Crime Beat

In the first of her From the Hip columns this year, Joanne Hichens hunkers down beneath a beach umbrella, smears on the sun cream and does flashback stuff to a time when life was simple and women were called Octopussy.

A trek down memory lane…
I remember the days I’d lie next to the pool, bikini top unstrapped (lying on my tummy of course), my body slathered in cooking oil, no less; I’d lie on a sheet of aluminium foil which reflected the suns rays to maximum benefit in order to burn my bod in the first step to tanning a deep brown, and I’d read about James Bond and his gadgets and his women, and I was enthralled, as a teenager, completely succumbing to James sex appeal, his easy manner, his devil may care attitude. As James Bond foiled the evil plans of SMERSH, the KGB, SIS, and defeated evil in the form of Goldfinger, Drax, Dr Shatterhand, and Irma Bunt, gorgeous women came on to him shamelessly. Reading was so perfectly escapist.

Those were the days men were men and women – though they were often equally deadly – had names like Plenty O’Toole, Octopussy, Honey Rider. I loved the playfulness between James and his ‘girls’ – no angst, no drama, though lots of action and memorable movies lines: when heavenly-blonde Pussy Galore, in cahoots with Goldfinger, introduces herself while standing over James as he regains consciousness in Goldfinger’s private jet, ultra-smooth Sean Connery delivers a great one: ‘I must be dreaming.’

I stopped reading James Bond for a while though, when I read in disbelief that James not only falls in love with Tracy di Vincenzo, but he resigns from the Service and marries her! Wuss! Tragically, Tracy is murdered right on their wedding day, in a drive-by shooting. Blofeld fires an automatic weapon from his car killing Tracy at the wheel of her Lancia Aurelia, with Bond left unscathed in the passenger seat. I tossed down On His majesty’s Secret Service, vowing that was tickets for James Bond.

It wasn’t Tracy’s death that upset me too much but the fact that James had actually given his heart to a woman stunned me. James was my fantasy; I preferred him tough, ruthless, high octane; the moment it was hinted at that James could actually ‘love’, that he was vulnerable and all too human, that he was going to settle down in domestic bliss, I lost interest…for a while at least.

With a frisson of excitement, this December break, I picked up the new James Bond novel Devil May Care. I hadn’t read an Ian Fleming for years, and looked forward to this perfect holiday treat. Things had changed though – strictly speaking this was Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming, and this time I was reading as a middle-aged frau under a beach umbrella, at Buffel’s Bay, alternately turning the pages and yelling at my kids to smear on more sunscreen.

I enjoyed connecting again with ‘my man’ but one thing that struck me, in a way it never has before, as I turned the pages, was what a helluva constitution 007 is blessed with. What a piss cat is our James. The amount of booze he consumes in Devil May Care, I reckon James must be drunk from morning till night. There’s no end to the jugs of martinis, the bottles of wine, the hard spirits consumed. Lunching with colleague Rene Mathis at a Paris restaurant, Mathis introduces James to Chateaux Batailley, a 1958 describing the wine as ‘A miracle!’. ‘One of the great secrets of Bordeaux!’ It’s uncertain how many bottles go down, but James orders a bourbon and Vittel later at Harry’s Bar, enjoying it along with the last of the day’s second packets of cigarettes, and downs several bourbons in his hotel suite before hitting the sack.

Throughout the novel, between delectable slices of camembert and glasses of Montrachet, dinners of scrambled eggs and triple helpings of bourbon, James sucks on one cancer stick to the next, puffing through packets of Sobranis and Gaulois and whatever he’s offered. The iron man with an iron stomach, our James, must also be a prime candidate for a bout for lung cancer! At least he sleeps like a baby, with no need of sleeping ‘barbituates.’

I caught the tail end of Quantum of Solace on the M-Net movie channel, just in time to see the last breaths of a Rene Mathis shot to death before James lifts him in his arms and dumps him into a garbage tip. ‘Is this how you treat your friends?’ asks Camille Montes. ‘He wouldn’t mind,’ countered Daniel Craig, I mean James Bond. The problem with Craig, for me, is that he never stops being Craig, he never successfully takes on the persona of James Bond. He’s too damn serious, too without humour, he takes things too hard. At least in Devil May Care, in a world of cables and telephones, Faulks gets this right – James’s insouciance, his cheeky invulnerability, and I remembered why I’d fallen for him in the first place: 007 is untouchable, he always has to land on his feet.

Things have changed, but not that much…
I was reminded of how much things have changed in our world in general as I reread a couple of other classic authors:

Nicholas Meyer’s PI Mark Brill smokes up a storm on a trans-Atlantic flight in Target Practice, all the while wrapping his arm around a young woman in distress – and she lets him. Her name is Bunny after all. Nowadays you’d be tossed off the plane without a parachute for even thinking about sneaking a smoke in the toilets, and any guy touching a ‘girl’ on a plane, if she didn’t lead him to the toilets to attempt membership of the mile-high club, would be charged with assault and marched off at touch down and thrown into a deep pit.

Just as 007 relies on Miss Moneypenny, so Mickey Spillane’s PI Mike Hammer can’t get a thing right, it seems, without Velda, his secretary foil: ‘Velda…’ he narrates in The Body Lovers, ‘was always a surprise to me. My big girl. My big, beautiful luscious doll. Crazy titan hair that rolled in a pageboy and styles be damned. Clothes couldn’t hide her because she was too much woman, wide-shouldered and breasted firm and high… she was deadly too. The tailored suit she wore hid a hammerless Browning and her wallet had a ticket from the same agency that issued mine.’

Women don’t play second fiddle any longer as secretary-types or eye candy, as they take charge as lawyers, detectives, profilers, no matter the size of their bust. But PI’s and cops and operators of various kinds are still trying to beat substance abuse – alcoholism in the ranks is here to stay.

Joanne Hichens is the editor of the crime fiction anthology, Bad Company.