Tuesday 13 June 2017

Secret Agents on Holiday

What do fictional secret agents do on their holidays?

On different occasions, Dominic Flandry:

plans to celebrate his twenty fifth birth-week in the company of three young women, starting with a well-planned menu at Everest House (on Mount Everest?);

spends three months at a perpetual banquet and fights a duel;

spends a month with his son, hiking in the Great Rift on Mars, gambling in a miners' dive in Low Venusberg, flying through the rings of Saturn and dining on Iapetus with two expensive and expert women.

James Bond swims in the Seychelles where he harpoons a sting-ray and, in another story, really just a magazine advertisement, we are told where 007 eats, drinks, sleeps etc in New York.

Fleming wrote a non-Secret Service short story about Bond's experience in the Seychelles and we wish that Anderson had written more about Flandry's vacations.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

At least in A STONE IN HEAVEN we see Dominic Flandry's apartment in Archopolis. And he also owned a cabin and a few hectares of land in the High Sierra of North America, when he wanted to really take a vacation in privacy.

Sean