26-12-2008, 10:58 PM
(This post was last modified: 22-11-2009, 02:10 PM by Charles Drago.)
From simple "inside" jokes to fiendishly clever reimaginings of actual operations, Ian Fleming's many subtexts, if you will, are worthy of book-length analyses.
Permit me to direct your attention of one of my favorites -- and arguably the most unsettling. James Bond's nemesis in From Russia with Love is the psychopath Red Grant, alias Krassno Granitski, alias Captain Norman Nash. 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 rather fascinating reasons.
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 Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much.
But it remains for Grant's homicidal pathology to utterly fascinate 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 is a lunar cycle serial killer. He is talent-scouted by SMERSH and defects to the Soviets, who somehow are able not only to manage his urges, but also to 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, et al had been raised to popular consciousness.
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 ...
Scared yet?
Permit me to direct your attention of one of my favorites -- and arguably the most unsettling. James Bond's nemesis in From Russia with Love is the psychopath Red Grant, alias Krassno Granitski, alias Captain Norman Nash. 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 rather fascinating reasons.
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 Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much.
But it remains for Grant's homicidal pathology to utterly fascinate 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 is a lunar cycle serial killer. He is talent-scouted by SMERSH and defects to the Soviets, who somehow are able not only to manage his urges, but also to 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, et al had been raised to popular consciousness.
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 ...
Scared yet?