John le Carre's Alec Leamas plays the opposite role from Flandry: sacked from the Secret Service, hating his former superiors and their American allies, unemployed, over-drinking, going to seed, serving three months in prison for assault, having an affair with a Communist Party member - this entire act is designed to persuade his former adversaries in East German Intelligence that they can recruit him. Maybe Flandry and Leamas have more in common than I had thought?
Leamas was played in black and white by Richard Burton. Flandry should be played in full color by two actors, before and after his biosculp. This should happen.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Stirling's Draka were were worse than merely super-Nazis, they were SMART super-Nazis! He created alarmingly convincing villains who didn't make the kind of STUPID mistakes the real Nazis and Communists committed. Or indulge in pointless, counterproductive atrocities. Draka atrocities were coldly rational and practical.
Whoa! So Le Carre's character Alec Leamas really went the extra mile to convince the East German intelligence service it was safe to recruit him.
And I recall Admiral Walton talking to the captain of his flagship near the end of "Tiger By The Tail" how Flandry did exactly that, pretending to be effete and ineffectual while actually working his way to the center of the conspiracy he was investigating. The worst mistake the Scothans made was to kidnap Flandry!
And I only wish SOMEBODY would try his hand at producing a few Flandry movies.
When it came to roughly contemporaneous spy novels, it was the James Bond books and the Blackford Oates stories I read (the latter by William F. Buckley, Jr.).
Sean
Paul and Sean:
The Quiller books by Elleston Trevor (under the name Adam Hall) were quite good spy fiction as well. Bond had the "00" prefix, but the Bureau (no other title) gave Quiller "the 9-suffix" to his name, standing for "reliable under torture."
David,
As I remember it, the Bureau was a private intelligence outfit.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID and Paul!
David: thanks for your interesting comments. Alas, I've never read the Quiller books, but some questions comes to mind. How RELIABLE is crudely physical torture? We see Flandry discussing and dismissing that in Chapter V of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. Also, what I read in volume I of Solzhenitsyn's GULAG ARCHIPELAGO about the REAL Romanian spy he met in a transit camp comes to mind. Unlike the UNTOLD numbers of Russians tortured by the NKVD into falsely confessing to be spies, the Romanian spy was treated with downright deference by the Soviets (you don't torture a real spy, he's a gold mine!). The NKVD tried to persuade him to talk, but he refused into ordered to do so by his own superiors in Romanian Intelligence after King Michael surrendered. I recall how Solzhenitsyn had nothing but respect for this Romanian spy.
We do see Flandry using sensory deprivation to induce, not torture, a prisoner to cooperate in being questioned. Or, in extreme or dire cases, a hypnoprobe would be used.
Paul: recall my comments about SPECTRE, would any kind of private organization have the resources needed to run a truly effective spy agency? Could it stand up to a really powerful nation which decided to crush it? I have my doubts it could!
Sean
Paul:
"...a private intelligence unit."
You mean mercenaries? A non-villainous version of SPECTRE? That doesn't square with anything I ever noticed in the books. The Bureau did its best to remain anonymous ("Nobody exists here because the Bureau itself doesn't exist. We call each other by the names we're given: except to the top echelon people or own names have never been known."), but I took it they were fully a part of HM government. In The Tango Briefing, Quiller's given an atomic bomb to get rid of the evidence; it's kind of improbable that a merc group could detonate one of those without being promptly shut down HARD.
Sean:
Quiller's been dosed with drugs (in the first book) and subjected to dehydration (in the third), and there've probably been other techniques used on occasions that didn't make it into the books. The "9-suffix" indicates that he's been able to hold on to most of the secrets he needed to keep in those incidents. He seems to apply a knowledge of psychology that keeps him in the right mental frame to not give up information under interrogation.
Despite use of the words "under torture," I don't recall anybody seriously using simple pain to question him. Not his pain, anyway; in Tango, there's a passage where he worries whether he'll give in when the support person captured with him is tortured.
"The term in the personnel files is 'an assault on the person designed to extract intelligence'. If you've held out against it they give you the 9 suffix to your code name but it's not exactly an award for meritorious duty or anything: it just means they can give you some of the high-risk jobs in the hope that you'll do the same again, refuse to expose the mission or the cell or the Bureau even though the light blinds and the flesh burns and the scream is private inside your skull, for pride's sake.
"An assault on the person. Your own person. No one else's.... I didn't know how long I'd be able to hold out if they went to work on Diane instead of me."
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