of the mission, his victories
are complete.
"On a
job," Bond muses in Casino Royale,
women "got in the way and fogged
things up...one had to look out for
them and take care of them." He
seems to agree with the pulp heros
on this score, but unlike his
predecessors he often fails to take
his own advice.
Trouble
does indeed seem to follow even the
innocent women. In the pulps, they
are stripped naked so as to be
crucified ("The Pain Master"),
thrown to animals ("Death Reign of
the Vampire King"), and on one
memorable occasion, cooked on a
storefront rotisserie ("Judgement of
the Damned")! In the Bond novels,
naked ladies are smothered in gold
(GF), dragged across coral reefs
(LALD) and fed to an army of crabs
(DN). This torture business is
another link Bond has to the pulps.
Pulp heros, like Bond, are forever
being shot, stabbed, burned, beaten,
whipped, poisoned, electrocuted and
hung only to somehow drag their
bloodied bodies into a final battle
with the villain, and prevail.
The
Gadget Masters
Facing such
fearsome odds, a good guy needs all
the help he can get, and that’s
where the gadgets come in. Again,
the pulp heros beat Bond to the
punch by a couple of decades.
Almost
every pulp hero had a figure behind
the scenes who, as Q did for Bond,
outfitted them with a variety of
amazing gadgets. The Spider had
Professor Brownlee, inventor of
state-of-the-art teargas globes, a
cigarette lighter with a Spider seal
to mark the foreheads of slain
enemies, and a pencil-thin silken
cord strong enough to lift 700
pounds. Operator 5 relied on an
unnamed secret service technician
for a sword that fit inside his belt
(!) and a death's-head pendant
containing lethal gas.
The
master gadgeteer, however, would
have to be Clark Savage, Junior,
a.k.a. "Doc" Savage. Doc was one
hero who didn’t need help from a
scientific genius, because he was
one himself. He designed aircraft
and automobiles superior to those of
his era (one of his planes was
rumored to fly at the
then-inconceivable speed of 200
mph!), a submachine gun that fired
.24 caliber rounds at a rate of 786
a minute, dissolvable parachutes and
oxygen pills for use in lieu of
aqualungs.
Every
inch of Doc’s giant frame was a
potential hiding place for a gadget.
Beneath his suit he wore a
bullet-proof vest loaded with gizmos
of all descriptions. Inside a false
tooth he hid a powerful plastic
explosive and inside another a tiny
saw! A set of false fingernails
contained tiny needles laced with an
anaesthetic, and the breast pocket
of his suit could be converted into
a gas mask.
Some of
Doc's accessories would end up on
the workbench at Q-Branch, including
a belt containing a silken cord with
collapsible grapnel, a bullet-firing
cigarette case and shoes with radio
transmitters and radioactive metals
to allow his colleagues to track his
movements. Perhaps our good Major
Boothroyd was a student of the
Doctor?
Again,
Doc and 007 share a certain kinship
despite the years separating their
adventures. Each character came to
life in a time when readers were
excited by the possibilities of
science and technology. In Doc’s day
mechanical wonders were being
churned out in rapid succession --
the world’s fair of 1939 was
promising all sorts of gadgets for
the average American household. In
Bond's era, the Space Age was under
way and once again people were
convinced that there was nothing
modern technology could not do,
given a bit of time. Both Doc and
Bond were on the cutting edge, sort
of "beta-testing" each new device
before the rest of us got our hands
on them, and providing a lot of
vicarious thrills in the process.
Of
course, there are two kinds of
gadgets; those created for good,
clean (if occasionally lethal) fun,
but also the products of...
Evil
Science!
Laser beams,
flame-throwers, nuclear missiles,
space-launched viruses; all have
been thrown at Bond at some point or
other.
No
doubt it has ever been thus. When
the first Neanderthal figured out
how to hold a stick, you can bet he
used it to bash in his neighbor’s
skull. Of course, fellows like Drax
and Goldfinger and Stromberg upped
the ante quite a bit, but they were
hardly the first to use science for
evil ends.
Throughout
the pulps run a host of anti-social
scientists with devices that would
never have gotten by the
Underwriter's Laboratories. Why, the
Spider alone fought off death rays
("The Devil's Paymaster"),
flesh-eating gasses ("The Green
Globes of Death"), super-powerful
explosives ("Satan's Death Blast"),
fast-acting poisons ("The Red Death
Rain") and gigantic killer robots
("Satan's Murder Machines").
Meanwhile
Doc Savage faced villains who had
mastered invisibility ("Spook
Legion"), could cut off all
electrical current to New York City
("Haunted Ocean") and built flying
devices that numbed men's minds with
brilliant light and a piercing sound
("Meteor Menace"), foreshadowing the
"flash bombs" used in real life by
Britain's anti-terrorist forces.
Obviously
in the pulps, as in the Bond mythos,
technology is to be both worshiped
and feared, the source of our
potential destruction as well as our
salvation.
Remember
Bond’s Roots
The point of all
this is not to detract from the
originality of the Bond novels, nor
to suggest that Ian Fleming "ripped
off" the pulps. But the Bond saga
does owe at least a tip of the hat
to those lurid magazines of so long
ago.
Some
would argue that Bond is too tied to
his era -- the fifties and sixties
-- to owe much to Depression-era
tales. Bond was about the Cold War,
they say, a spy for the Atomic Age.
That’s true to an extent, but at the
same time there is a macabre fantasy
element to the Fleming Bonds that’s
quite at odds with most notions of a
"spy thriller," but right on target
for a pulp novel. There are times
when the Fleming Bonds seem not so
much "spy thrillers" as "fairy tales
gone wrong."
Consider
characters with names like Pussy
Galore and appearances as unlikely
as Dr. No’s. Consider concepts like
Dr. Shatterhand's (Blofeld's)
surreal "Suicide Garden" or Jill
Masterton's naked, gilded corpse.
Like the pulps before them, the Bond
novels adhere to "gritty realism"
for the most part, only to suddenly
and dramatically veer off into the
realm of the bizarre and sometimes
even the absurd.
Nowhere
is the influence of the pulps more
pronounced than in "Dr. No," a novel
featuring a deformed and depraved
Oriental mastermind (in the pulps we
knew Dr. No as Dr. Yen-Sin, Fu
Manchu or Shiwan Khan) living on a
forbidden island ("The Fantastic
Island" and many others) protected
by a machine that plays on the
superstitions of the gullible (here
it’s the "Dragon" tank -- in Doc
Savage adventures it was mechanized
"sea serpents" and "flying
saucers"). The villain likes to
torture good guys, puts naked women
in bizarre death traps for a giggle,
and makes a pet out of a giant
squid! If Fleming wasn’t influenced
by the pulps, little else short of
LSD can account for this book!
Ultimately, as
noted before, the pulps were killed
by the advent of the paperback
novel, a format in which James Bond
thrived. And just as the pulps were
considered disposable entertainment,
so too did Fleming downplay the
literary worth of 007. Whatever
private hopes he may have harbored
for his works, outwardly he
dismissed them as "adolescent"
distractions, aimed not at the
reader’s head but rather "somewhere
between the upper thigh and the
solar plexus."
Except
for a loyal but relatively small
audience of modern enthusiasts, the
pulps have indeed proven largely
disposable, whereas Bond endures and
thrives to this day. But the
influence of the pulps is anything
but disposable, having paved the way
for the adventures of one of
literature’s most beloved heros. The
next time you thrill to the exploits
of the world's greatest spy, spare a
thought for those who went before,
who kept the world in one piece long
enough for James Bond to get out of
Eton and pick up the skills of a
Double-O agent. The heros of the
pulps.
Related links:
Chris
Kalb's "Hero
Pulps":
With exciting designs and lots of
cool surprises, the "front door" to
the ultimate Doc Savage and Spider
links on the Web.
dotPulp:
Offering a brief history of the
pulps and the ultimate list of WWW
pulp links.
Operator 5 cover
copyrighted 1936, Spider covers
1941, G-8 covers 1940 and Detective
Tales cover 1943, all by Popular
Publications. Spider, G-8 and
Operator 5 characters copyrighted
1966 by Argosy Communications. Doc
Savage covers copyrighted 1934, 1937
by Street and Smith Publications,
character currently owned by Conde
Nast.
