armed and dangerous: a writer's guide to weapons by michael newton

Author:michael newton [newton, michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: weapons, arms, writing novels, writing nonfiction, Writing
Publisher: The Write Thought
Published: 2012-05-06T22:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Licensed to Kill

Unlike their counterparts in fiction, real-life spies are generally drab and nondescript. Their work consists primarily of tedious pursuits like tapping phones or watching who goes in and out of foreign embassies, accepting envelopes from paid informers in a park and filing long reports in triplicate. You’ll seldom find them skiing down a mountainside in Switzerland with killers in pursuit, or diving in the blue Caribbean for stolen nukes. And yet.…

For all the boredom and the busy work involved in gathering intelligence, there are occasions when a spy must travel armed, and many governments—our own included—have resorted to the politics of murder when the cause was deemed sufficient. Authors in the field of cloak-and-dagger, therefore, need to know how agents arm themselves on “black” assignments, when they have a reason to suspect that “wet work” may be imminent.

The Spy in Fiction

Secret agents are associated in the public mind with lethal gadgetry—machine guns popping out of headlights on a flashy car, knives springing from the toes of shoes, a wristwatch with a built-in wire garrote—that generally bears no relation to the working tools of real-life spies. There are exotic weapons out there, and we’ll take a look at several in a moment, but an agent’s priorities are normally concealing and transmitting information, so the bulk of gimmicky inventions will consist of hiding places (hollow books or coins, and so forth) and transmitters (compact radios and tape recorders, “cut-out” phone lines and the like). Where weapons are concerned, simplicity is often favored over space-age sound and fury.

I think it’s safe to say the James Bond’s weaponry has been more thoroughly examined and dissected by the media—through novels, films, and “scholarly” analyses of same—than that of any other spy in modern fiction. (In the films produced with Roger Moore, Bond’s notoriety was such that an opponent once remarked, “Your reputation precedes you”! How’s that for secrecy?) I don’t intend to talk about the movies, that deviate from the novels so dramatically that some wind up in outer space, but it is helpful to examine firearms used by Bond in thirty years of service to the queen.

In Ian Fleming’s first five novels, published between 1953 and 1959, Bond’s main weapon is a .25-caliber Beretta automatic pistol with “skeleton grip,” that is, with the grip plates removed to reduce extra bulge in a holster. His back-up piece for serious work is an unspecified Colt .45 revolver, probably the M1917 New Service model [discussed in Chapter 4]. From Dr. No until the end of Fleming’s lifetime, Bond abandoned the Beretta-which had nearly killed him, snagging in a quick-draw situation—for the larger Walther PPK [see Chapter 5]. The Colt was likewise cast aside in favor of Smith and Wesson’s .38-caliber Centennial Airweight, a five-shot “hammerless” ancestor of the modern Airweight revolvers [Chapter 6]. The combination served Bond well in seven more novels and eight short stories, although the long-barreled Colt crops up again in Goldfinger, concealed in a trick compartment beneath the seat of 007’s car.

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