Peter Fleming

I was at a conference last week where I crossed paths with Evan Osnos. Somehow it emerged that we are both hopeless Peter Fleming fanboys. Peter Fleming was the older brother of Ian, the creator of James Bond, and so Peter is little known by comparison. But I think he was much the better writer. He belongs in my personal Mount Rushmore of English prose stylists along with Gibbon, Dickens, and Churchill. If you are looking for good introductions to his work, I’d suggest starting with Brazilian Adventure, a personal account of mad foray into the rain forest. Close behind that would be The Siege at Peking and Operation Sea Lion, historical accounts of the Boxer Rebellion and Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain respectively.

I’ve been mentioning that Owen Crisp-Upjohn, the main character in D, is inspired by Peter Fleming. This topic of “inspiration” is apt to spawn all sort of hobgoblins in people’s minds, so a few words about that. It can mean a lot of things. In this case it worked for me as what a mathematician would call an existence proof. If you can demonstrate that something exists, or could exist, then you’ve learned something that you can build on. Just as importantly, for a novelist: no one can criticize you for being unrealistic if you can show that such a person really walked the earth. Last weekend I was on a panel at Comic Con with Emery Robin, who has written a science fictional take on Cleopatra. The story of Cleopatra is so remarkable that if one were to write it as fiction it would be considered too farfetched to allow for the suspension of disbelief. But she existed, and she did the things she did, and so no one can gainsay Emery for telling her own version of that story.

Owen Crisp-Upjohn, the point of view character in D, has a number of traits in common with Peter Fleming. I won’t lengthen this post by ticking down the whole list. The most important of these is a witty and droll prose style that’s clearly aimed at a well-educated, high-social-status readership back home—the sort of chap who can be relied upon to get the joke. I have tried to emulate that in the first part of the book, set in the early 1930s. As the story goes on, however, things become more serious, and Owen’s tone shifts accordingly.

There’s a connection in this to a Substack post I made last year called which centered on a short passage from Dickens. The gist of it is that complex scenes that would take pages to describe in detail can be compressed into just a few words by the likes of a Dickens or a Peter Fleming. They’re relying on the reader to unpack the scene in their minds. It’s not merely a stylistic choice; the joke wouldn’t be funny, the sadness wouldn’t pierce the reader’s heart, if the description were longer.

There’s a catch, though, which is that the writer is making assumptions about the reader’s ability to decode such pithy sentences. Peter Fleming, educated at Eton and Oxford, and writing for a like-minded audience, could get away with it. Flipping through Brazilian Adventure, I see examples on every page:

We were six days in Rio, having what is known as Trouble With the Customs. A certain amount of this was inevitable, for no attempt had been made in London to get a special permit for our elaborate and heavy armament. We easily managed, however, to make matters worse than they need have been.

Once you know to look for this kind of thing, you see it everywhere in literature. Perhaps the ballsiest example is this bit from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park:

Their eager affection in meeting, their exquisite delight in being together, their hours of happy mirth and moments of serious conference may be imagined…

Only Austen could get away with just telling the reader to imagine a bunch of stuff. But she knows that her readership will be up to the task.

Anyway, my feeble efforts to emulate Peter Fleming’s prose style in the fictional voice of Owen Crisp-Upjohn are intended to get the reader into that frame of mind—a way of setting the scene and establishing the ambience of the 1930s. That’s what “inspiration” means in this particular case.

Jane Austen is the best novelist, but that’s because of characterization and wit—what she’s saying as opposed to how she’s saying it.