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Today Caleb Daniels joins me again to discuss one of the mysteries of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Bond is described as carrying a long-barrel .45 Army Special under the dashboard of his Bentley – but what is this gun? Fleming was not a “gun guy”, but he liked to write lots of specific details into his descriptions of things, including guns. The way he describes this .45 car gun leaves it open to some speculation to what the gun actually is…so let’s do some speculating!
Could the pistol have been a Webley Green 455 target model? The Target model was a special model, it could have a longer than standard length barrel, and a Webley Green would have been fitting for a supercharged Bentley.
There is such a thing as a long-barreled 1911-in The Terminator, in the gun store scene, the Terminator requests a “.45 longslide with laser sighting.” That was an AMT Hardballer, but did Colt ever (or in time for Fleming) make a long slide 1911?
Or at that point were there shortened 1911s like the Commander or Officer models? In which case the Govt Model with its 5″ would have been the longest barrel.
OTOH, Englishmen are funny about safety-catches on their revolvers so that could just be an artifact. The 1909 Colt New Service was available in a 7.5″ barrel and if that’s not a long barrel, what is?
The “Special” is confusing. But Bond has used other revolvers, including a Colt Police Positive under his pillow.
Very exciting prospect this book-obviously catnip for fans like me. Thanks to both of you!
Check out the Colt New Service revolver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_New_Service
Variants had a 7 1/2 inch barrel. A later model had a safety. Not sure how it worked so that it would fit the “safety up” statement.
The safety was internal, so the gun couldn’t fire if dropped. No manual safety catch.
Check out this link. Just how did the positive lock work? Still looking for good pictures of the Colt New Service with a positive lock to see how it was manipulated. What I can find on other models seems to show manipulation could be described as having the safety lever “up”, if the author is not into firearms minutia.
https://www.shootingtimes.com/editorial/handgun_reviews_st_coltnewservice_200905/100072
Was the short story in question “From a View to a Kill?”
Is Caleb’s shirt made of sea island cotton?
Could the Bentley .45 and the short story .45 be different guns? (I remember the story was set in continental Europe)?
Did Caleb note the other short story where the ski instructor was killed with a “Webley fort-five”? Was that term a British contraction for .455? Could all these other Bond .45s actually be .455?
Doesn’t the 1911’s barrel look “long” in comparison to all contemporary handguns but a C96 or artillery Luger? Eg. P08, P38, Ruby, Beretta 34, Colt 1903, and the .32 Webley semi-autos?
Can someone track down Mr. Bart’s Colt New Service with safety, as mentioned above? (Though the British revolver safeties I have seen were cross-bolt)?
Thank you for your hard work, Mr. Daniels, now pour yourself a vodka martini.
Outside of the 007 “universe”, in Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion novel Police at the Funeral (1931), when Campion asks his friend and colleague Inspector Stanislaus Oates of Scotland Yard what Andrew Seeley was shot with, Oates replies “point four-five revolver”, and then comments that even the Yard has no idea how many unregistered ex-Army “point four-five” Webleys there are in the country. (SPOILER:The one in question actually belonged to Seeley’s cousin George Faraday, taken without his knowledge or permission.)
So apparently, a .455in Webley was generally referred to simply as a “.45” or “point four-five” in England before the war, a habit Fleming also likely had.
cheers
eon
https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=540976
goes into a whole lot about .455/.45 conversions. Note that .455 Eley spec is lower pressure and weaker than .45 Auto or even .45 Auto Rim, due to its black powder legacy.
I fired a Webley MK V (“bird’s-head” butt) converted to .45 ACP/Auto-Rim once. Extraction was hard and cases showed clear evidence of bulging.
I concluded that (1) the chambers were oversized for the .45 ACP/AR cases and (2) a revolver originally intended for either black powder or Modified Cordite loads was skating way too far into its safety margins with even standard service .45 ACP/AR loads.
Yes, the conversion is possible. No, I do not recommend it.
clear ether
eon
I don’t think someone would have called a standard 1911 a “long barrel .45”.
Even if the barrel is slightly longer, it doesn’t “seem” to have a longer barrel than the Hi Power, and it seems even shorter than the FN 1903 (because the grip of the FN is very short).
Good to see Ian has got his ducks in a row on this topic !
How? A non-gun guy writer of fiction vaguely refers to a handgun and this thread agonizes over what the piece ‘really’ was? Guys…guys? Ian Fleeing was tossing off a detail in a made-up story. None of it is ‘real.’ This place is like grade school recent. ‘Oh yeah? Batman can kick Spiderman’s butt!’
One thing worth noting in the SAA’s favor is the variance in barrel length. The original Army barrel was 7.5 inches, but 5.5 inches was super common among other purchasers. Thus specifying “long barrel” would make sense even before getting into extra long stocked variants.
When did “Commander” 1911s first appear?
The New Service 1909 was also available in up to 7.5″ barrel. 1911s exist with 6″+ barrels, but I don’t know if by Colt or in the 007 period. For the Colt Commander, from wiki,
Production history
Designed
1949
Produced
1950–present
So by comparison a 1911 Government Model would have been the “long barrel.”
Tactically a SAA would be unsound, obsolete in a world with double action revolvers having swing open cylinders and hand ejectors, let alone with self-loading pistols having detachable box magazines.
The Colt Commander is mentioned in American Rifleman of January 1951 (p. 53) as new on the market.
The gun described in the early novels was called a Colt. According to my 1939 Stoeger catalog, that would be a New Service in either .45 Colt, .45 ACP, or .455 Eley (Webley).
The “long-barrelled” description would fit either the 5 1/2″ or 7 1/2″ inch versions. (Yes, you could get a New Service with a 7.5″ barrel as a standard catalog item.)
Alternatively, it could have been the Shooting Master, the adjustable-sighted target version, in either .45 Colt or .45 ACP with a 6″ barrel; no other barrel length was available on that model, and it was not available in .455in.
Please note that since production of the New Service type revolver was ended when WW2 began (and the jigs were stupidly left outside to rust), any such revolver would have to have been a pre-1941 production.
What I’ve never understood was why 007 would choose the .45 caliber version when the same revolvers (New Service and Shooting Master) were also available in .357 Magnum from 1936 to end of production. Not only is .357 more powerful, it can of course also chamber .38 Special, which would be an advantage in most areas, .38 ammunition being more widely distributed than .45.
This would have been consistent with the Walther PPK in 7.65mm. That was chosen because .32 ACP was at the time easier to obtain in many countries than .380 ACP. For instance, in France, a .32 ACP pistol was legally available as a self-defense arm, and so was its ammunition, but a .380 was defined as a military and police caliber, and was prohibited to civilians. Other countries had similar statutes then.
Curiously, several such countries prohibited .45 ACP, as it was a military caliber, but .357 Magnum was considered a “sporting” caliber intended for hunting (which was after all how it had originally been advertised by Smith & Wesson) and so was legally available to the civilian market.
I know which one I’d rather have in 007’s line of work, and it would be the .357.
clear ether
eon
.357 seems to have been a rare round in the UK, whereas all sorts of .45 and sort-of .45 ammo had been floating around since the turn of the century. C&Rsenal mentions the slew of British revolver manufacturers since the 1880s making .45 revolvers with very long cylinders for fear the British Army would adopt .45 Long Colt (meanwhile they also chambered .450 Adams, etc., and eventually .455 Webley.) 7.65/.32 was popular in the UK from the moment John Browning invented it for FN; the FN pistols and the 1903 Colt sold so well that Mr. Whiting at Webley had to develop a .32 pistol for the pocket market.
From my skimming and https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=540976 it appears that .455 dried up and anyone who wanted to run their Webleys had them converted to .45 Auto/Auto Rim. Some say that later (post black powder) Webleys were built stronger, however, others feel that much shooting of .45 Auto/AR at GI ball pressures, let alone +P, quickly ruined the guns, and you should use the .45 brass but should download it by maybe half, in one case treated-these will be squib loads in a 1911, 600, 700fps.
Could we perhaps entertain the possibility that Mr. Fleming was performing a classic authorial ass-pull?
It’s hard enough keeping track of real weapons used by real people; you slip into fictional, and pretty soon you’re arguing about how many cartridges fit on the head of a pin.
Kirk:
It is a bit futile to try and make sense of something which the author himself did not understand. I seem to recall that a British gun enthusiast called Boothroyd wrote to Fleming to explain some of his mistakes, and after that Fleming let Boothroyd read his proofs and correct the gun errors. I think he even introduced a character called Boothroyd into the books as an armourer to thank him. Was this Q’s real name?
I’ve only rarely run into authors who know their firearms at all well; H. Beam Piper was about the only one I can think of who “got things right”.
Fleming is someone I really haven’t been able to put down as anything in particular; his supposed career during WWII strikes me as being embellished heavily, but… I don’t know. He certainly put his finger on the zeitgeist of his times, and became extremely successful commercially, but was he “real”, or a figment of his own self-promotion? No idea; most of the actual proof is still buried under the Official Secrets Act.
The only thing I was ever able to verify about Fleming was that he was in Lisbon in 1940-41, and was involved in a incident regarding a German go-between that was the basis for the very first 007 novel, Casino Royale (1951).
Apparently, the very first TV adaptation of the story, on CBS’ “Climax” anthology series in 1954, with Barry Nelson as American agent “Card Sense Jimmy Bond”, was closer to what really happened than the novel or any later film version.
As to how I verified this, as Bugs Bunny once said, “In my business you meet so many interesting people”.
(No bobby pins, though, please.)
cheers
eon
Apparently, yes. Word of God from the people at Mayfair Games, who did the James Bond 007 Role-Playing Game in cooperation with Eon Productions (no relation, no, really), stated that “Q”‘s full name and title was Major Quentin Boothroyd, formerly Special Air Service.
In fact, in the movie The Spy Who Loved Me (197), Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) even greets Q (Desmond Llewelyn) with a cheerful, “Hello, Major Boothroyd”. According to the Mayfair Q Manual (an indispensable reference even if you’re not a “role-player”), Q was rather put out about a senior KGB field executive knowing his real name.
Of course, for years, the official MI6 manuals on Soviet bloc weapons always referred to the PM 9 x 18 pistol as a “Marakov” rather than a “Makarov”, a mistake repeated in the Mayfair book.
cheers
eon
That should be the Spy Who Loved Me (1977), of course.
cheers
eon
Eon:
Thanks for confirming that. I think I read about Boothroyd many years ago in Handgunner magazine, a very fine publication which foundered following the many British gun bans. Apparently Fleming had described Bond using a type of shoulder holster for his Beretta which could only work with a revolver, as it grasped the cylinder. Boothroyd wrote to Fleming to correct him, and Fleming, to his credit, decided to run gun things past him in future.
That was the Berns-Martin Triple Draw, and the Q Manual has Q himself pointing out that the Q Section version resembles the commercial version about the way 007’s Aston-Martin DB5 saloon resembles one you’d buy off the showroom floor. About the only thing remaining of the original is the name.
BTW, you can still buy a Triple-Draw today. It’s also known as the “Mossad Three-Way” holster, and thanks to Don Johnson and Miami Vice, it’s available as the Galco “Miami Classic”;
https://www.galcogunleather.com/miami-classic-shoulder-system_8_2_1211.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw6c63BhAiEiwAF0EH1PD9dChknSXrX-Sk22gTnYlF5DN2npUfCnmBBu5mrWwiPasxCkkpuBoC2YUQAvD_BwE
And yes, it’s made for both revolvers and automatics.
cheers
eon
Eon:
Berns-Martin, that’s the one. I couldn’t bring it to mind.
Perhaps a 1917, with a mythical revolver safety tacked on?
Or, more likely, an author who thinks that every pistol has a safety. Alternatively, an author thinking that the terms “pistol” and “revolver” are interchangeable, and that the typical characteristics of each flow across the entire sub-species of one-handed firearms…
The number of people that get this stuff entirely wrong is legion; you see it all the time in movies and read it in fiction almost more often than they get such details correct. I’m never going to get past hearing someone on Law & Order taking the safety off of their Glock 19…
Swear to God, I remember one movie where they “racked the slide” on a bolt-action rifle, using the sound-effect from a 12-gauge. Utterly bizarre to observe. I got up and left the viewing area… Totally took me out of the “willing suspension of disbelief” mode.
Spider Robinson blew it completely in Callahan’s Key, when he not only put a safety on a S&W M29 .44 Magnum, but also said it was less powerful than…a Webley Mk VI .455.
Which was odd because up to that point in the “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” stories, he’d gotten things more or less right where guns were concerned.
Walter Wager, who wrote things like the “I Spy” and “Mission:Impossible” TV tie-ins under the pseudonym “John Tiger”, generally got things correct. He “gave” Robinson, Scott and most other CIA types snub-nosed .357 Magnum revolvers (probably S&W M19 2.5″ ones), which in the 1960s were more-or-less standard issue for the agency’s field officers IRL.
Quote;
The Magnum threw a big slug and hit with tremendous impact. It was not a weapon for the marksman or the finicky; generally, whatever it hit, it killed.
Yes, pretty much.
In his 1969 novel “Sledgehammer”, in which a quartet of ex-OSS “Jedburghs” take down a corrupt Southern town in which their fifth team member has been murdered by the local mob, Wager correctly identified and “used” a variety of weapons, notably the suppressed M3 .45 ACP “Grease Gun” that was OSS issue during the war. He even correctly identified it as having been manufactured by the Guide Lamp Co. division of GM at the time.
Although he did at one point talk about a .357 Magnum revolver having “a round in its chamber”, as if it were an automatic. (Oops.)
Brian Garfield, author of “Death Wish” and “Death Sentence”, the two novels which were the basis for all those Charles Bronson movies, wrote an article for the first Murder Ink collection edited by Dilys Wynn, in which he bemoaned the fact that most authors didn’t know anything about guns, and when he made an error about one his readers let him know about it in no uncertain terms. Kersey changed from a .32 revolver to a S&W Centennial .38 Special snub in the second novel largely due to those sorts of letters from his readers.
In fact, Garfield rarely made mistakes about guns, especially in the eight “Marshal Jeremy Six” westerns he wrote in the early 1970s under the pseudonym Brian Wynne. (They’re now back in print under his own name.) In the last one, “Big Country, Big Men”, he drops Six into the middle of one of Mexico’s eternal revolutions (the one in 1886 in Chihuahua, apparently), and accurately depicts everything from Remington rolling blocks, to a Sharps rifle in the hands of a sniper, to a ten-barrelled .45-70 Gatling Gun (the Colt-made Model 1874, would be my guess).
Among modern writers, Stephen Hunter rarely screws up where guns are concerned. In his WW2 novel “The Master Sniper”, he even correctly described the rare “Vampir” sniper version of the StG-44, complete to the IR sight and its solar-energy battery charger. (Yes, the Germans actually developed that during the war.)
His description of a unit of U.S. paratroopers (101st Airborne most likely) getting ready for a night drop is pretty much bang on, right to their habit of taping their knife sheathes to the front of their LBEs with the hilt downward, which was a WW2 “thing” I could never figure out. (But then, I’m not a “para” and never have been; my knife always went on my belt opposite my pistol holster.)
Overall, though, as Garfield said, “The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it is often a damned sight less accurate than the firearms it portrays”.
cheers
eon
Eeeesh… That “knife taped upside-down to LBE harness” crap really dates the story, and sets it among guys who really didn’t know any better.
I mean, yeah… It’s a technique, as critical Ranger and Sapper Leader course instructors liked to phrase it, but… Man, did it have some downsides. Fer’ one thing… Gravity. Goes down, not up; any sheath just hanging there waiting for gravity to help you lose your knife? Bad, bad idea.
It’s about like that other thing that used to be fairly popular, centering the canteen on the back of the web gear. We had a First Sergeant that had a fetish for that crap, and no amount of common sense from anyone could get him to change.
Until the night he slipped and fell off the running board of a truck, going straight back onto his back with that canteen centered on his spine. We had to straight-up MEDEVAC his ass, and it was all any of us junior enlisted scum could do not to break out in laughter at the result, unkind as that was. He spent like a week in the hospital while they did all the work on his spine, then three-four months on convalescent leave. We didn’t see him fully back on duty until after the six-month mark went by.
Somewhat after his accident, the Sergeant Major went through and did a rework of all the SOPs we had, and surprise, surprise, surprise… No more canteen centered on the back.
I still don’t know what the hell they were thinking; that policy seems to have happened without much in the way of forethought or view to consequence.
And, that upside-down knife thing? That’s the same damn thing, only with a really sharp object. Frankly, I banned the concept any time I had the opportunity, because it was stupid and dangerous. If you’re a combat soldier, and you need a knife that close to hand? You’ve fundamentally screwed up, anyway. You’re also operating with very little common sense, because if that thing drops free, odds are pretty good it’s going to wind up in your body, somehow. One of the guys in our battalion had his KA-BAR set up like that, tumbled down into a ravine during a night patrol, and the upshot was that he somehow wound up a.) losing his knife, and b.) acquiring a nasty shoulder wound that he said came from a splintered branch. I still have my doubts, on that one.
An additional clue was that he never again wore anything like that on his gear. I think learning occurred, but he’d never admit to it.
I’ve read a first hand witness story where a soldier had a knife on his chest, or its side, and when he was hit, knife broke and pieces of it ended in his body (along with a bullet, ofc).
So, carrying knives in such matter is maybe not the wisest choice.
It was definitely an affectation of youth… And, an unwise one. I think I tried that “carry technique” for a couple of days on one field exercise before realizing “This is a really bad idea, why do people do this?”
Took a few years for the dime to drop; “Only really silly poseurs do this…”
The amount of sheer idiocy that young soldiers get up to in every era is immense, and you have to be really careful about what you take as “approved practices” when you look at the descriptions in literature and whether or not to take someone seriously when they tell you that they did things like this.
The sheer cringe factor, looking back at a lot of stuff done in youth? Yeesh. Teeth chip…
Kirk:
I must admit it is a pet peeve of mine. When you watch TV or a movie you find that every time someone picks up a firearm it has to click. Even a revolver. It is so monotonous, but the sound engineers seem to be addicted to it.
The nice thing about a double-action revolver is that the adverse party’s first notification of you having it is when it goes BANG.
A single-action, of course, has to be cocked manually first. (“Fanning” doesn’t count except with a modified “slip gun”, IMPO.)
The double-action automatic was supposed to solve the whole “first shot” problem, originally for pocket autos. (BTW, the Menz DA pocket auto predated the Walther PP/PPK family by nearly a decade. The PPK and Menz are hard to tell apart visually and mechanically.)
The trouble is, as previously discussed here, that the DA auto has its own problems, mainly with ADs on the range.
As to why 007 ended up with the PPK, in Dr. No (1957) he actually was issued a .32 ACP PPK and a .38 Special S&W Centennial hammerless DA-only revolver. (The Centennial was just new on the market then.)
Brian Garfield (in the article op. cit.) could never figure out why Bond got that one instead of the Bodyguard with the shrouded hammer, which allowed thumb-cocking for more accurate shooting beyond point-blank. I have trouble understanding that, too.
As for the .32 PPK, I’ve always suspected that with so many ex-Wehrmacht and ex-NSDAP ones floating around Europe at the time, they gave Bond that one so that if he had to use it, he could drop it in a convenient sewer grate afterward. With less chance of it coming back to say “hello again” in the hands of an overly-inquisitive local homicide detective.
Yes, his “trademark” sidearm was likely intended as a deniable “throwdown”.
His previous one, the Beretta 635 .25 ACP, would also qualify.
https://images.gunsinternational.com/listings_sub/acc_2224/gi_100908399/BERETTA-MODEL-635-BREVET-6-35-X-25-CAL-PISTOL-EXC-CONDITION-Made-1950_100908399_2224_2BA933DE9DF28256.JPG
Very common in Europe from about 1920 on.
cheers
eon
Colt New Service in .455 Webley as carried by the RCMP would fit.
AFAIK, all the RCMP New Services were the 4 1/2″ version, because they were carried in belt holsters in automobiles in addition to being on horseback. The longer barrels could cause bruises in awkward places that way, when the muzzle hitting the car seat rammed the butt up into your ribs. (My policy was that anything with more OAL than a 1911A1 was carried in a vertical shoulder holster.)
I suspect Fleming may have gotten the idea for 007’s car gun from the movie The Big Sleep (1945/46), in which Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) had a springloaded flipdown panel under the dash of his Ford with a Colt Official Police .38 and a Colt Detective Special .38 held on it by spring clips.
https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Big_Sleep,_The_(1946)
cheers
eon
It is the safety thing that knocks out all revolvers. Except unless we just ignore a non-gun-guy author trying to throw in a plot point, without thinking through previous references to the pistol.
Look out, Barbara Broccoli is going to claim your book.
Talking of James Bond, if you have never compared Ian Fleming’s fictional James Bond to a real spy check out a news article dated 13 September 2024 in TheBurlingtonFiles website. Sadly for Fleming’s Bond, reality like exploding pagers and walkie-talkies is leaving espionage fiction in the ashtray of history. Why not forget about fictional agents like Bond and Bourne dashing to save the world from disaster and forget about CIA and MI6 officers reclining on their couches dreaming up espionage scenarios to try and thrill you. Check out what a real MI6 and CIA secret agent does nowadays. Why not browse through TheBurlingtonFiles website and read about Bill Fairclough’s escapades when he was an active MI6 and CIA agent? The website is rather like an espionage museum without an admission fee … and no adverts. You will soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.
I think there’s something to say about the popularity and reverence for the “secret agent man” in popular culture of the era.
You can tell an awful lot about the underlying culture and the people expressing said culture by looking at the stories they tell each other. After all “story” and “narrative” are how we make sense of the world, and when you go to look at the various tales we tell ourselves… It’s a lens into the very id of the culture telling them.
Case in point: Examine Aladdin and his lamp, and consider things from the standpoint of what that story tells about the people in it, and their culture. Aladdin finds an enslaved entity, by sheer accident. What’s his first thought? Oh, but of course… How to take advantage of that enslavement for himself, and how he can best benefit from it. Not a thought is expressed in any of those tales of “found genies” about the morality of that question; the genie is a slave, pure and simple, there to be used like a sentient tool. Many of the other details are included about how best to take advantage of the discovered slave/genie, and keep them subjugated…
What does that tell you about the Arab/Persian culture that has such tales, holding them out as exemplary? D’ya think you’d like to be shipwrecked on their shores, hearing them? Would you like to be their neighbors?
The “secret agent man” stories we were telling each other back in the post-WWII era are expressions of that which is basest and most profoundly wrong in our culture; Bond was a knight-errant, fighting the Black Knights of the intelligence world, but the whole thing was deeply and profoundly wrong. Look at where all that glorious espionage has gotten the Russians; is the average Russian better off because of the NKVD’s machinations in the days of Stalin, or did all that crap blunder them into a hell-world where their early support of Hitler and his Nazis earn them Barbarossa? Same with everything else since those times; can anyone point to any positive benefit from all of this “secret agent man” bullshit?
I mean, even our own inept efforts made by our own version of the Okrana… Sweet babblin’ baby Jesus, but have they gotten us into some very bad things, indeed.
Personally, I have to question the entire premise of the “intelligence agencies” and the glorification thereof that Fleming did with Bond. In my experience, most of the “intelligence” types are not really all that intelligent, and they’re also not very nice people at all. They don’t “make things better”, and instead actively go around subverting and destroying things that used to sort of actually, y’know… Work.
I mean, yeah… The Russian support for the Black Hand was a bit of an intelligence coup, but in the long run? What, pray tell, did Nicholas II gain from assassinating the heir to another imperial throne?
Oh, that’s right: He and his family, murdered in a basement. Somewhat karmic, that…
As Fleming wrote him, Bond was really a throwback to an earlier age of spying. He was an updated version of Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s novels, or Sir Percy Blakeney, aka the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the Baroness Orczy’s.
Bond was a swashbuckling gentleman-adventurer who just happened to work for Her Majesty’s Government. An even closer comparison would be Jim Maitland, created by “Sapper” (also creator of Bulldog Drummond), of whom it was said “Only God and he knew exactly who he worked for and what his job was, and it would be hard to choose which of them it would be harder to get a straight answer from”.
P.J. O’Rourke (the great overlooked satirist of the last half-century) once observed that the British Empire was built by men who knew little more than the history of Ancient Greece and how to properly do Latin declensions. Of course when they “went out to the colonies”, he continued, they found themselves dealing with people who would have been entirely at home in the Trojan War. (No matter where it was actually fought, Turkey or the bloody Gog Magog Hills.)
For dealing with those sorts, that plus a Webley was probably good enough. (If properly backed up by a couple of rifle companies, a Gurkha platoon, and a heavy-weapons section with Maxim guns.)
Bond came from a clear different “tradition” than anything we Yanks would call “spying”. A closer fit to reality would be Len Deighton’s “man from Burnley”, aka Harry Palmer in the Michael Caine movies. And the only one of those I “bought”, based on my old prof’s advice, was the book and movie “Funeral in Berlin”. (He’d been there, and said that Deighton’s version of the local “politics” was about 90% accurate.)
My prof also considered Donald Hamilton’s “Matt Helm” novels to be a better guide to “spying” than Fleming’s. Of course, in real life Hamilton had been a wartime special operations officer, and please note, he did not work for OSS and didn’t think much of “Wild Bill” Donovan.
Spying has always been serious business. It’s also unfortunately a business which tends to attract romanticists. They tend to (1) act like 007, and (2) end up messily dead in very short order.
A truly successful spy is going to be an underhanded bastard who doesn’t give two shits what he has to do to win. A good example was the “Dreyfus affair” in France before World War One. Col. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy,the real Austrian spy in the French command staff, deliberately planted evidence that Maj. Alfred Dreyfus was the spy, knowing it would be believed for the simple reason that Dreyfus was a Jew. That was “good enough” for the French general staff, back then. A really “good” spy would approve of Esterhazy’s trick- that’s how a professional would do it.
So when some “spy ring” is supposedly busted, the first thing you really need to ask is, “Is this The Real Thing or what the GRU used to call ‘wolf meat’?”
Then start looking under the rugs and behind the furniture for who’s really doing the dirty work.
cheers
eon
One of my profs in college was a retired CIA field executive, 1950s-1960s vintage, who came up under the last of the wartime OSS “Jedburghs”. Interestingly, he taught physics (with a Ph.D).
Regarding Fleming, he said that his mentors, some of whom had encountered him during the war, considered him a no-better-than-average British agent, a class they held in low regard. They considered the Russian (Soviet) spies to be the best in the business, and the likes of Richard Sorge (who didn’t get executed by the Japanese- he died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1962), Rudolf Abel (they considered him the most dangerous “spy” in the business back then) and the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) apparat to be proof of this.
Even then, in the mid-1970s, he stated that “spying” in the traditional sense no longer existed. What replaced it was a combination of;
1. Aerial reconnaissance (cf. the U-2 and SR-71), which was superseded by
2. Reconnaissance satellites (which accounted for over half of “overheads” even then)
3. Electronic surveillance (more so than ever once computers, the Internet and cellphones became the thing)
and
4. Plain, old-fashioned betrayal (the John Walker spy ring, etc.)
(4) is still the most dangerous item on the list, in spite of being the oldest type. Satellites can’t read what’s in a file folder, let alone photograph it.
I met that prof again a few years after the Soviet Union went away. He agreed with Tom Clancy that when the dust had settled, the Russians, especially the GRU (not the KGB) had won the Cold War “spy war” hands down, mostly by method (4). He actually knew two of the CIA upper-rankers who turned out to be GRU “moles”, and no, nobody at Langley had any idea.
He also said that what with the resurgence of Islamism after the Cold War ended, what we would be looking at in the future would look more like the colonial wars of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I’d say Afghanistan, Iraq, and etc. has proven him correct, and he said this in 1994.
In short, “espionage” is a gone deal. It’s been replaced by low-intensity warfare. Something else he and Clancy would no doubt have agreed about.
He also said something that’s stuck in my mind ever since. Because history has shown it to be true over and over again.
“There are two kinds of intelligence networks. Those which gather no useful intelligence- and those which operate brothels.”
Except he didn’t use the genteel term “brothels”. He used the one that is associated with the best little one in Texas.
cheers
eon
I still think we ought to just “open source” everything, and let the cards fall where they will.
Secrecy in government is just not compatible with good government. Period.
If you don’t have transparency, then they can get away with anything they like. I think that all those heavily redacted FOIA requests are just prima facie evidence that there are a lot of people working where they came from who deserve investigation, trial, and execution for their crimes against the people of this nation.
If what you’re doing can’t stand the light of day…? You shouldn’t be doing it.
A friend of my mother’s would agree with you, if she were still around. (She passed away in 1966.)
She was State Department issue, and was a court recorder at Nuremberg in 1946-48. As such, she heard a lot of things in the “closed” sessions that were never made public, and some that were never even in the official record.
She told me in 1964, when the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg was re-released to theaters (it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater as opposed to on TV), that if just half the things revealed in those “closed sessions” had been made public, there would have been no arguments about who was hanged, who got a prison sentence, or who was acquitted.
They’d have had to hang every damned one of them. On wire, slowly, no drop, SS style.
To her dying day, she held that it was “unfortunate” that the A-bomb wasn’t ready before April of ’45.
She had no problem with nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki- but she wanted them to do Berlin first.
She also held that enough people on “our side” were complicit in what happened in Germany and etc. that we should have had more than a few “necktie parties” over here, as well.
It probably wasn’t a coincidence that as soon as she got back Stateside after Nuremberg, she not only married a USAAF colonel (who introduced me to building aircraft models at age two)- she also handed in her resignation at State.
Some of the people she wanted “dropped” were some of her own superiors.
clear ether
eon
I spent the last chunk of my military career as an intel NCO for a brigade headquarters. Went to Iraq, worked nights in the Division headquarters.
Did a lot of research taskings for my boss at Brigade, because there wasn’t anything productive to be doing, where I was… And, I had the classified SIPR net, right there in front of me. Not to mention, all the other feeds available, including our major “news organizations”.
Completed that tour with a set of opinions, based on what I observed and experienced, that the vast majority of our “news” and our “intelligence” ought to be investigated, tried for their crimes, and then if found guilty, executed for them. They’re really that bad; you would not believe the crap they’ve all gotten up to that was done in our names, with our monies. You can barely work out the outlines from open-source when you know where to look, but it’s egregious when you see it.
I really do not find it at all tolerable that media like Fleming’s novels and all the movies glorify and adulate these creatures of the night; they’re more criminal than criminals, when you get down to it. I don’t know why any of them can live with themselves, unless they’re the sort of sick sociopaths who don’t possess consciences.
The average citizen with any knowledge of the history of the last few generations would likely lose their minds, if they had access to everything on the “high side” of the intel networks, and full knowledge of what’s been done by all these high-priced “intel agencies”. I ain’t kidding when I tell you that lynch mobs would be forming up, were the full depth of all the malfeasance known.
Eon:
Let’s be fair, there is no comparison between attempting run run agents in a closed society, the USSR, and the open societies of the west. The job was far easier for the KGB.
And in the end? Pointless.
What benefit has accrued to the peoples of the former Soviet Union due to the activities of all their “intelligence agencies”? Are their lives better? Have they suffered fewer casualties in their wars?
These sick games benefit nobody in the world. Encouraging them, glorifying them? A pointless exercise in futility.
I laugh every time I remember that the number-one spy in Saigon wound up in a re-education camp, and eventually became a refugee here in the US, while his spymasters eventually became wealthy through “turning capitalist” in his homeland. Dude got to witness all of his bosses take over and run profitable businesses in South Vietnam that had been owned by the people they fought against as “capitalist exploiters”.
A pox on all their houses.
I know Bond would not have a revolver from this company, but some of the their products do have a safety lever that is in the safe position when “up”. Here is a link to a manual that shows the “hammer block”. I do wonder when and on what make/model this type of safety first appeared.
https://heritagemfg.com/images/manuals/heritage-rough-rider-small-bore-revolver-instruction-manual.pdf
With Fleming not being a gun guy, I doubt he would be cognizant of such a rare variation in design, even if available when Fleming was writing. If there was any sense in what Fleming wrote, I would go with a 1911, with maybe a custom longer barrel. I would also go with Fleming just using “creative license”.
The only problem is that in at least three of the novels (Dr. No, Moonraker, and Live and Let Die, all written by Fleming and not somebody else), it specifically says that Bond’s “car gun” is a Colt .45 caliber revolver.
Since Fleming’s own gun, sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 1971, was a Colt Official Police .38 Special 4″, it’s reasonable to assume that when he said “Colt revolver”, he meant exactly that and knew what he was talking, or rather writing, about.
cheers
eon
Eon:
Since Fleming actually owned a Colt revolver, he must have known they did not have a safety catch. At the time he wrote, “revolver” was often used as a term to cover all handguns, but equally I think he was just not a gun guy and did not know that much about them.
OT but on it in a way…
I’ve just been re-reading George R.R. Martin’s “vampyr” novel, Fevre Dream (1982), which has been called one of the pivotal novels in that genre. It’s about the decades-long “duel” up and down the Mississippi River between vampyr Damon Julian, who wants to create a vampyr “Empire” in America, “good” vampyr Joshua York, who wants to stop Julian, and riverboat captain Abner Marsh, who starts out working for York (not knowing what he is) and ends determined to help him destroy Julian and his “cult”.
What that has to do with this, is this. In 1857, as part of his program of wiping out Julian, Marsh has a special rifle made;
–Fevre Dream, Chapter 22, “Aboard the Steamer Eli Reynolds, Mississippi River, October 1857“.
That date is the sticking point. Even seven or eight years later, after Appomattox, Marsh’s rifle could have been any one of a dozen types, all single-shot breechloaders using metallic cartridges, and at least half of them firing rounds big and powerful enough to qualify as “buffalo” gun rounds.
But what could it have been (historically) in 1857? A Maynard? An early model Ballard? A Bullard? A Berdan I? A Morse? What?
Keep in mind that it was (A) apparently a single-shot and (B) used a big-bore metallic cartridge.
What may be on display here is George R.R.”Game of Thrones” Martin’s lack of knowledge of ordnance more “modern” than swords and crossbows.
I know I’ve come up zero on this one.
Any ideas?
cheers
eon
“(…)But what could it have been (historically) in 1857? A Maynard? An early model Ballard? A Bullard? A Berdan I? A Morse? What?
Keep in mind that it was (A) apparently a single-shot and (B) used a big-bore metallic cartridge.(…)”
There is not indication in blurb shown regarding material from which said cartridges were made.
Considering you need ammunition which was thinkable no later than Oct 1857 I would suggest Lefaucheux system. Really big shotgun ammunition was made around that time, e.g. http://old.municion.org/lefaucheux/8Gauge.htm shows 8 gauge (around 23 mm) made in 1850…1870, so similar ammunition but with single bullet should be within limits of 1857 technology.
Let us also bear in mind that the author you’re highlighting here puts rather more thought and research into his rape scenes than anything else he does with the English language.
There are reasons he’s known as George-Rape-Rape-Martin among some of his multitudinous anti-fanbase. Personally, I think he’s likely to show up on America’s Most Wanted one of these days, with a trail of bodies like Jeffrey Dahmer. I’ve read through a fair chunk of his oeuvre, over the years, and even the crap he did under pen names is easily subjected to a checklist of “Has there been a sex crime, yet? Is there gratuitous cruelty? Self-loathing? Hatred of his fellow man…?”
The one thing about him and his work? I’m pretty sure that if it’s a glimpse into his psyche, then that’s one sick, sick human being.
Wondering what the hell he was writing about when it comes to firearms? LOL… Seriously, my friend: There is no “there” there. Like as not, that made-up rifle is a pastiche of things he read somewhere, thought was cool, and then included because he was certain he’d get away with it.
From what little I’ve read of his tedious “Song of Ice & Fire” books (the basis for “Game of Thrones”) I agree. Only Stephen Donaldson was more into “My Heroes Like To Rape Women” than GRRM is. Hell, the Gor novels treat slave girls with more respect and courtesy.
From what little I’ve read of SOI&F, the only real OPLAN that works there is “Never Piss Off Daenerys Targaryen”. Queen, sorceress, has a chip on her shoulder the size of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the power to back it up.
And oh yes, a TAC composed of dragons. Big, mean dragons.
I kind of got the feeling in FD that GRRM didn’t like much of anybody very much.
if I were filming it, I think I’d give Marsh a Bullard carbine in .55 Bullard Express, just for the sheer looks. Or else an old Navy Arms Rolling Block carbine in .50-70.
Just to see if GRRM even noticed.
cheers
eon
I like to read for entertainment, not squick. So, Mr. Martin is automatically someone I avoid these days.
I have come to believe that there’s a lot to be said for the argument that people are very much “monkey see-monkey do”, and that the follow-on from that is that the entertainment/music you allow in popular culture is going to influence a lot of weak-minded people, one way or another. See “gangsta rap” for examples of this sad fact.
People want gun control to reduce violence, but I think the real goal ought more rightly be “behavior control”, and one of the things that goes into that would be for our society to stop popularizing and glorifying dreck like Game of Thrones. How many crimes can you think of, where some idiot has decided to copycat something in a song, a movie, or a book that they read? How many deaths can we lay at the door of characters like Holden Caulfield?
Frankly, I think you’d probably do rather more good by requiring permits and such for access to some of the nihilistic crap we serve out in job lots across popular culture. Which means I’m obviously some sort of Nazi true believer in mind control, or something…
Dunno. Didn’t hold these opinions when I was younger, but now that I’ve the experiences I have had, the less I’m in support of all the “liberal wisdom” I had pushed down my throat as a child and young adult.
I guess my problem was that when I was little, the only “literature” in the house was a reprehensible piece of granny dreck called “Welded Links”. I could never get through it.
Fortunately, I had the KJB (of course), and the Compton’s Encyclopedia (1926 edition). Most of my reading as a kid, other than SF, was encyclopedias. People kept giving me “out of date” ones. To this day I don’t trust any edition of Britannica after 1969.
As for SF, people kept giving me old paperbacks. Two of the first I read were Second Stage Lensman by E.E. “Doc” Smith and Starship (aka Non-Stop) by Brian Aldiss.
Then I paid 50 cents for a paperback at the drugstore, Three Times Infinity, edited by Leo Margulies. Three novellas;
The Golden Helix- Theodore Sturgeon
Lorelei of the Red Mist- Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett
Destination Moon- Robert Heinlein.
I kind of liked the first one, really liked the second, and flat-out loved the third. Later, when I was in Cub Scouts, they were just a little weirded-out that my woodcarving project was a model of the Luna.
When I got my library card at age six, the first books I checked out were anything by Heinlein, followed by anything by Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury.
My first non-fiction? Firearms Identification, Investigation, and Evidence by Julian S. Hatcher, Frank Jury, and Jac Weller.
Followed by all those Collier’s books by Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun. I still think we could have done it that way.
Music? I’ve always like movie and TV soundtracks. Especially Jerry Goldsmith and Nelson Riddle. As good as Paul Sawtell’s music to “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” was, their version was better. (Look up “Jonah and the Whale suite”.)
I didn’t really care much for the music to Star Trek- until they got Goldsmith to do it.
The only “popular” music I liked? The Ventures. The whole “British invasion” left me uninterested. Their TV shows were a lot better. (I still love Gerry Anderson’s UFO, and The Saint with Roger Moore. They ruined Dr. Who after Sylvester McCoy’s tenure and I haven’t watched it since.)
So yeah, what you read, listen to, etc. affects the way you think. It certainly has for me.
cheers
eon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boothroyd
For a “car gun” a long (10+”) barrel SAA aka “Buntline” would make sense as a compact substitute for a rifle for long range shots. No need for quick draw and close combat utility. Entirely different use case. The large bullet gives acceptable terminal ballistics at long range.
However, Q wouldn’t have had any problem making a “long barrel” Colt of any pattern. Can’t see carrying a 1911 as a “car gun”. Why? In the end it comes down to expected use case.
BTW I’ve not read Fleming in half a century, but I’ve always understood the Beretta was in a small chamois pouch safety pinned in the upper part of his jacket sleeve. Not intended for quick draw. Meant to be relatively easy to not be noticed in a pat down. To be retrieved and palmed when needed.