Residing as I do in the greater Boston area, I’m interested in the occasions when Ian Fleming brings James Bond close to my home. Unfortunately, in the novels at least, the only glimpse Bond gets of Boston is from the air. He does venture into New England, going into Vermont for the events of For Your Eyes Only, but for that trek, he flies into Montreal, not Boston.
Boston is city on the east coast of the United States, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The city is one of the oldest (settled in 1630) in America and the site of much rich history – including some of the earliest rebellions of the colonists against the British Empire. (We’re friends now though, right?) Fleming mentions the city in three of the novels.
In Live and Let Die the city is used as part of Bond’s cover while on assignment:
He was given a military haircut and was told that he was a New Englander from Boston and that he was on holiday from his job with the London office of the Guaranty Trust Company.
In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond gets a brief view of the city as he flies into New York.
And then there were three hours when the plane hung dead-steady in the middle of the world, and only the patches of bright sunshine swaying slowly a few inches up and down the walls of the cabin gave a sense of motion. But at last there was the great sprawl of Boston below them, and then the bold pattern of a clover-leaf on the New Jersey Turnpike, and Bond’s ears began to block with the slow descent towards the pall of haze that was the suburbs of New York.
Finally, in Thunderball the city is mentioned simply as a geographical marker:
Bond said, “Did the American D.E.W. line pick it up—their Defense Early Warning system?”
“There’s a query on that. The only grain of evidence we’ve got. Apparently about five hundred miles east of Boston there was some evidence that a plane had peeled off the inward route to Idlewild and turned south. But that’s another big traffic lane—for the northern traffic from Montreal and Gander down to Bermuda and the Bahamas and South America. So these D.E.W. operators just put it down as a B.O.A.C. or Trans-Canada plane.”
Actually it was the DISTANT Early Warning system, but I’ll give Mr Fleming the benefit of the doubt and say he was being dramatic. Also, the hijacker of the Vindicator, Giuseppe Petacchi notes his location in relation to Boston while delivering the plane to S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
The coastline of America should be on the screen by now. He got up and had a look. Yes, there, 500 miles away, was the coastline map already in high definition, the bulge that was Boston, and the silvery creek of the Hudson River.
And that’s it. I’m just glad Boston was on Fleming’s radar – no pun intended – while he was writing the Bond novels.
