Sniffing Out the Truth
The eclectic breadth of Ian Fleming’s sources may be the Bond series’ secret weapon, and probably accounts for its astonishing longevity.
Fleming wrote about places where he had actually lived or visited and used incidents from his personal life and his career in military intelligence. But he tossed these together with thrilling stories he had enjoyed reading in his youth, antique classics he had to study in school, popular movies he probably took in with a young lady on his arm, and rousing comic books he thumbed through on the sly.
From Russia With Love may be an expertly crafted travelog through a familiar landscape dominated by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and Agatha Christie, but after a while it becomes harder to ignore the succession of scenes from Disney cartoons unspooling quietly in the background.
There’s a beautiful princess, a dragon, an evil crone with poisoned needles, a magic mirror in the Kristal Palas, all classic ingredients from Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.
But does the gypsy camp sequence in FRWL really have anything at all to do with the mice in Cinderella? Well, of course it does. The gypsies and the mice exist to fill out the stories they’re in. Take the mice, Bruno and Lucifer out of Cinderella and a full-length feature would dwindle into a short subject.
Take the gypsy camp sequence out of the film version of From Russia With Love, and the movie is not only too brief, but starts to drag in the middle.
Even I decided that I may have gone too far when I compared Lucifer the cat in Cinderella to the evil Krilencu in FRWL, but studying the villain’s name set in type did send me on a search for anagrams.
Clunkier? Cruel kin? Cruel Nik? Rien luck?
Both Lucifer and Krilencu are chased out of an aperture in a wall and drop to a cobbled street. Krilencu dies from a bullet fired by Kerim. To escape the snarling Bruno, Lucifer plummets to an uncertain fate.
Does that mean Ali Kerim Bey is based on Bruno the faithful hound from Cinderella? Seriously? We’re really getting into the deep weeds now, aren’t we?
The name “Bruno" is said to be derived from the Old High German word for “brown” and means “dark-skinned." It occurred to me that I should at least check Fleming’s novel to see if, somewhere in the narrative the author refers to Ali Kerim Bey’s brown face - not that such a description would provide a definitive answer. But you never know what might pop up.
You never know, indeed. I did not have far to look, and what I found on the page where Bond meets Kerim is the whole reason for writing this blog entry.
Bond looked up into two wide apart, smiling blue eyes in a large smooth brown face with a broken nose. The eyes were watery and veined with red, like the eyes of a hound who lies too often too close to the fire.
When we first meet Bruno in Cinderella he’s asleep on a rug parked in front of the kitchen hearth. Later, in the gypsy camp Kerim confides his suspicions to Bond.
'I have few facts,’ he reached up a big index finger and laid it alongside his nose, ‘but I have this.’ He tapped the side of his nose as if he was patting a dog. ‘But this is a good friend of mine and I trust him.’
Did I mention that Cinderella's Bruno is a bloodhound?
And I had completely forgotten that Ali Kerim Bey’s nickname is “Darko.”