Ian Fleming explains how to write a thriller (2019)
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Usually, when people these days want an unambigous good-guys-vs-bad-guys storyline, they have to go back to WWII and the almost-universally despised Nazi regime. This is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any. The Berlin airlift looks good for the West, but the effort to perpetuate French colonialism in Vietnam, not so much. There are at least a dozen similar examples on both sides, from eastern Europe (USSR not looking so good) to Africa and South/Central America (lots of bad behavior by the 'pro-democracy West').
John Le Carre famously portrayed the conflict as two giant gear wheels grinding against each other and destroying the lives of people unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle, and his doubtful self-questioning protagonist, George Smiley, though obviously devoted to the West, carries that theme well. Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" and "The Russia House" are also some of his best works, with similar themes and central characters.
For those who don't know, it's basically accountancy with violence.
Le bureau des légendes is also similar to these three and just slightly worse IMO, and that mostly because of the weaker final season and an accumulation of implausibilities roughly starting in the middle (more series have that than not, sigh). But, for the most part, flawless acting.
The Night Manager is cool, too, with a very satisfying ending.
The Little Drummer Girl is also good, though there is some... uncommon? psychological stuff going on in the book that creaks even more in the series.
Totally.
Is it rude of me to ask if you were born after about 1972 (so less than about 17 at the time the wall came down and the Cold War ended)?
Le Carre's books, even the newer ones, are deeply embedded in a grand battle to the death between superpowers. He didn't bother to explain that in his books because at the time he was writing them his readers (and most of his original film audiences) understood that context and took it for granted. By about the age of 17, most people in those days had a very clear understanding of the stakes involved in conflict or war between super powers, including for example the Cuban Missile crisis when everyone in the world understood that tens of millions of people could be killed in the next 12 hours or so (if you're not personally familiar with the era, the movie Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner is a powerful and engaging view into what was perhaps the height of the Cold War experience).
The work Smiley does might be incredibly important, or it might not be. He himself grapples with that ambiguity (and with his oscillating affiliation with the Circus), which is part of what drives the narrative.
So the answer to your question here is basically like asking "who's the murderer" in an Agatha Christie book.
Sounds like you've seen the Bond movies. Ian Fleming wrote the books. The relationship between those often amounts to "the movie used the book's title, and the name of the book's protagonist".
In Fleming's "Goldfinger", Goldfinger is actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. It was much more realistic to have him instead trying to destroy the gold to increase scarcity.
Say what you want about the film "Live and Let Die" but reading Fleming trying to write "jive" was just embarrassing.
But it wasn't the plots that I thought were worse, but the writing itself.
Seems the film-makers largely agreed that it wasn't worth trying to preserve much from the books.
"Diamonds Are Forever" much better than the movie.
Can you substantiate this claim? Are there actual sources that you can quote that the CIA/MI-5/6 did this?
https://priceonomics.com/how-james-bond-introduced-the-cia-t...
> "The agency’s director at the time, Allen Dulles, loved the Bond novels. Despite the derision most agents held for the series, Moran notes that he had a signed copy of each and every novel. Dulles and Fleming struck up a relationship that at times seemed mutually beneficial. Dulles peppered his public remarks with references to Bond, while Fleming dropped positive mentions of Dulles into the mouths of his characters."
Given the climate of the era, anti-communist blacklisting in Hollywood and so on, it seems fairly obvious that the Bond movies were given a clandestine stamp of approval.
Ends don't justify the means and there were very bad means in both sides. Probably I shouldn't be using past tense either. When there is an existencial threat to a whole country's way of living, I don't think you will find many nice guys in the game, more like those giant wheels.
But I have no uncertainty over who are the very bad guys now and then. At all.
In it, photochemsyn states that you don't know who the good guys were, citing different episodes of the cold war, comparing it to WW2, somehow suggesting that there's a difference because Hitler was clearly bad.
But that's not how I see it. The "good guys" side of WW2 involved the URSS (and only because they were attacked, after breaking Mólotov-Ribbentrop) and at a least morally ambiguous measures like bombing civilians in Germany and Japan. So neither in the goals nor in the means I see so big of a difference.
The point of the comment is that Fleming provided a nicer narrative than Le Carré so it was prefered for political reasons.
Fleming, in the article, pretty much says that he doesn't care much about politics, that he wrote for his own pleasure and the readers'. Saying that spy agencies promoted Fleming's work is unsubstantiated. I've seem weirder, like the CIA supporting abstract expresionists, but anyway it seems more likely that Fleming was successful just because it was entertaining. Le Carré was also very successful, so no need to create a war there.
For instance (first thing off the SERP, didn't dig deeper):
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/26/what-spies-really-think...
If you're totally unfamiliar with le Carré's work, it's OK not to have an opinion about him! He's not, like, part of the Canon.
BTW, I wouldn't need to read Tarantino's book. I watched the original sources at that time, and we had Bond in the same bag as Wang Yu, Trinidad or Bruce Lee, even if we were teens.
So I totally believe that Le Carré had a bad time, but Fleming wasn't really in the same genre to function as an antidote.
Then you don't like questionning your own side or have never talked to an actual person who lived in East Germany or in USSR.
Most of the Americans I have talked to have a very flat and somewhat caricatural view of the eastern block and few are as knowledgeable as they should regarding what the CIA did abroad. As usual, there are nuances.
To be honest, as an European with a fairly unsympathetic view of the USA, the Cold War is very much a conflict between terrible and terrible.
Also you're wrong. I question everything. Of course, you don't need to like my answers. But it doesn't help that you take for granted things that you have no idea about me.
I lived beyond the iron curtain my first 14 years. I remember someone coming from "the west" and bringing me ... a small bag of candy, chewing gum and crap like that.
I rationed myself to one a day and made it last 2 months because it was stuff I had never seen before and it was all much better than whatever locally passed as candy for a 10 year old.
I could also tell you about my parents discretely asking me if i told any jokes about the current regime at school etc.
So please cut that crap.
I've always enjoyed his books[1] as sort of a "Spy thriller done right" antidote to Fleming's "Fantasy Spy Thriller".
[1] I think "Cobra" was the last one I read, and enjoyed it immensely.
"In 1963 MacLean decided to retire from writing, saying he never enjoyed it and only did it to make money."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_MacLean
The retirement didn't take, he ended up producing more.
An action story has three obligatory elements:
- a hero (James Bond)
- a victim (humanity, or maybe a damsel)
- a villain (rotating)
This sounds childishly simple, and it is. But it's also very easy for authors of thrillers to forget the triangle because it's not something you even notice in a well-crafted action story. But all three need to be fleshed out to the extent that the audience cares about them.
The difference between an action story and a thriller is that in a thriller, the victim and hero are the same character. For example, Stephen King's Misery is a thriller because the hero is the victim. Action stories often involve the hero's facing death, but it's done to save the victim.
Something else that's easy to forget is the human value at stake in an action story: life and death. James Bond is always on the edge of being killed, even when in extracurricular persuits. If Bond doesn't succeed, the victim is toast, and the stranger that death is, the better. At the end of the story, there's no doubt which way it went.
This is why good action stories are page-turners, or as Fleming writes:
> "You have to get the reader to turn over the page."
Humans are hardwired to pay attention when death is a possible outcome. That's why rubbernecking is a thing even though people complain about it. It's also one reason cited for the popularity of NASCAR. Death can come at any time even though the action is quite repetitive.
More than that, the scenes in an action story tend to turn on life and death. That's one place where action story authors can get into trouble: writing too many scenes that turn on a value other than life-death, or don't turn on anything. It's shockingly easy to write scenes that offer nothing more than information. One or two of them is all it takes for the reader to yawn and quit.
As Eddie Izzard once memorably pointed out, you get a lot of car chases in movies; very few car chases in books though.
So in movies we see ‘action’ emerge as a distinct genre, with ‘thriller’ left for more Hitchcockian psychological excitement (and then Michael Jackson comes along and confuses everyone by writing a song about horror movies and calling it ‘Thriller’).
But meanwhile in novel-land, spy stories (and detective stories) were always ‘thrillers’ - although maybe that does conjure more Len Deighton or Le Carré than Fleming… Still, from ‘thrillers’ we also get ‘techno thrillers’ which in some ways also build off Bond-like action elements.
I suppose there is the other pulp-ish fiction category of ‘adventure’, which you could also shelve Bond under, alongside war stories and explorers and space captains.
I do not agree with regard to detective stories, because the thriller aspect varies a lot from story to story. There are many examples where the focus is primarily on the who-done-it aspect: the detective arrives at a crime scene and demonstrates his superior ability of deduction.
A more interesting question is what narrative principles are at work when a detective thrillers leans more towards the "whodunnit" side in contrast to when it leans more towards the thriller side of the spectrum. For example, a classic narrative strategy of the "whodunnit" story is further murders during an ongoing investigation, with the victim being the respective current prime suspect. This thriller element increases the urgency of the investigation (thriller aspect) and it at the same time is meant to impress and confront the reader with the challange that the hitherto closest explanation of the murders needs to be replaced by something more sophisticated ("whodunnit" aspect).
> So in movies we see ‘action’ emerge as a distinct genre, with ‘thriller’ left for more Hitchcockian psychological excitement
I would say that e.g. The Da Vinci Code is written with pacing that would make me characterize it as a "thriller". There's no psychological excitement going on there.
I don't think it's true that you don't see car chases, or their equivalent, in books.
And are you characterizing the multi chapter long taxi ride of exposition from the Da Vinci code as a car chase?
You can practically see the action movie that was playing in Dan Brown's head.
It's a profoundly idiotic movie, and if anything Hollywood probably improved on it, but still. Brown's style is cinematic, or at least cinematic-aspirant.
What people get out of reading The Da Vinci Code, or other books in that style, is the same thing they get out of watching thriller movies. So I think it makes sense to call the book a thriller.
> Brown's style is cinematic, or at least cinematic-aspirant.
This is an interesting comment. I didn't get that vibe from Dan Brown. But Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart struck me, while I was reading it, as an effort to put a movie into book form. I was completely unsurprised to later learn he'd shopped out the movie rights.
My spy hero is Bernard Sampson from the Len Deighton Trilogies - starting with Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. He talks about how experienced spies are like frightened old women and avoid risks and it's only the noobs who charge into things bravely. Sampson is the believable opposite of Bond who would obviously not have a long life in reality. Sampson is still extremely brave - just not idiotic - and he's very clever but human so it takes time for him to work out what's going on.
That said, you're watching James Bond wrong. Watch it as a porno. There's a quick excuse for a plot, then you see the "spy" doing all sorts of cool and exotic stuff.
Same thing with movies like top gun, ignore the story and just watch it as an excluse to fly $50M planes near the edge.
Also your attitude to Bond is the reason why they went wrong after Broccoli - you don't understand the romance of them - the action and gadgets are side issues - trimmings but not the meat.
"My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. . . . Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground."
That's what makes action-adventure movies work. It keeps people from realizing that all someone needed to do was some simple thing, instead of the adventurous thing. That Fleming did this in his writing made the move to the screen easier.
"Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next."
Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the info-dump, where there's a long description of the setting. Read anything self-published, and you'll probably find both of these problems. "Show, don't tell".
There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong.
As usual, the rules can be thrown out if you're good at it. A master writes whole chapters of introspection and makes them sublime and compelling. Woolf filled the entire middle of a book with description of an unoccupied house passing the years, featuring very little that could even generously be called action and hardly even any characters to properly introspect despite the whole affair feeling introspective, and it's excellent. An author even slightly below that level of skill and talent creates only trash of one variety or another, should they attempt anything similar.
But the point definitely holds for most writers, and you're exactly right that you can dig through (especially, but not only) self-published works and easily improve most of them several times per chapter by swapping a tell for a show. I suppose one hallmark of what might be called literature—at least, the kind that truly deserves that label, not just any work that aspires to it—is that if you were to edit it in that fashion, instead of getting better, it would get worse.
> There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong.
Same here. See: Tarantino. He interrupted a thrilling, tense narrative to have a distractingly-famous actor who wasn't otherwise in the movie explain, directly to the audience, a bit about the chemistry of film, and somehow it worked. And that's not the only time he's done something like that. Don't do it... except if you can.
Which movie was this?
Throughout I am impressed with the value of professionalism. The most consistent artists seem to see themselves with no more sanctimony than an experienced plumber would.
I believe it's important to make distinct the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Art is inward looking and for the individual to experience uniquely theirs, whereas entertainment is for the masses and outwardly.
Ian Fleming Explains How to Write a Thriller (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25181256 - Nov 2020 (18 comments)
and for that matter, here's Raymond Chandler explaining how to write a murder - from yesterday:
The Simple Art of Murder (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888453 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
We had a few beers after he was finished and he told me some crazy stories... I still need to blog about that adventure; that was a highlight of my early 20's.
I think this is tough to do, but a good idea.
And everyone says how important is the routine.
A lot of Le Carré's work contains the kinds of details Fleming talks about, but the plots are more complex and the pace is slower.
I also personally find that there's an emotional impact from Le Carré that's lacking in Fleming, but perhaps that's just me.
And I think that's the point of Fleming's essay. He wasn't writing to be high art, he was writing to make money. Fleming avoided deep plots and emotional exploration, because those detracted from the guttural response he wanted out of his readers.
I would not say that the point of le Carré is to realistically depict tradecraft. He's not a realism antidote to Ian Fleming. There's not really all that much tradecraft in a Smiley novel; they're much more about human relationships, and about the moral bankruptcy of the Cold War enterprise.
Le Carré is much closer to literary fiction than Fleming, who is a genre hack. Not so close as to be tedious; the books are all fun to read. I'd push back on the idea that le Carré wasn't aiming for art, though.
(If tradecraft is what you're after, by the way, what you really want is Hoffman's "Billion Dollar Spy".)
Obviously, this assumes you've seen the BBC Tinker Tailor with Alec Guinness, the canonical Smiley.
It's like a pitch deck: the point is to keep it simple but show enough ankle that the reader asks for a meeting. But really I should look at each page to see: how do I keep the reader from stopping here?
If I may be forgiven for bringing up chatGPT, that thing LOVES to go on about the state of mind of the protagonist. Its favorite thing ever is to write some variation of the following sentence: "<main character> knew things would be difficult, but he is determined to prevail." I suspect it may have been trained on a corpus containing entirely too much fan-fiction.
"Diamonds Are Forever" is the other one I recommend to people who want to read his best.
The author here mentions that all her sources are online and links to one of them (which is alas a blog post with minimal references)
Would be amazing to confirm whether this source is legitimate, I feel like anything online with hand-wavy citations can just start getting treated as real so long as it's at least 10 years old
holy fucking shit WHAT
The thing I love is the detail he uses. Mundane objects - his watch, his meal, his car are intensely described in a way that adds to the narrative. And Bond is human - he's sometimes petty, vengeful, lustful, lazy, but appealing - our heart feels for him when his wife is killed.
Is that the same for devs?
Why not ALL three?
You're mixing a zero sum concept with the on-topic hypothetical.
I can buy fame with money or convert fame to money. It's not even zero sum.
There are exceptions but it tends to require more than a little bit of luck to hit the zeitgeist in a way to work out. Take for example Brandon Sanderson. Outside SFF I doubt almost anyone has heard of him but dude makes millions.
An exception that proves the rule would be a statement like "Parking permitted between 3-5 PM."
What's he referring to here?
I looked at Wikipedia about Fleming’s schools and Eton and Sandhurst werelisted there… archetypical venues for that ingrained behaviour.
Fleming in that section of the article was highlighting that he personally had some axes to grind but kept them firmly out of his novels.
I don’t think paying for sex quite has the sting
The buggery angle is also viable.
> My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.
This is a bit of a turn-off. Sounds like a modern day conservative whining about not being able to say Merry Christmas and people convincing children to destroy themselves with surgery.
And I say this as someone who loved reading Moonraker...
> I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged, man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.”
...I wondered whether, were he writing in 2022, he would have written "My books are not woke"?