Foreign Devil: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Richard Hughes, The Far East Correspondent Who Inspired Ian Fleming And John Le Carre

 Back in 2020 I wrote about an interesting man named Richard Hughes (seen in the above photo), a Far East correspondent for the Sunday Times who inspired both Ian Fleming and John le Carre. Both spy thriller writers modeled a character after Hughes. 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:  

The foreign correspondent who inspired Ian Fleming and John le Carre - Washington Times

 

Later this year Casemate will publish Edward Abel Smith’s “Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books.”

 

“James Bond is possibly the most well-known fictional character in history,” Casemate Publishing notes. “What most people don’t know is that almost all of the characters, plots and gadgets come from the real-life experiences of Bond’s creator — Commander Ian Fleming.

 

“In this book, we go through the plots of Fleming’s novels explaining the real-life experiences that inspired them. The reader is taken on a journey through Fleming’s direct involvement in World War II intelligence and how this translated through his typewriter into James Bond’s world, as well as the many other factors of Fleming’s life which were also taken as inspiration.”

 One friend who inspired Fleming was the late Richard Hughes, who was a foreign correspondent for the British Sunday Times. He was the inspiration for the fictional character Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s 1964 James Bond novel “You Only Live Twice.” 

 “He is a giant Australian with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world,” the late Ian Fleming said of Richard Hughes. In 1959, Fleming, then the foreign manager of the Sunday Times, was asked by the newspaper's editor to travel to foreign cities and write about them, as Fleming notes, "through a thriller-writer's eye." The newspaper articles were compiled into a book called "Thrilling Cities" in 1963. 

While visiting Hong Kong and Tokyo, Fleming’s guide was Richard Hughes, whom Fleming called “Our Man in the Orient.”       

 

Ian Fleming later wrote “You Only Live Twice,” which featured a character named Richard Lovelace Henderson. Henderson, based on Hughes, was the British intelligence chief in Japan. He was a big, boisterous and profane Australian who understood the way of the Japanese. Fleming described him as looking like a middle-aged prize-fighter who retired and had taken to the bottle.

Richard Hughes was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1906. He served as a war correspondent in North Africa in WWII and after the war he worked primarily in Japan. In 1956 he filed an exclusive interview in Moscow with the British spies, traitors and defectors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Hughes went on to write several books, including his 1972 autobiography, “Foreign Devil: Thirty Years Reporting in the Far East.”

 

“I had the honor of accompanying my friend, the late Ian Fleming, on his second and last tour of Japan. He was seeking local color, factual detail spiritual inspiration and carnal folklore for his twelfth — and alas, penultimate — James Bond volume, “You Only Live Twice,” Hughes wrote. “I filled the humble role of valet-comrade to Fleming-san. Our odyssey was the most instructive, enjoyable, crowded, leisurely, lively and hilarious trip I ever made in thirteen long and happy years.”

 

Hughes wrote that he discovered what he called “Fleming’s technique of precise and meticulous investigation for the background and action of a James Bond adventure.”

 In the late 1970s, John le Carre visited Hong Kong while doing research for his novel “The Honorable Schoolboy,” the sequel to his novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Mr. le Carre met Richard Hughes, and like Ian Fleming, he based a character on him.

 In the novel, the assembled journalists at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Hong Kong were discussing the closing of the local branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Mr. le Carre wrote that William Craw, like Hughes, was the doyen of Asia’s foreign press corps.

 

“In the tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would walk over; and they were right,” le Carre wrote. “In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place.”

 

Mr. le Carre thanked Richard Hughes in the foreword of the spy novel. “And then there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw.

 

“Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruelest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.”

 

Richard Hughes, who died in 1984 at the age of 77, led a robust and fascinating life, and he fascinated two world-famous thriller writers.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers. 

My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Ben Macintyre On Ian Fleming And James Bond

The Washington Times published my weekly On Crime column on Ben Macintyre’s take on the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming and his iconic character James Bond.

With the release of latest James Bond film “No Time to Die” postponed from April to November due to the COVID-19 outbreak, millions of Bond fans around the world will have to be content to watch the older Bond films, or perhaps they should go back to the original source — Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

They could also read some of the many books written about the popular character and his creator, such as two fine biographies of the late Ian Fleming, John Pearson’s “The Life of Ian Fleming” and Andrew Lycett’s “Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond.”

Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the London Times and the author of “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,” (which I reviewed in these pages) “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” and “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal,” also wrote an interesting book called “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.”

He wrote the book in 2008 as a companion to the Imperial War Museum exhibition that was held to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. The exhibition examined the late thriller writer and his fictional character in historical context. The exhibition also looked at Ian Fleming’s experiences as a naval intelligence officer in World War II and how they informed his plots and characters.

Ben Macintyre was chosen to write the companion book because of his nonfiction books on espionage and his many columns on Ian Fleming and James Bond, including one column that revealed that there was a Nazi plot to rob the Bank of England, which perhaps inspired Ian Fleming to use a similar plot to rob Fort Knox in his great thriller “Goldfinger.”

Ian Fleming admitted his plots in the novels were fantastic (the films much more so), but he also said they were often based on the real world of intelligence.  

I recall Ben Macintyre telling me that his book on Fleming and Bond was a personal investigation of two lives, one real and one fictional.     

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/18/ben-macintyre-on-ian-fleming-and-james-bond/ 

Note: The below photos are of Ben Macintyre, Ian Fleming. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No, and Ian Fleming as a WWII naval intelligence officer:

Operation Underworld: My Washington Times On Crime Column On "Operation Underworld:

 The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up To Win World War II.

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'Operation Underworld' - Washington Times

While serving time in Dannemora State Prison in 1942, New York Cosa Nostra organized crime boss Salvatore Luciano (seen in the above photo), better known among criminals as “Charlie Lucky” and the public as “Lucky” Luciano, was asked to help the U.S. Navy protect New York ports from sabotage from Nazi Germany during World War II. 

New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage from German and Italian agents, and the Navy knew that the Cosa Nostra controlled the unions on the waterfront. 

Matthew Black’s “Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and the U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II,” is an interesting and informative look back at this fascinating alliance between American gangsters and U.S. naval intelligence officers.  

 

I contacted Mr. Black (seen in the bottom photo) and asked him to describe his book.

 

“Operation Underworld is about how the U.S. Navy secured and defended the Port of New York during WWII. Confronted with challenges ranging from spies and saboteurs, to union strikes on the docks, the Navy formed an unprecedented alliance with the mafia to help safeguard ships, war materials, and personnel passing through New York’s harbors. This brought the Navy into a gray area of the law, as the Commander — Charles Radcliffe Haffenden — kept the operation a secret, even as he recruited the top gangster in the country to help — Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano,” Mr. Black said.

 

Here is the rest of the interview:

 

PAUL DAVIS: How did you perform research for the book?

 

Mr. Black: This book was researched and written during the pandemic, and for most writers, that would’ve tanked their research efforts, as libraries and archives were closed all over the country. But the archive I needed to access at the University of Rochester was kind enough to supply digital uploads of everything I requested. Their archive contains the contents of an investigation into Operation Underworld that had been previously classified. It took about a year-and-a-half to upload nearly 3,000 pages of testimony and documents.

Was there anything that you learned that surprised or shocked you?

 

When I first took on this project, I told myself that I’d have to find things that no one else had discovered if I was going to be successful. I’m happy to report: Mission accomplished! Commander Haffenden kept a little black book that contained names of informants and secret agents. For nearly 80 years, several of the agents had yet to be identified, but I was able to not only determine identities, but also find photos of participants such as Agent X and Agent Y. On top of that, I was also able to uncover the entire roster of people who visited Luciano in prison during Operation Underworld. Some of the names I uncovered are shocking, as Operation Underworld granted Luciano access to all of his top capos as he served his term in prison.”

 

How would you describe Salvatore “Charlie Lucky” Luciano?

 

Luciano was tough, calculating, and full of ambition, as he organized crime in America. He ran the mafia like a Fortune 500 company. But when readers meet Luciano in Operation Underworld, he is experiencing the darkest days of his life, serving a 30-50-year sentence in Dannemora prison. As a New York City criminal, his direction had been clear, and his drive unflinching, but in 1942, he was full of doubt, dread, and was losing hope that he would ever get out of prison.

 How would you describe Navy Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden? 

Commander Haffenden (seen in the above photo) was full of ambition, too, and he was an extremely creative thinker. Haffenden was looking to make his mark on history and his legacy with Operation Underworld, and he poured his heart into his efforts. His drive and creativity often took him out of bounds in Navy norms and U.S. law, as he was willing to recruit anyone who could help him protect the Port of New York. This included not only mafia leadership, but other known murderers, and criminals who were under indictment. His unyielding confidence bolstered his unshakeable belief that he could win the war all by himself, and he would stop at nothing to do it.

 

Did organized crime’s involvement with the Navy truly help the war effort?

 

Yes, it most certainly did! The question is: Was it worth the price? Operation Underworld was successful for many reasons that you’ll have to read the book to understand, but the Navy ultimately achieved its objective. But doing so took more than cooperation with the mafia: It took union suppression, beatings of noncombatants, and other violations of worker and human rights.

Mafia members were also successful in setting up a network of informants that helped provide intelligence for the Allied invasion of Sicily. Some of the most important combatants in the first waves that landed on Sicily were naval intelligence officers from New York who used their knowledge of organized crime to contact Sicilian Mafiosi.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.



• • •

Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and the U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II
By Matthew Black
Citadel, Dec. 27, 2022
384 pages, $25.49

O. Henry's Humor, Pathos, Drama And Irony: 'My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On 'O. Henry's 101 Stories'

Back in October of 2021, I wrote about the late, great short story writer O. Henry in my Washington Times On Crime column. 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'O. Henry: 101 Stories' - Washington Times

Every Christmas season, I watch about a dozen or so favorite holiday films. One of them is “O. Henry’s Full House.” The 1952 film offers five adaptations of O. Henry’s great short stories with Christmas themes. The film features fine directors for each story, such as Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King, and notable actors as Charles Laughton, Fred Allen, and Marilyn Monroe. Author John Steinbeck is the film’s narrator. 

The film highlights O. Henry’s humor, drama, pathos and irony. The stories presented in the film are “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Last Leaf,” and my favorite, “The Clarion Call.” The story stars Dale Robinson as a cop who is indebted to a crook portrayed by Richard Widmark.

 

O. Henry, the pen name of William Sidney Porter, has many admirers, like me, and those admirers will enjoy a new collection of his stories published by the Library of America, called “O. Henry: 101 Stories.” 

 

As crime is my primary interest and beat, I particularly love O. Henry’s short stories about crime. There are several crime stories in “O. Henry: 101 Stories,” such as the classic “A Retrieved Reformation,” “After Twenty Years,” and “The Girl and the Graft.” 

 

“O. Henry: 101 Stories” was edited by Ben Yagoda. He noted although that although O. Henry is mostly known for stories with a twist ending, such as “The Gift of the Magi,” the majority of his stories do not have surprise endings and are not sentimental.  

“O. Henry painted an almost ethnographic portrait of the American con man in `The Gentle Grafter,’ and published another sharp and clever collection of linked stories in `Cabbages and Kings,’ about misfits and their misadventures in a fictional Central American `banana republic’ (O. Henry coined the term),” Mr. Yagoda said in an interview.

 

“Born in North Carolina, he spent his twenties and early thirties in Texas, and offered a careful and affectionate depiction of the just-before-the-turn-of the-century American West in such stories as `The Return of the Troubadour.’ A bit post-modernly, he wrote many self-conscious stories about writers and editors,” Mr. Yagoda said.” Perhaps his most characteristic theme was hidden identity and disguise, surely influenced by his own secretiveness about the fact that he was convicted of embezzling funds from the Texas bank where he worked as a teller, spent more than three years in prison, and took great pains to hide this for the rest of his life.”

 

Ben Yagoda said that O. Henry set more than one hundred stories in New York City, his adoptive hometown. “O. Henry’s New York stories present the city with journalistic precision and have a wide geographic, architectural, and social scope, taking place in Coney Island and the Tenderloin and Madison Square, and peopled by tycoons and shop girls, vaudevillian, and bums.”

 

Mr. Yagoda said that O. Henry had a fondness for wayward protagonists, such as outlaws and rogues. “O. Henry was born into a well-to-do family in North Carolina, but after he moved to Texas, he never hobnobbed with bigwigs, even after reaching a high level of literary fame in New York,” Mr. Yagoda said. “His prison experience was important in many ways, including that conversations with other inmates gave him so much material—for the famous safe-cracker short story `A Retrieved Reformation,” for the con-man stories in ‘The Gentle Grafter’ such as `Conscience in Art,” for a fascinating how-to piece called `Robbing a Train,’ for the overlooked gem `After Twenty Years.’”

 

Mr. Yagoda notes that in New York, he gravitated not so much to bigwigs as to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder, “… storekeepers, homeless people (like Soapy in `The Cop and the Anthe’), and, especially, the underpaid, harassed, and put-upon shop girls and young working women, some of whose stories he told in `The Last Leaf,’ `An Unfinished Story” and `The Trimmed Lamp.’”

 

“It’s fascinating that O. Henry arrived in New York in 1902, at the age of 40, having never set foot there previously, and almost immediately adopted it as his second home. Within a year he was setting most of his stories in the city, and in December 1903 was engaged by The Sunday World newspaper to write a short story every week, an arrangement that continued for a remarkable two years,” Mr. Yagoda said.

 

O. Henry died of alcohol-related illness in 1910, and, as Mr. Yagoda points out, O. Henry’s “The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball” is unflinchingly about an alcoholic.

O. Henry continues to be read today as he is entertaining and insightful, and “O.Henry: 101 Stories” offers a fine collection of his work.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction, and thrillers. 

• • •

O. Henry: 101 Stories

O. Henry, Editor Ben Yagoda 

Library of America, $25.49, 840 pages, Published July 13, 2021

A Look Back At The Late, Great Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is one of my favorite crime writers. I've read nearly everything he has written and nearly everything written about him.

Back in 2018, I reviewed The Big Book of the Continental Op for the Washington Times. 

The Big Book of the Continental Op offers a collection of short stories about a nameless private detective who worked for the Continental Detective Agency. The stories were written by a former private detective who became a giant writer of crime fiction – Dashiell Hammett.

 

You can read the review via the below link or the below text:      

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Big Book of the Continental Op' by Dasheill Hammett - Washington Times

Some months ago I visited my daughter and her Air Force husband in California. We visited San Francisco and saw Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown and other well-known attractions. Although I had never been there before, I had a sense of familiarity. This was Dashiell Hammett’s town. I grew up reading Mr. Hammett’s crime stories and San Francisco appeared prominently in many of the stories. 

The late Dashiell Hammett, the author of "The Maltese Falcon," "The Thin Man," and other classic crime novels, began his writing career punching out short stories for Black Mask magazine.

Before he wrote about his more well-known detectives Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, he created a nameless detective who narrated his early short stories. The detective, also called an operative, or Op, worked for the Continental Detective Agency. The Op was a short, fat fellow, unlike Mr. Hammett, who was tall, lean and in his youth looked like a “blonde Satan,” which is how he described Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon.”

 

In “The Big Book of the Continental Op,” fans of crime fiction can read a collection of all of Mr. Hammett’s Op stories. The book was edited by Richard Layman, the president of Bruccoli Clark Layman, producers of the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” and Julie M. Rivett, Mr. Hammett’s granddaughter, who is a Dashiell Hammett scholar and spokesperson for the Hammett estate.

 

“The long-awaited volume you hold in your hands is the first and only collection to assemble every one of Dashiell Hammett’s pioneering Continental Op adventures — twenty-eight stand-alone stories, two novels, and Hammett’s only known unfinished Continental tale.” writes Ms. Rivett in her introduction. “It is truly definitive. And it has been many decades in the making.

 

“At the time of this writing, the first Op story is ninety-four years old and the last one is seventy-nine, not including ‘Three Dimes,’ an undated draft fragment conserved in Hammett’s archives, first published in 2016.

“The gritty sleuth Hammett described as ‘a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit’ has weathered gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, neglect, and more. This volume is testament to his tenacity. He is a survivor, a working-class hero, and a landmark literary creation.”

 

As Ms. Rivett notes, Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton detective and the Continental agency was modeled on Pinkerton. Mr. Hammett worked on cases involving forgeries, bank swindles and safe burglaries, which Ms. Rivett’s states was a solid factual basis for the Op’s fictional stories.

 

She goes on to quote her grandfather: “As much happens to one of my detectives in a page and a half as happened to me in six months when I was a real-life detective.”

 

The Continental Op first appeared in Black Mask magazine in October of 1923 in a story called “Arson Plus.”

 

“Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match,” Mr. Hammett’s “Arson Plus” begins. ‘Fifteen cents straight,’ he said. ‘You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.’

 

“I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five years — ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office — and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack; but it didn’t mean anything. ‘Wrong both times,’ I told him. ‘I get two of them for a quarter; and I’m here to do you a favor instead of asking for one. The company that insured Thornburgh’s house thinks somebody touched it off.’”

 

Despite Dashiell Hammett’s foolish sympathy for the American Communist Party and other character flaws, he was a patriot who served in the U.S. Army in both world wars. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

 

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish,” wrote Raymond Chandler, another late, great crime writer. “He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

 

The Op stories are full of gritty and gruesome characters, plenty of action, snappy dialogue with period slang and fine writing. In “The Big Book of the Continental Op,” new readers can discover a unique voice and Dashiell Hammett aficionados, like myself, can rejoice in rereading all of his Op stories in one fine volume.

 

• Paul Davis is a writer who covers crime, espionage and terrorism.

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Dashiell Hammett, From Street to Paper, via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: From Street To Paper: A Look Back At Dashiell Hammett, Crime Writer & Detective

A Look Back At Mickey Spillane: My Washington Times On Crime Column, Part Two, On 'Spillane: King Of Pulp Fiction'

The Washington Times ran my On Crime column, part two, on the fine biography of the late crime writer Mickey Spillane. 

In last On Crime column, I interviewed Max Allan Collins, the co-author of “Spillane: The King of Pulp Fiction,” a fine biography of the late crime writer Mickey Spillane.

 

Spillane, who died in 2006 at the age of 88, wrote the Mike Hammer crime novels and other crime thrillers. Although he received some of the worst book reviews ever written, his novels were bestsellers. As I noted in my previous column, Spillane was unabashedly conservative and unpretentious. He was also self-deprecating about his work, calling his novels “the chewing gum of American literature.”

 

He later became as famous for mocking his tough-guy image in beer commercials on TV as he was for his novels.

 

The late Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite writers, dismissed Spillane, having his iconic private detective character Philip Marlowe drop what he noted passed for a crime novel in a trash can — as no garbage can was available.

 

Another of my favorite writers, Elmore Leonard, felt differently about Spillane. Writing in Time magazine after Spillane’s death in 2006, Leonard wrote: “I remember when ‘I, The Jury,’ Mickey Spillane‘s first novel, came out in 1947. I was in college and had just come out of the service the summer before. Forceful and full of energy (it had to have been, since he wrote it in nine days), the book knocked me out.

 

“In 1995, as president of the Mystery Writers of America, I had the privilege of honoring Mickey with the title of Grand Master, despite some members’ objections. Whether you liked him or not, he played a key role in the development of crime fiction — I’m not sure phrases like “Hot damn!” were ever popular before he used them, and shooting a girl in the navel in “I, The Jury”? That’s as good as it gets.”

 

I contacted the other co-author of “Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction,” James L. Traylor (seen in the below photo) and asked him why he co-wrote a biography of Mickey Spillane.

 

“The reading public’s knowledge of Spillane — biographical or otherwise — was limited to press releases, the entertaining but not very informative interviews that Mickey freely gave or the Life magazine article dating from 1952. We wanted to tell the most interesting story, which was his life,” Mr. Traylor replied.

 

“Spillane’s influence was generational. He helped shape three generations of mystery and thriller writers. And the influence did not stop with fiction, but crossed over to film and TV, leading to the PI era of the late 1950s, and eventually to the success of Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ and the current TV series incarnation of ‘Reacher,’” Mr. Traylor said. “Spillane was a master of the fast-paced turn-the-page thriller. His narrative thrust forced the reader to continue as quickly as possible to the punch ending, they knew awaited them. All the early paperback novels had this on the cover: ‘A Mike Hammer Thriller.’” 

You can read the rest of the column via the below link: 

Interview with James L. Traylor, co-author of 'Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction' - Washington Times