Written at the height of Bond-mania, the book is a thorough analysis of Ian Fleming’s strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. Kingley Amis had considerable respect for the Bond novels, and thought that they deserved to be taken seriously as popular literature.

The James Bond Dossier (1965, Jonathan Cape) by Kingsley Amis is a critical analysis of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Amis would become the first Bond continuation novelist, writing Colonel Sun in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham. The James Bond Dossier was the first, formal, literary study of the James Bond character. More recent studies of Fleming’s secret agent and his world include The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by historian Jeremy Black.

Written at the Bond-mania’s zenith in the 1960s, The James Bond Dossier is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming’s strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. As a mainstream novelist, Amis respected the Bond novels, especially their commercial success, believing them ‘to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more ambitious kinds of fiction’. That was a controversial approach in the 1960s, because from early on, since the mid-1950s, the James Bond novels were criticised for their violence, male chauvinism, sexual promiscuity, and anti-Communism.

Despite his intellectual respect for the Fleming canon, Amis’s way of writing about it, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, ‘. . . partly guys academic procedures and pretensions by applying them to low-cultural objects’ and, as such, is deliberately provocative. In that context, the Dossier can ‘. . . look like a cheeky two-fingered salute to the academic world, a farewell raspberry blown at all things pedantically donnish, in a manner Lucky Jim would surely have approved. For to Ian Fleming’s œvre Amis brought the anatomising and categorising zeal he never had devoted and never would devote to more elevated works of literature’.

From essay to book: Kingsley Amis had several motives for writing the Dossier. He had recently retired from teaching and wanted to ‘put behind him the more rigid austerities of university life’. He wanted to expand his range as a writer beyond poetry and mainstream fiction. The need to make more money was also a consideration. Primarily, however, he wanted to show the academics that the literature of popular culture could be as substantive as the literature of high culture.

Consequently, in November of 1963, he announced to Conquest the idea of writing an essay (of some 5,000 words), about the James Bond novels. In May of 1964, after reading all of the then-published books (twelve novels and a short story anthology), his preliminary work revealed them as genre literature more substantive than the standard disposable thrillers. In the event, he expanded the essay to book length, and submitted it to his publisher, Jonathan Cape, in late 1964. In one hundred and sixty pages, The James Bond Dossier methodically catalogues and analyses the activities and minutiae of secret agent 007: the number of men he kills, the women he loves, the villains he thwarts, and the essential background of Ian Fleming’s Cold War world of the 1950s.

After Fleming’s death in August of 1964, Glidrose Productions Ltd, owners of the international book rights, asked for Amis’s editorial assessment of the uncompleted manuscript of The Man With The Golden Gun, which Jonathan Cape deemed feeble, and perhaps unpublishable. He reported that the manuscript was publishable, but would require substantial modifications. Because Amis was not the only writer consulted, it remains controversial if his editorial suggestions were implemented, and to what extent Amis contributed directly to the revision of the manuscript. In the event, the Dossier’s publication was delayed a year, because Jonathan Cape asked Amis to include discussion of The Man With the Golden Gun. Both books were published in 1965; later that year, Amis reviewed The Man With the Golden Gun in the New Statesman.

The Dossier: The James Bond Dossier includes most of the Bond fiction cycle, excepting Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), the final collection of 007 short stories, which was published after the Dossier. Kingsley Amis’s argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming’s critics said, ‘a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life’. He viewed them as popular literature, akin to that of the Science Fiction genre he critiqued in New Maps of Hell (1960).

Although written in Amis’s usual, accessible, light-hearted style, The James Bond Dossier is neither patronising nor ironic — it is a detailed literary criticism of the Ian Fleming canon. In the main, he admires Fleming’s achievement, yet does not withhold criticism where the material proves unsatisfactory or inconsistent, especially when the narration slips into ‘the idiom of the novelette’. Amis reserves the most serious criticism for the academically pretentious rejections of the Bond books, a theme implicitly informing the Dossier.

Each chapter deals with one aspect of the novels — ‘No woman had ever held this man’ defends Bond’s attitude to and treatment of women: “Bond’s habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominating or combative”; ‘Damnably clear grey eyes’ describes M, the head of SIS: “a peevish, priggish old monster”; ‘A glint of red’ is about the villains, who have in common only physical largeness and angry eyes; and so forth. According to his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, the hand of Sovietologist and scholar Robert Conquest is betrayed in Amis’s precise dissertation upon the genesis and changing nomenclatures of SMERSH, the employer of the villains of the early novels. With ‘almost parodic scholarly dedication’, Amis provides a ten-category (‘Places’, ‘Girl’, ‘Villain’s Project’, etc.) reference guide to the Bond novels and short stories.

Along the way, Amis enjoys himself, for example, when he explains away plot inconsistencies in Dr No (1958), wherein Bond is implausibly captured by the eponymous villain. That ‘Bond is temporarily helpless in his creator’s grip’, does not matter, because ‘three of Mr Fleming’s favourite situations are about to come up one after the other. Bond is to be wined and dined, lectured on the aesthetics of power, and finally tortured by his chief enemy’. Earlier, Amis had discussed the matter of Bond’s correct designation: ‘It’s inaccurate, of course, to describe James Bond as a spy, in the strict sense of one who steals or buys or smuggles the secrets of foreign powers . . . Bond’s claims to be considered a counter-spy, one who operates against the agents of unfriendly powers, are rather more substantial’.

See also:

• Bond, James: Critical endeavours