22-10-2008, 03:03 AM
(This post was last modified: 22-10-2008, 01:07 PM by Charles Drago.)
From superficial "inside" jokes to fiendishly clever reimaginings of actual operations, the stuff of Ian Fleming's many plots and subplots is worthy of book-length analyses.
Permit me to direct your attention to arguably the most unsettling -- and revealing -- of the Fleming dramatis personae. James Bond's nemesis in From Russia with Love is the psychopath Red Grant, alias Krassno Granitski, alias Captain Norman Nash. (In the aforementioned "'inside' joke" department: "Nash" is the transliteration of the Russian slang for "one of ours." Reference Richard Case Nagell's elaboration as proffered in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Know that Fleming was fluent in Russian.)
While, as Kingsley Amis points out in his The James Bond Dossier, Grant is not the true villain of the novel (a distinction reserved for the execrable Rosa Klebb), he nonetheless stands out in the canon for reasons relating to Myra's query.
Grant's homicidal pathology is endlessly fascinating to those of us for whom Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy stands as an essential guide for a tour of the darkest realms of political/intelligence intrigue.
You see, Grant, a British enlisted man assigned to Germany, just happens to be a lunar cycle serial killer. He is identified and seduced by SMERSH, and he defects to the Soviets, who somehow are able not only to manage his urges, but also direct them purposefully.
(And so we travel from Lektor to Lecter -- sorry, all this "inside" stuff is getting to me.)
How much did Fleming know about operations designed to control both "normal" and abnormal minds? Remember, we're talking 1957 here, a point in time long before MK/ULTRA, ARTICHOKE, and similar programs had been raised to popular consciousness.
I'm afraid, Myra, that you're on to something.
But in the "lemonade out of lemons" department, an idea for the next Hannibal Lecter novel: The good doctor allows himself to be recruited by an unnamed intelligence service for use in a conspiracy of world-historic proportions ... which of course he turns to his own ends. But perhaps ... just perhaps ... he has been their creation all along ... or they have been his ... or ...
Permit me to direct your attention to arguably the most unsettling -- and revealing -- of the Fleming dramatis personae. James Bond's nemesis in From Russia with Love is the psychopath Red Grant, alias Krassno Granitski, alias Captain Norman Nash. (In the aforementioned "'inside' joke" department: "Nash" is the transliteration of the Russian slang for "one of ours." Reference Richard Case Nagell's elaboration as proffered in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Know that Fleming was fluent in Russian.)
While, as Kingsley Amis points out in his The James Bond Dossier, Grant is not the true villain of the novel (a distinction reserved for the execrable Rosa Klebb), he nonetheless stands out in the canon for reasons relating to Myra's query.
Grant's homicidal pathology is endlessly fascinating to those of us for whom Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy stands as an essential guide for a tour of the darkest realms of political/intelligence intrigue.
You see, Grant, a British enlisted man assigned to Germany, just happens to be a lunar cycle serial killer. He is identified and seduced by SMERSH, and he defects to the Soviets, who somehow are able not only to manage his urges, but also direct them purposefully.
(And so we travel from Lektor to Lecter -- sorry, all this "inside" stuff is getting to me.)
How much did Fleming know about operations designed to control both "normal" and abnormal minds? Remember, we're talking 1957 here, a point in time long before MK/ULTRA, ARTICHOKE, and similar programs had been raised to popular consciousness.
I'm afraid, Myra, that you're on to something.
But in the "lemonade out of lemons" department, an idea for the next Hannibal Lecter novel: The good doctor allows himself to be recruited by an unnamed intelligence service for use in a conspiracy of world-historic proportions ... which of course he turns to his own ends. But perhaps ... just perhaps ... he has been their creation all along ... or they have been his ... or ...