The Rivals of James Bond: Masterfully Cunning Literary Spies

“Before there was James Bond, there was Gregory Sallust” wrote Tina Rosenberg. True enough.

Created by best-selling British author Dennis Wheatley (best known for occult horror tales such as The Devil Rides Out and To The Devil a Daughter), Sallust made his first appearance in the 1934 novel Black August.

He would go on to feature in nine more ripping yarns, culminating with The White Witch of the South Seas in 1968.

Like 007, Sallust is a devastatingly attractive, independently minded British super spy with a taste for the finer things in life (Wheatley himself spent a fortune on wine and caviar) and little compunction about killing the enemies of Great Britain.

During the Second World War, Wheatley worked alongside Bond creator Ian Fleming in military intelligence (he specialised in psych-ops).

Fleming would acknowledge Sallust as his inspiration.

Art-dealer spy, Hood, is another Bond rival whose author—Stephen Coulter, writing under the name James Mayo—was a wartime pal of Ian Fleming.

The two men served together in Naval Intelligence and went on to work as journalists at Reuters. Coulter even helped Fleming with the background for Bond’s first outing, Casino Royale

 Inspired by his friend’s success, Coulter came up with his own dashing agent, Hood, who works for Centre, a predictably clandestine arm of MI6.

Hood—tough, sophisticated, irresistible to women…—made his first appearance in Hammerhead (1964) and went on to travel the world killing baddies and bedding beauties until 1972.

While Bond is a privately educated member of the British officer class (much like Fleming himself), Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer (who isn’t actually named in the novels) is a working-class, self-educated Northern geezer who begins his career running illegal rackets in post-War Berlin.

Recruited into the British Secret Service, Palmer uses his street smarts to outwit a series of enemies of the state, while all the while dishing out cynical one-liners, back-chatting his posh bosses, showing off his knowledge of food, art, and jazz, and seducing attractive women.

Palmer (memorably brought to life in the movies by Michael Caine) made his debut in The Ipcress File (1962) and appeared in four more sixties novels, bowing out in 1968’s An Expensive Place to Die.

If The Beatles had been spies, they’d have been Harry Palmer.

In literary terms, pulp secret agent Nick Carter (AKA Killmaster) may not be the best of the sixties spies, but in terms of longevity and body count, he surpasses all the others put together.

The lean and handsome Carter first earned fame as a straight-ahead Holmes-style detective back in the 1890s under the authorship of classic dime novelist John R. Coryell.

He was revived as a PI several times before reappearing in the wake of Bond’s success as a ruthless superspy working for top secret US agency AXE.

The new incarnation of Carter—who spoke 15 languages and did yoga—debuted in 1964’s Run Spy Run and would go on to appear in 260 novels before finally hanging up his gun (and a huge variety of other weaponry) in 1990.

Multiple authors wrote the books, including “Queen of Espionage” Gayle Lynds and Martin Cruz Smith, best known for the Arkady Renko series.

Created by author Donald Hamilton, today Cold War assassin Helm is best remembered for his portrayal by Dean Martin in a series of larky swinging sixties movies.

The films bear as much resemblance to the original books as Mike Myers does to Sean Connery.

In Hamilton’s well-crafted series of books, Helm is a man after the style of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, a tough, cynical, and highly competent loner who mistrusts all authority.

Helm—who made his debut in 1959’s Death of a Citizen—is an agent for a covert US intelligence agency that identifies enemy agents and eliminates them.

Forged by the brutality of the early years of the Cold War and with a back story of marital breakdown, the man is so ruthless and lacking in anything you might describe as humanity, he makes Bond seem like Miss Marple.

Helm would appear in 26 more lucidly written and coldly fascinating novels over a span of 33 years.  

Agent OSS 117 is often described as “The French James Bond” though he actually first appeared in 1949 (four Years before 007) and is an American (albeit a French speaker from Louisiana whose family had immigrated to the New World in 1789) who works for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of CIA).

Created by French writer Jean Bruce, whose widow Josette continued the series after his untimely death in an accident, OSS 117 is memorably described as having “the weathered face of a pirate prince” and a gaze “no woman could ignore”.

Like Bond, he pops up in glamorous locations all over the world, battling a variety of foreign villains and grappling with hundreds of naked women.

Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath appeared in more than forty novels in French, a handful of which have English translations and turned up in dozens of movies, most recently a series featuring Oscar award-winner Jean Dujardin.