From Dimitrios with Love: Ian Fleming’s Cold War Revision of Eric Ambler’s &lt;i&gt;A Coffin for Dimitrios&lt;/i&gt;

Lucas Townsend

doi:10.24877/jbs.54

Abstract

While From Russia With Love is certainly one of Ian Fleming's most discussed novels, little attention has been given to the influence of the earlier spy fiction pioneer Eric Ambler on the James Bond canon. This article exposes Fleming’s metatextual inclusion of Ambler's 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios in the narrative of From Russia with Love as more than just Bond’s choice of reading. The text of A Coffin for Dimitrios forms the underlying foundation for historically relevant settings, themes, events, and characters, especially when observing Ambler's villain Dimitrios Makropoulos and his remarkable similarities to Fleming's Donovan Red Grant. As Ambler's novel actually saves Bond's life in his duel versus Grant, this warrants a closer look at the book's content, revealing in clear detail the dangers of time periods that are neither war nor peace and the enemies that operate within them; sadly, a distracted Bond never finishes the book, and thus fails to heed this warning. Gerard Genette's theory of hypertextuality, Hans Robert Jauss's concept of the horizon of expectations, and Tzvetan Todorov's discussion of detective fiction genres each work in concert with this comparative analysis of the two novels, clarifying how Fleming not only transplants near-direct quotes out of and adopts elements from A Coffin for Dimitrios, but also updates, revises, and reinterprets them for the Cold War era.

Highlights

One of the most recognisable titles of Cold War popular fction is certainly Ian Fleming’s 1957 novel From Russia With Love
Lucas Townsend is an MA candidate in English at Florida Atlantic University. His primary research interests include the application of Structuralist theories to twentieth-century speculative and genre fiction, especially in the works of Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and H.P
Narrative structure (the frst ten of the novel’s twenty-eight chapters are dedicated to the internal machinations of SMERSH before fnally introducing a Bond sufering from his relegation to “the soft life” of desk work in the eleventh chapter) certainly raises questions about the nature of Fleming’s writing process

Summary

Introduction

One of the most recognisable titles of Cold War popular fction is certainly Ian Fleming’s 1957 novel From Russia With Love. Russia is undoubtedly more of a postmodern novel than Fleming’s earlier work, as this intentional audience subversion comments more on the qualities of his established spy novel structure, mastering what Jauss calls the “ideal case [...] of the objective capability of such literary-historical frames of reference [...to] evoke the reader’s horizon of expectations, formed by a convention of genre, style, or form, only in order to destroy it step by step” (ibid.).

Results

Conclusion