This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives by G. W. Thomas. In this collection you will find the oddest kinds of detectives from Dr. Drayk in the foggy streets of Victorian London to his more recent colleague Richard Delamare of the Edwardian period. Lastly, there are the Athenodorians of America in 1926 who solve the Case of the Phantom Legion. If you like your Mystery filled with monsters then “The game is afoot!” It just might prove to a giant, clawed foot. Check out the companion volume, Strange Adventures if you’d like more.
Gothic touches in the James Bond series were always obvious to me after seeing Dr. No (1962) with Sean Connery. Remember when Bond kills the spider that is placed in his bedroom. That bit is right out of Sax Rohmer, a Gothic-influenced thriller writer that Fleming would have read in his youth. There is quite a bit of Fu in the James Bond series. For example, the Poison Garden in You Only Live Twice (1964). The garden is a key locale in Shatterhand’s Castle of Death. (There is a real one in the UK: Poison Garden.)
James is sent to kill Dr. Guntram Shatterhand (who turns out to be Blofeld in disguise) but first he must pass through the Garden of Death, a very Pulpy idea for a novel about espionage. Tiger Tanaka wants Bond to “slay the dragon”:
‘…Doctor Shatterhand was prepared to spend no less than one million pounds on establishing an exotic garden or park in this country which he would stock with a priceless collection of rare plants and shrubs from all over the world…This Doctor Shatterhand has filled this famous park of his uniquely with poisonous vegetation, the lakes and streams with poisonous fish, and he has infested the place with snakes, scorpions and poisonous spiders. He and this hideous wife of his are not harmed by these things, because whenever they leave the castle he wears full suits of armour of the seventeenth century, and she wears some other kind of protective clothing. His workers are not harmed because they wear rubber boots up to the knee, and maskos, that is, antiseptic gauze masks such as many people in Japan wear over the mouth and nose to avoid infection or the spreading of infection.’
With such a strange set-up you would expect this garden to play a big part in the story. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Bond sneaks into the garden as a way of working himself into the castle proper. (Where he falls victim to booby-traps not plants.) He witnesses a man who has been blinded by some herbaceous killer who throws himself into a pond filled with piranhas. He watches another man kill himself by throwing himself into a volcano fumerole. Fleming’s descriptions of these deaths are quite shocking for he does them in his usual cool journalistic way.
…The distant crashing in the shrubbery sounded like a wounded animal, but then, down the path, came staggering a man, or what had once been a man. The brilliant moonlight showed a head swollen to the size of a football, and only small slits remained where the eyes and mouth had been. The man moaned softly as he zigzagged along, and Bond could see that his hands were up to his puffed face and that he was trying to prise apart the swollen skin round his eyes so that he could see out. Every now and then he stopped and let out one word in an agonizing howl to the moon. It was not a howl of fear or of pain, but of dreadful supplication…
I guess I was hoping for an actual man-eating plant. Which, of course, there wasn’t. I was even more disappointed when I saw No Time To Die (2021) which co-opted the garden. The Poison Garden of Lyutsifer Safin (played by Rami Malek) is even more underwhelming, being much too small and lacking in piranhas and volcanoes. The actual adaptation of You Only Live Twice (1967) with a screenplay by Roald Dahl, drops the Castle of Death so I guess Cary Joji Fukunaga was welcome to use it. It could have been much more fun.
Conclusion
More interesting to me are some references to Horror writers in You Only Live Twice. Tiger Tanaka refers to Westerners who come to Japan and go native: “…They have for the most part been cranks and scholars, and the European born American Lafcadio Hearn, who became a Japanese citizen, is a very typical example…” Hearn was responsible for the classic Kwaidan (1904), a retelling of classic Japanese ghost stories.
Fleming has heard of some others: “…Tiger was obviously obsessed with this lunatic business, and subtle, authentic glimpses of Japan were coming through the ridiculous, nightmare story with its undertones of Poe, Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce.” All of this shows that Fleming (unless he was cribbing) was fan of ghost stories and Horror fiction. I was surprised he didn’t make any reference to the American Nathaniel Hawthorne who penned “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, December 1844) which has a botanist who makes his daughter poisonous to the touch and imprisons her in a garden. The idea of Blofeld collecting a garden filled with terrors probably starts here even if Fleming never read it.
For more on gardening and Horror, go here.
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
