In a way, Bond provided the era’s equivalent of Bob Hope’s USO tours in our shooting wars. These Bond movies, in fact, were important steam valves for letting off the Cold War tension. In fact, Bond spawned an entire cultural movement – TV shows like “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and the comedy “Get Smart” and “Mission: Impossible” and a mysterious and just plain weird British production, “The Prisoner,” plus a campy, mod Brit landmark, “The Avengers.” Movie Bond inspired songs on the radio and spin-off flics on the silver screen, good and bad, plus endless comic parodies. The film Bond made spying fun and sexy and glamorous. The James Bond of Fleming’s novels and the James Bond of Hollywood stand pretty much on opposite sides of a canyon of plausibility. Bond then magically made the jump from page to movie screen and in that transformation became a wholly new thing in spy culture – the secret agent as action hero. Greene has literary descendants in writers like John LeCarre, whose anti-hero spies imported the despair and treachery of the profession into high literature.īut in the nail-biting 1950s, English writer Ian Fleming introduced the most famous and iconic spy of all, James Bond. Phillips Oppenheim.īy the time of the Cold War, license-to-kill agents had been introduced to fiction by writers like Desmond Cory, while Graham Greene flipped the spy coin to show us the burnt-out cases and ennui on the underside of the spook business. The form goes back as far as stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Rudyard Kipling, and had an early golden age before World War I, with writers like England’s best-selling author of the time, William Le Queux, and another best-seller named E.
Still, something dangerous always clanged away in the foggy night out there somewhere.Ī genre of literature – the spy novel – re-ignited in these years. Americans made a game effort of pretending the world they’d lived in since Shiva Night at Alamogordo was normal. In the 1950s and early 1960s, folks wore their Mad Men gray flannel suits to work, got blotto for the cocktail hour, then now-I-laid-me-down-to-sleep at night trusting God, Joe McCarthy, Joe DiMaggio, Ike and Mamie, JFK, Howdy Doody, and Richard Nixon. A mushroom-shaped sword of Damocles would always hang over us. But something closer to resignation held sway in the Cold War years – five minutes from Doomsday was simply the way the world would always be. Our newest century has been marked by alertness and anger and action. It’s hard to faithfully recall today, even with the shock and shock waves since 9/11, the constant fatalism and paranoia that hung like a pall over America during that long strange trip last century called the Cold War.
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