DEATH IN THE FACE: THE YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE FACTOR

(Caution: Mild spoilers ahead for the James Bond novel and film, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.)

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In 1962, a gravely ill Ian Fleming went to Japan to research what would result in his penultimate James Bond novel, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.

Typical of Fleming, he planned for himself a macabre itinerary he hoped would showcase the stranger sides of Japan that might in turn inform his novel. He went in the company of two journalists with Asian expertise (more on them later).

The resulting book is one of the darker, more doom-laden of the James Bond novels, almost gothic in atmosphere, and a world away from the resulting 1967 film adaptation which became the first Bond film to jettison the majority of its Fleming inspiration’s plot.

I made my first acquaintance with YOLT, the novel, in the winter of 1981. My maternal grandfather who turned me on to pulp literature had died the previous October. I inherited his 1965 Ford Galaxy and a bunch of paperbacks including a near complete run of the original Fleming Bonds that I commenced to reading in publication order that fall into winter.

My first acquaintance with James Bond had come in 1967 when my folks took me to a big old downtown Columbus theater to see YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE on first run. Given how young I was, my memories of the film remain spotty, but, perhaps tellingly, I have more memories of that film than anything else that happened to me in that year of my very, very young life.

I remember the great John Barry music and the creepy scene of one space capsule swallowing another, killing a NASA astronaut in the process.

I remember James Bond’s apparent assassination. (This appears to have left a particular mark on me as I have, as a fiction writer, composed several pieces in which protagonists are falsely presumed deceased.)

I remember the ninjas and that sprawling volcano lair and I remember Blofeld’s reveal and his scar, as well as a giant magnet plucking a trailing car of thugs off the road and dropping them into the ocean. I also remember some other scenes, here and there that were quieter…more disturbing (assassination by thread and poison being the most haunting of these.)

When, fourteen years later, I finally began to read the original Fleming novels, I was stunned to see how many of the films and books departed ways from one another. With the exception of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, perhaps no other film/novel in the Bond canon deviated from one another so vastly than YOLT.

Bond encounters "Siamese Vodka"

Parts of the novel have since been cannibalized to greater or lesser degree (probably most notably in SKYFALL, though I hear SPECTRE may also work some of that ground).

It’s too bad we never got a more faithful version of Fleming’s next-to-last Bond, as I have a certain fondness for YOLT and its melancholy air…for its brave ending that Fleming, sadly, would prove too physically weak in delivering more fully upon in its never polished sequel, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN 

GUN.

My new Hector Lassiter novel DEATH IN THE FACE places Lassiter along with journalists Richard Hughes and Tiger Saito on Fleming’s circa sixty-two Japanese tour.

From there, the two authors continue on to 1963 Istanbul where the filming of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (the second Bond film I ever saw) is underway.

The new novel is my love letter, really, to that strange sad man Ian Fleming, and the remarkable vision he gave the world that endures as one of the most lucrative and vital screen franchises in cinema history, as well as to his two great novels I’ve returned to again and again as a reader.

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ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

THE RUNNING KIND: Paperback/eBook

HEAD GAMES: Paperback/eBook

PRINT THE LEGEND: Paperback/eBook/audio

DEATH IN THE FACE: ROBERT SHAW, ACTOR-NOVELIST

Robert Shaw: actor…novelist.

ROBERT SHAW, as RED GRANT

Chances are, you probably didn’t know about that last distinction. And more is the pity.

Shaw was quite an accomplished author. Indeed: one senses Robert Archibald Shaw was probably far more proud of his novels than his many film roles.

Pride in his books over his films is certainly the way I choose to depict Mr. Shaw in my new novel.

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Shaw is one of several authors who drive the plot of my new, James-Bond-inflected Hector Lassiter novel, DEATH IN THE FACE, featuring my fictional novelist Mr. Lassiter, 007 creator Ian Fleming, Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima and Robert Shaw.
 

Ian Fleming, actor Pedro Armendariz
and Robert Shaw in Istanbul.

Shaw finds his way into this novel because he also bleached his hair, built up his bulk, and played the chilling, would-be Bond assassin Red Grant in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

ROBERT SHAW with LOTTA LENYA
(AKA, ROSA KLEBB)

(In the original Fleming novel, Grant was in thrall to SMERSH, the infamous Russian spy agency; in the film, Donovan “Red” Grant is an agent of SPECTRE.)

As a child, I first watched all of the original Connery 007 films with my father, usually during ABC Movie Of-The-Week special showings.

(My mother, father and I managed to see YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE in a grand old Columbus, Ohio downtown theater when the film was new. After, we went to a nearby downtown department story where I got my own vintage Corgi Aston Martin with patented ejector seat).

Shaw, Connery, and the run-up
to a classic fight scene.

I remember my father, with real relish, preparing me for the climactic and particularly vicious fight scene between Shaw and Sean Connery: a filmic hand-to-hand brawl matched only in his mind by the train fight between Lee Marvin and railroad bull Ernest Borgnine in EMPEROR OF THE NORTH.

(Oddly enough, current Bond Daniel Craig would engage in a similar, train-top melee in SKYFALL, even resorting to the use of chains, as in EON.)

The battle to the death between Grant and Bond in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE is, indeed, one of cinema’s greatest and most visceral fight scenes.

Years later, and with piercing poignancy, Robert Shaw’s Sheriff of Nottingham would square off a last time against Sean Connery’s Robin Hood for another nasty— and far more bloody and bittersweet—mano-a-mano in Richard Lester’s ROBIN AND MARIAN (1976).

In addition to an epic turn as the Irish gangster mark in THE STING (1974), Shaw is probably best remembered for his portrayal of would-be shark hunter Bartholomew M. Quint in JAWS.

A last bit of trivia: They say Shaw, the accomplished novelist, proved his chops as a writer yet again by deftly editing down many pages of his Quint monologue to the now-classic “Indianapolis Speech” that centers the film’s final third. (Shaw purportedly cut the speech down from John Milius’ original ten-page version to about five pages.)

In one of his last roles, Shaw easily swamped Harrison Ford in the charisma-stakes in FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE, playing a character with the last name (a Bondian premonition?) of “Mallory.”

Shaw died of a heart attack at the rather young age of fifty-one.

Oddly enough, just like Ian Fleming, Shaw’s last good hours were spent at a golf club. (My take-away for aging authors: Eschew golf and country clubs, like the goddamn plague.)

To explore more about Robert Shaw, author, check out this very fine piece.

NEXT UP: YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, AND ITS ROLE IN DEATH IN THE FACE

DEATH IN THE FACE

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DEATH IN THE FACE: THE STRANGE LIFE & DEATH OF YUKIO MISHIMA

Writers who become bound up in quixotic, violent causes: Sadly, you could write a book.

1823: The poet Lord Gordon George Byron becomes swept up in the Greek independence movement. He chips in cash, various other resources, and, eventually, plans to personally lead a military action. Byron falls ill, undergoes a course of “therapeutic bleeding” (from which he probably contracts sepsis) and dies in Greece in 1824.

1939-45?: Ernest Hemingway ran his own spy/anti-German submarine contingent called “The Crook Factory,” then later operated a guerilla unit while serving as a WWII correspondent in the European Theater. Hem ended up facing a formal hearing for his actions (see my Hector Lassiter novel, ROLL THE CREDITS for more on that latter).

A young Yukio Mishima.

1970: On November 24, Japanese novelist-playwright Yukio Mishima, 45, stages a coup attempt that ends in his committing seppuku (ritual disembowelment) and then beheading at the hands of one of his four co-conspirators.

———
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Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka) was a gifted novelist and one of Japan’s great literary figures. He was a true renaissance man who composed nearly three dozen novels, nearly as many books of essays, more than two dozen short story collections, plays, screenplays and who dabbled in acting.

Mishima's poorly received speech delivered
minutes before his ritual suicide.

He was considered a likely contender for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Mishima was increasingly appalled by Japan’s post-war Westernization and turned further and further toward martial arts studies and an embracement of Samurai codes of life and personal conduct. He practiced body-building and kendo, and, in 1968, he formed is own private militia.

His death came almost immediately upon completion of his novel, THE DECAY OF THE ANGEL, the final volume of his SEA OF FERTILITY tetralogy that many regard as Mishima’s masterwork.

Yukio Mishima shares a lunch with my fictional novelist, Hector Lassiter, in DEATH IN THE FACE, the next-to-last novel in the Lassiter series.

Lassiter is in Japan, dogging the steps of his fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming, who has come to gather materials for his James Bond novel YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.

Over a meal and drinks, Mishima shares his horror at Japan’s post-war condition to Hector—a deep and troubling concern shared by many of the villains in my novel, including an all-too-real clandestine ultranationalist cabal called the Black Dragon Society. (The group was actually operating in 1940s America, in the San Joaquin Valley of all places, and within Japanese internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor.)

In sum, Mishima is yet another in a long-line of gifted, self-destructive creative artists who poses a cautionary, unsettling example to novelist Hector Lassiter who is now himself becoming a “lion in winter”.

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NEXT TIME: Robert Shaw, actor and novelist, and his role in DEATH IN THE FACE.

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DEATH IN THE FACE: TRAVELS WITH IAN FLEMING

My new novel DEATH IN THE FACE centers on James Bond creator Ian Fleming and two 007-driven excursions he made late in life while a very unwell man.

James Bond sometimes smoked dozens of cigarettes daily in
the original novels. Ian Fleming seemed driven to match
his character's smoking habits.

By the early 1960s, Ian Fleming was dying from heart disease—a condition exacerbated by smoking impossible numbers of cigarettes, hard drinking, rich foods (an ungovernable love for scrambled eggs, particularly) and a deeply unhappy personal life.

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Like fellow macho author Ernest Hemingway, Fleming was a man who seemed driven to live the larger-than-life escapades he put down on paper.

In my series of novels about Hector Lassiter (DEATH IN THE FACE is the 9^th in the 10-novel series), novelist-screenwriter Hector Lassiter is often dubbed “The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

While the Lassiter series make it clear there is harrowing truth in this assessment, Hector is far more circumspect than Hemingway or Fleming. In the end, as a man and an artist, Hector is a survivor, and his groping towards continued existence is his larger character arc that binds and drives the series to its conclusion.

Hemingway has been an on-the-page character, sometimes even a kind of “co-star,” in four of the Lassiter novels. Actor-director Orson Welles has also appeared in several of the novels in a similar context.

For me, Fleming represents the third and final of Lassiter’s major artist companions—three tragic men whose self-destructiveness point a light for Hector toward his own salvation. 

Ian Fleming has been name-checked in previous Lassiter novels; his role in Hector’s later life deliberately foreshadowed: With DEATH IN THE FACE, he at last arrives to the Lassiter series in person.

My new novel is patterned to replicate the kind of structure Fleming himself often used in his James Bond novels. I’ve tried to evoke some of Fleming’s narrative voice while remaining true to the tone of the Lassiter novels that have come before. 

Ian Fleming in Beppu, Japan. That city, and this
statue, figure in DEATH IN THE FACE.

DEATH opens with Hector accompanying Fleming on a research trip across Japan for his penultimate Bond novel YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. The second half of DIF takes Ian and Hector to Istanbul, to witness some of the filming of the second Bond film, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

In a passage cut from the final version of PRINT THE LEGEND, I referenced an anecdote repeated in several Fleming biographies and articles about the way in which a dying Fleming bonded, so to speak, with actor Pedro Armendariz, the fine actor who plays Bond’s companion Kerim Bey in FRWL. (He also played another real life character central to my series, one Pancho Villa.)

Pedro Armendariz and Ian Fleming in Istanbul
during the filming of
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

Early in production in Turkey, it was learned Armendariz had terminal cancer. Heroic efforts were made to rush filming of his scenes so he could complete his role and leave his family some money.

During their mutual stay in Istanbul, Fleming and Armendariz purportedly talked at length about Ernest Hemingway and his then-still-relatively recent suicide by shotgun.

Upon returning to North America, Armendariz smuggled a firearm into the hospital that he used to end his own life.

For his part, Fleming continued to kill himself just as surely, but more slowly, with forbidden cigarettes and liquor.

At the end of the novel (spoiler alert!) YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, Bond is presumed dead and his obituary printed. It incorporates a quote from Jack London that surely spoke to Ian Fleming’s own sense of fatalistic bravado:

“I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than that it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to LIVE.  I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.  I shall use my time.”

My novel of Ian Fleming and Hector Lassiter and their last journey together as authors, former spies and friends takes its cue from a quote Fleming placed at the beginning of his Japan-centric Bond novel:

“You only live twice: Once when you are born

And once when you look death in the face”

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Next time: Author Yukio Mishima, and his role in DEATH IN THE FACE.