5 ms·
The author of this review seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and Fleming's "unremarkable career" is much more remarkable than the career of the average perso
by jeffreyrogers 5y ago
The author of this review seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and Fleming's "unremarkable career" is much more remarkable than the career of the average person working in intelligence today.
So much of the review is projecting today's values into the past that it is hard to tell how much is a fair assessment and how much is virtue signaling.
- josephorjoe 5y agoyeah, really kind of a weird attempt to put down a long dead author for having some luck with birth and some success with writing spy novels (and essentially defining the genre). i guess it is an attempt to generate clicks by fabricating a controversy? it would be one thing if it were a serious attempt to critique the values espoused by bond/fleming, but it is just a bland flattening of the truth with some uninspired spitting on it.
- rbanffy 5y agoWell… as anyone in intelligence will point out, the novels, while genre-defining, are ludicrously unrealistic. In fact, being unremarkable is the hallmark of excellence in intelligence ops, therefore, I assume Mr Fleming was very good at his day job.
- smackeyacky 5y agoGenre defining for action spy novels (and untold numbers of big budget movie scripts). More interestingly, realistic novels like those of John le Carre probably wouldn't have happened without Fleming creating the market for them.
- JJMcJ 5y agoOnly the first, Casino Royale, is close to realistic. Some of the short stories also seem realistic, as does The Spy Who Loved Me. The later books seem more fanciful.
- nanis 5y agoCase in point: > Inspired by a detective novel, Basil Thomson’s The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, Fleming is credited with proposing Operation Mincemeat, in which Naval Intelligence attached an identikit of fake documents to a dead body and released it from a submarine into Spanish waters; the Spanish, as expected, passed on the false information to the Germans, causing them to leave Sicily unprotected against Allied invasion. I did not know this really important operation[1] was Ian Fleming's brainchild. Just this one is enough success. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
- Animats 5y agoFleming's "unremarkable career" is much more remarkable than the career of the average person working in intelligence today. His career was during a war when large numbers of people were doing rather heroic things. He beats Hemingway, whose major achievement of WWII was liberating the bar of the Ritz in Paris.
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoI think he would compare favorably even to his contemporaries. There must've been thousands of people in naval intelligence, many of whose efforts were not notable enough to be remembered today, unlike Fleming's.
- phaemon 5y agoYou can learn what Hemingway actually did in WWI, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#World_War_I
- jacquesm 5y agoIt was certainly more remarkable than the authors'.