Where has Bond travelled to?

I feel I have neglected this blog recently so I thought I would reboot it by mapping the countries that Fleming’s Bond travelled to.

Bond lives in London and spent part of his childhood in Scotland so the United Kingdom is first on the list.  Bond is a regular visitor to Jamaica, the United States, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France as these are all featured in multiple stories.

From Russia With Love is a great travel story with Bond following the Orient Express route through Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia.  Thunderball is based in the Bahamas whilst nearly all the activity in You Only Live Twice takes place in Japan.  The short story For Your Eyes Only takes Bond on a trip to Canada and in the first part of The Man With The Golden Gun Bond recalls his stay in the Soviet Union.

James Bond replica passport from indyprops.com

Bond travels to Africa at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, visiting Sierra Leone & Liberia and we have visits to the Seychelles and to the Kenyan port of Mombasa in the Hildebrand Rarity.

There are other mentions of Bond’s previous travels in the books.  We know he has visited Sweden as he shot a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm and Thunderball hints at a visit to Lisbon in Portugal during the war as well as a trip to Hungary in 1953.  Bond learnt to ski in Austria and the country is referenced in Octopussy, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and From A View To A Kill.  

Bond recalls visits to Mexico & Venezuela in the first chapter of Goldfinger which also describes the service’s waterfront office in Hong Kong.  Other quick mentions include a trip to Trinidad in The Man With The Golden Gun, Monaco in Casino Royale and in Goldfinger Bond recalls watching a motor race in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.  The final mention goes to Denmark, not specifically named but Bond’s JAL flight to Tokyo in You Only Live Twice would have stopped at Copenhagen on the way there.

I am sure I have missed a few places that Bond visited in Fleming’s novels so please let me know!

Map produced using historicalmapchart.net

Phantoms & Meteors

Trains play a significant part in a number of Fleming's books and the novels Live & Let Die and Goldfinger both feature railroad trips between New York and Florida.

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad introduced the Silver Meteor, a diesel powered service between New York and Florida, in 1939.  The train used to split at Wildwood with the front half of the train heading southwest towards the Gulf Coast and the rear to Miami.

In Live and Let Die, Bond and Solitaire take The Silver Phantom from Pennsylvania station through Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.  The Silver Phantom was a fictional name conjured up by Fleming, the trains operated by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad at the time were named the Silver Meteor and Silver Star.

Fortuitously they slip off the train at Jacksonville and take the Silver Meteor (this time a real train name), to Tampa and avoid an attack on the Phantom.

"'There's a long stretch of straight track between Waldo and Ocala,' continued Leiter, 'running through forest and swamp land. State highway right alongside the track. About twenty minutes outside Waldo, Wham! goes a dynamite emergency signal under the leading Diesel. Driver comes down to forty. Wham! And another Wham! Three in line! Emergency! Halt at once!" 

Three of Mr Big's agents walk down the outside of the stopped train:

"Twenty yards and they stop outside Car 245. Men with the rippers give a double squirt at your window. Open it up for the pineapple. Centre man tosses in the pineapple and all three run back to the car. Two seconds fuse. As they reach the car, BOOM! Fricassee of Compartment H. Fricassee, presumably, of Mr. and Mrs. Bryce."

A timetable from the early 1950s says it is 42 minutes from Waldo to Ocala on the Silver Meteor.  As the attack happened around 20 minutes after leaving Waldo we can place it just south of the town of Hawthorne where there is a long straight stretch of the line next to the Sid Martin Highway.

Bond & Solitaire leave the train at Clearwater station which is the last station before St Petersburg before heading to the (presumably fictional) Everglades.  On the way they get spotted by Poxy, an associate of the Robber, at the junction of Park Street and Central Avenue.

In Goldfinger, Bond also takes the Silver Meteor from Miami to New York accompanied by his "hostage" Jill Masterton. 

No travel details are given of the journey, presumably as Bond had other things to occupy his mind:

"It had been a wonderful trip up in the train. They had eaten the sandwiches and drunk the champagne and then, to the rhythm of the giant diesels pounding out the miles, they had made long, slow love in the narrow berth."

See my Google map to track 007's train journeys on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

Where next for Horowitz’s Bond?

Following on from the success of his first Bond novel Trigger Mortis, Ian Fleming Publications has announced that Anthony Horowitz will write a second 007 book to be published in spring 2018.

Trigger Mortis is a period Bond novel and is set immediately following the events of Thunderball.  It was generally well received by both critics and Bond fans due to a combination of a strong story and the writing remaining faithful to the original Fleming.  The book features locations including London, the Nurburgring racetrack in Germany plus Florida and New York in the United States.  It included material from a story called Murder on Wheels, part of an intended Bond television series written by Fleming.

It seems that the new novel will again be a period piece and Horowitz has hinted that he is has been thinking about placing it around the time of Casino Royale.  This got me thinking where it would be good to see Bond visit next.

Winning the 00 number
In Casino Royale, Bond tells how he was awarded the 00 number after killing a Japanese cypher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm.  Again linking one of these stories, perhaps as a prologue to the novel, would be a nice nod to Fleming’s original books.  Mentioned in Thunderball,  The Spy Who Loved Me and From Russia With Love (and also being a city that I visit regularly), Stockholm is surely ripe for inclusion.

Hong Kong
A colony (later dependent territory) from 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong was a major strategic location of the British Empire/Commonwealth.  The territory has been used in various Bond continuation novels set in more modern times but a 1950’s Hong Kong, possibly featuring Dickson from Goldfinger would be an interesting stamp in Bond’s passport from the mid 1950s.

An African Adventure
Despite the historical ties between many African countries and Britain, Fleming only sent Bond to Africa on two occasions.  At the end of Diamonds Are Forever he closes the diamond smuggling pipleline in Sierra Leone and the short story The Hildebrand Rarity is located in the Seychelles.

We can rule out Bond being involved in the Suez crisis (“one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world”) as this was at the same time as the Hungarian uprising where he was on an operation at the time.  However there are many exotic locations in Africa that Bond could visit such as Algiers or Dar es Salaam.

You can just imagine Bond being sent by M to some remote colonial outpost where unbeknown to the outside world, there is a megalomaniac villain up to his nefarious tricks…


Behind the Iron Curtain?
Despite all of Bond’s many trips, Fleming never sent him to one of the old Warsaw Pact counties.  In Moonraker he mentions previously being attached to the British Embassy in Moscow and in Thunderball Bond recalls a trip on the Arlberg Express which mainly ran from Budapest to Paris.  Weaving one of these two events into the new book would interesting and add something more to Bond's backstory.

Alternatively an undercover trip to Warsaw, Prague or East Berlin could be another adventure for 007 which would presumably include an exciting escape over the frontier (Fleming always seems to use this word rather than “border”).  Personally, I would love to see Bond operating undercover in Eastern Europe.

Of course all of this is pure speculation, I guess we will have to wait until 2018 before we find out what Anthony Horowitz has up his sleeve.

London Calling

London features in most of the Bond stories, particularly in Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me.

For a bit of fun I have produced the below map in the style of the London Underground which attempts to show all of the locations mentioned in the 007 novels.  As per Harry Beck's original tube map, this is not strictly geographically accurate although my "stations" are approximately in the correct places.

In Goldfinger, Bond actually takes the tube from Bank station when returning back to headquarters after visiting Colonel Smithers at the Bank of England.  Even M seems to use it in Dr No after telling his driver to finish early "I'll use the tube this evening. No weather for driving a car."

Wellington Square is the joker in the pack as this is not actually mentioned in Fleming's novels, however this is the location of Bond's flat in Chelsea given by John Pearson in his book "James Bond: The Authorised Biography".

Strict rules of golf?

Follow the Bond v Goldfinger golf game which took place at the Royal St Marks golf links at Sandwich by using my Google Map. A close game which Fleming placed on the real life Royal St Georges golf course in Kent.

I have attempted to recreate the shots that Bond (red) and Goldfinger (orange) played at each hole.  Unfortunately Fleming does not go into detail about the shots played at the 8th, 9th, 12th, 13th and 16th holes.

"The ball soared a hundred feet, paused elegantly, dropped eighty feet on to the thatched roof of the starter's hut and bounced down." Goldfinger, chapter 8