It's sixty years since Ian Fleming published the first James Bond novel Casino Royale. He went on to write twelve novels about Bond, and various short stories, and of course since the early sixties the Bond movies have become one of the biggest movie franchises of all.
Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig and all the various actors who have played Bond will be best remembered for those roles, and many secondary players have made indelible marks on the cultural memory of three generations. Who can forget Lotte Lenya as 'Rosa Klebb' in From Russia With Love? But who remembers Lenya for her superb theatre renditions of the songs of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil, the work for which she ought to be best remembered?
James Bond has cast a long shadow.
There is something about Bond that makes him irresistible. In the original novels he is a heavy smoking, hard drinking mysogynist who has little heart. In the movies he is an indefatigable ladies man, cool, calculated, but impossible to ignore. Famously, Fleming wanted him to be dull, hard and fundamentally uninteresting as a character, a tool of government to whom things happened but of whom there was little interesting to be said.
How does a writer looking to recreate the world of the British Secret Service in the new millennium draw a character like Bond now? Elaine Dex's Marcus Tyler is a government agent hewn from much the same wood as the James Bond of the movies. Tyler is uncompromising, unfailingly attractive to women, handsome, hard-hearted and driven by the moral code of government that has created the role he plays. If he has to kill, it is easily achieved. If he has to love it is against his better instincts. He likes fast cars, luxury, and solitude. Having had his heart broken once, it is too much to expect of him to give it away easily a second time.
But Tyler is different to Bond. Unlike the original 007 of Fleming's books, Tyler does have a heart, albeit hidden. While his mission to recover data hacked from a CIA database by unscrupulous businessmen necessitates a tough approach to 'business', in meeting the wife of one of those businessmen and learning about the abuse she has suffered at her husband's hand, he becomes motivated as much by a sympathy for her as by the instructions coming from Davenport, his immediate boss.
