The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [173]
It is interesting to note that Blofeld assumed his primacy as Bond’s number-one enemy only in the movie canon; Fleming originally invented him while working on the screenplay and novel of Thunderball, and used him subsequently in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. (Prior to these later books, Bond typically tussled with less corporate enemies—Soviet stooges, unregenerate Nazis, and psychotic gangsters.) Blofeld was born out of mere corporate expediency. Rather than demonize the Soviets and reduce their potential audience, the producers of the film From Russia with Love appropriated SPECTRE as the adversarial organization. With the success of Thunderball, the fourth of the films, Blofeld moved front and center, and acquired a life of his own that far exceeded his prominence in the novels. Arguably, Fleming’s death in 1964 freed up the movie series to diverge from their original author’s plans; and so Blofeld may be seen as a demon of necessity, conjured up from the vasty deep in order to provide Bond with a worthy adversary.
’Twas not always so. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time that the British spy thriller was gradually cohering out of the mists of the penny dreadful and the literature of suspense (via the works of John Buchan and Erskine Childers—not to mention the tangential contributions of Arthur Conan Doyle, by way of Sherlock Holmes), there was no dualistic vision of the great champion confronting the villainous heart of evil. There was no mighty champion: we were on our own against the masters of night and mist, the great and terrible supercriminals. Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis—the Napoleon of Crime—was but one of these: Fantômas, the 1911 creation of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, is another. The emperor of crime, Fantômas was a master of disguise and an agent of chaos (not to mention standing astride Paris in black mask, top hat and tails in the posters for the 1913 movie of the same name: an icon of decadent wealth and criminal chaos). Nor was he alone. Guy Boothby’s 1890s supervillain Dr. Nikola fits the bill, too, right down to the fluffy lap-cat and the fiendish plans. But perhaps the root of Bond’s nemesis can be found in his full-fledged form somewhat later, and somewhat further to the east—in the guise of Dr. Mabuse.
Dr. Mabuse is an archetype and a runaway media success in his own right, famous from five novels and twelve movies. The Doctor was created by author Norbert Jacques, and was developed into one of the most chilling creations of the silent era in 1922 by no less a director than Fritz Lang. Mabuse is a name, but one that nobody in their right mind speaks aloud. He’s a master of disguise, naturally, and a rich, well-connected socialite and gambler. (Some social context: gambling at the high-stakes table is not so much an innocuous recreation as an obscenity, in a decade of hyper-inflation and starvation, with crippled war veterans dying of cold on the street corners, as was the case in Weimar Germany.) Mabuse has his fingers in every pie, by way of a syndicate so shadowy and criminal that nobody knows its extent; he’s a spider, but the web he weaves is so broad that it looks like the whole of reality to the flies trapped within. He is (in some of the stories) a psychiatrist, skilled in manipulation,