Licensed Troubleshooter: The Guns of James Bond is live on Kickstarter now – check it out for lots of super cool exclusive options!
Today Caleb Daniels – author of Licensed Troubleshooter – is back with me, to discuss the wide variety of shoulder holsters that James Bond uses throughout the myriad of Bond books and films. We will touch on the really good ones – like the Galco Executive as used by Brosnan – to the really terrible soft gun sock “holster” that Fleming originally wrote into the character.
One of the major problems with 007 carrying a sidearm much bigger than a PPK in a Bianchi X-15 is pointed out inadvertently in From Russia With Love (1957).
In it, the GRU file on Bond states his height as 178 cm. In English, that’s 70 inches or 5′ 10″. Simply put, he was about three inches too short to carry a larger gun in the vertical shoulder holster without somebody noticing it.
FTR, I’m 6′ exactly and I had to be careful about that “back in the day”. A 6″ Colt Police Positive Special .38 was about my limit without something “showing”.
As for the other holsters, they all had the same “real world” fault; their straps simply were not stiff enough to prevent the holster from “coming along” with the gun on the draw. This would have been less of a problem with the downward-draw holsters like the Berns-Martin or the Galco Executive, but the upward-draw holsters, any of them, badly needed better strapping.
The Mayfair “Q Manual” states that an MI6 agent with a PPK should “have two bullets in an opponent” armed with a Colt Python .357 before the Python clears the holster.
If the MI6 fellow has one of these holsters and the Python is in even a Lawrence (one if the slowest holsters there is), don’t bet on it.
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