Tuesday 18 April 2017

More Villains

Searching the blog for "villains," I find an extraordinary number of posts analyzing villains created by Poul Anderson and related authors. I do not want to repeat that analysis. However, it might be of interest to note that I have found an author who, I think, presents the most interesting succession of villains. In Ian Fleming's novels:

Bond discredits Le Chiffre, who is then assassinated by SMERSH;
Beria directs SMERSH;
G succeeds Beria;
Bond kills Mr. Big, Donovan Grant and Goldfinger and captures Rosa Klebb, all of SMERSH;
Bond meanwhile also fights the Russian-backed Nazi, Hugo Drax, and the Spangled Mob - the latter later joins Goldfinger's Hoods' Congress;
while recuperating from the SMERSH attempt to assassinate him, Bond eliminates the independent operator, Dr. No;
when Khruschev disbands the discredited SMERSH, some of its members join SPECTRE;
Bond defeats Largo and Uhlmann of SPECTRE and destroys the organization twice;
Bond kills the founder and director of SPECTRE, Blofeld;
because of the aftermath of his fight with Blofeld, Bond must kill Scaramanga to regain his position in the Secret Service;
the Mafia is represented in the Hoods' Congress, SPECTRE and Scaramanga's Group;
SPECTRE poaches men from the French equivalent of the Mafia, the Unione Corse, which then helps Bond against SPECTRE.

And I did not expect that list to grow so long.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

In my opinion the best of the Bond books were those who featured SMERSH, an all too plausible stand in for the MVD/KGB secret police/intelligence and counter intelligence agencies which waged subversive and intelligence operations against Western nations. I never did find SPECTRE to be really convincing or satisfactory villains. Because private terrorist organizations, no matter how ruthless and determined, simply don't have the RESOURCES available to a government.

I suppose the Muslim Brotherhood could be considered a real world analogy of SPECTRE, altho it focuses partly on trying to seize power in Egypt and setting up or encouraging spin offs sharing its fanatic ideals from doing the same in other mostly Muslim countries. The Muslim Brotherhood also seeks to undermine and subvert non Muslim nations using Marxist Leninist methods (as detailed by Andrew McCarthy in his book THE GRAND JIHAD).

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

I should have eliminate "from" in the first sentence of my second paragraph immediately above.

Sean