Literary Locations #6: Aldwych Tube Station

Former entrances on

The Strand and Surrey Street

London

WC2R 

 

“When the lift goes up and the train leaves,  Aldwych station is as deserted as an ancient mine. You can hear the drip of water and the beat of your heart.”

Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household (Chatto & Windus, 1939) 

 

Upon returning to England the anonymous protagonist of Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller pays a visit to his solicitor Saul in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the Holborn area of London. However, the building is being watched by agents of the unspecified European power (which we assume from its description to be Nazi Germany) from whose clutches he has just escaped. 

 

Upon entering the underground station at Holborn, he discovers he is being followed by his chief pursuer Major Quive-Smith as well as another agent who had previously been spotted feeding the birds outside Saul’s offices. The dramatic plot sequence that follows uses the layout of the tube network as its basis. 

 

At the time Household wrote Rogue Male, a short branch of the Piccadilly line ran from Holborn to its terminus at Aldwych. After attempting to throw off his pursuers inside Holborn station, Household’s hero boards the Aldwych train only to discover that a third agent wearing a black hat and blue flannel suit is waiting for him. Whilst the train is still in the station he then lures “Black Hat” into the tunnel where the agent is electrocuted by the live rail. Now wanted for murder, he is propelled to put the next part of his escape plan into operation and go to ground in rural Dorset.


Entrance to the former Aldwych Station on Surrey Street

Aldwych station was opened as Strand in 1907 and, as Household describes, was served by a train that shuttled back and forth from Holborn. The year after Rogue Male was published the station was temporarily closed and served as an air raid shelter during the war, with its tunnels providing safe storage for items from the British Museum including the Elgin marbles. Although the branch line was the subject of several extension plans, none of these came to fruition and the station was permanently shut in 1994 due to low passenger numbers. The former entrances, which are Grade II listed, are still visible on The Strand and Surrey Street, with the Strand entrance still bearing the station’s original name. 

 

Rating (out of 10): 4

Literary References in Ian Fleming’s James Bond Novels

For most, especially those familiar with him from his screen appearances, James Bond is a man of action – someone who acts rather than thinks. Indeed, Terence Young, who directed three of the first four Bond films once remarked “I have never seen Bond read or go to the theatre, or to a concert. I believe he is mentally weak.”. Similarly, Ian Fleming’s novels, which provided the original source material for the films, have been described by Nicholas Lezard in his introduction to The Blofeld Trilogy as “aggressively anti-literary”. I think this is overstating the case and a close reading of Fleming’s work reveals that Bond is depicted reading a surprising number of times, providing us with further insight into his character. 

Ironically the most iconic fictional secret agent of the twentieth century is regularly shown reading thrillers, with the first reference to this genre appearing in From Russia with Love where we see him reading “The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler” on his flight out to Istanbul. Later on the Orient Express, during his encounter with the Soviet assassin Donovan Grant Bond is still trying to read “his Ambler”. However, he is distracted by Grant’s presence such that “After a few pages he found that his concentration was going.”. Much of the action of The Mask of Dimitrios takes place in Istanbul and, like Bond, Fleming read Ambler’s fifth novel (first published in 1939) on a flight out to the Turkish capital where he attended an international police conference.

 

At the conclusion of Goldfinger, Bond buys “the latest Raymond Chandler” in the bookshop at Idlewild airport whilst waiting for his flight back to England. Goldfinger was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959, which coincidentally was just three days before Chandler’s death. Although it is impossible to be certain, as Fleming would have written his manuscript the previous year he may have been referring to the Chandler’s 1958 Philip Marlowe novel Playback. What is more certain though is that Fleming was a friend of Chandler’s during the latter years of his life and owed at least some of Bond’s popularity in America to an endorsement that Chandler wrote for Live and Let Die in which he stated that ”Ian Fleming is probably the most forceful and driving writer of what I suppose must still be called thrillers in England”. The more prosaic reference in Goldfinger is simply Fleming returning the compliment.  

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond endorses the work of another American thriller writer. He is visiting M’s home – the only time when Fleming allows us  a glimpse into his boss’s domestic life - to discuss what can be done about Blofeld when M asks “What the devil’s the name of that fat American detective who’s always fiddling about with orchids, those obscene hybrids from Venezuela and so forth? Then he comes sweating out of his orchid house, eats a gigantic meal of some foreign muck and solves the murder. What’s he called.”. Bond is evidently a fan of these novels since he responds “Nero Wolfe, sir. They’re written by a chap called Rex Stout. I like them.”. Rex Stout created the character of Nero Wolfe in 1934 and he was to feature in a total of 33 novels over the next 40 years. Wolfe is a man of expensive tastes and, in addition to the fondness for orchids and food which M notes, he also has a strong liking for beer – a drink that seldom passes Bond’s lips!

  

Finally, the most dubious example of Bond’s reading material is provided in the short story The Living Daylights. Whilst on an assignment in Berlin which requires him to assassinate a Soviet operative, he kills time by reading a lurid German pulp novel entitled “Verderbt, Verdammt, Verraten” which features “a spectacular jacket of a half-naked girl strapped to a bed”. Fleming informs us that “the prefix “ver” signified that the girl had not only been ruined, damned and betrayed, but that she had suffered these misfortunes most thoroughly.”. The book serves to distract Bond from the task in hand as he temporarily loses himself  “in the tribulations of the heroine, Gräfin Liselotte Muntzenbacher”. 

This is interesting in that it confirms that Bond can speak German – we are told in You Only Live Twice that he learned German and French whilst spending much of his early life abroad on account of his father’s job as a representative of the Vickers armaments company. However, whilst John le Carré’s fictional spy George Smiley uses his knowledge of the language to read obscure German poetry, by contrast Bond’s choice of reading matter is much less erudite. 

For further consideration of the literary references in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, see my recently published e-book The Books of Bond.

The Books of Bond

For a series of books that are usually thought of as being unliterary, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels contain a surprising number of references to other literary sources. Bond himself, generally regarded as a man of action, is frequently depicted reading. Find out more about these references - which range from Eric Ambler to P.G. Wodehouse, taking in Hemingway, Lermontov, Pliny and de Sade along the way - in The Books of Bond, available now as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store.