Dr No - a BBC Radio drama

Based on Ian Fleming’s novel, BBC Radio 4’s Dr No stars Toby Stephens as James Bond and David Suchet as Dr Julius No

I grew up on radio dramas—mostly religious ones like “Adventures in Odyssey” or “Patch the Pirate” or, when, to my grief, I woke up in the deep watches of the night with WRAF on my clock radio, the harrowing “Unshackled”—and have enjoyed rediscovering them as an adult and a father. My own kids are getting to know the town of Odyssey’s large cast of characters, and we especially loved “Odyssey”-veteran Paul McCusker’s joyous and intelligent radio drama The Legends of Robin Hood.

But BBC Radio’s literary adaptations have become particular favorites of my family. We’re a third of the way through their classic Lord of the Rings starring Ian Holm, and we have enjoyed their radio adaptations of Treasure Island and the Richard Hannay adventures The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. And there is a great favorite among my kids, The Mark of Zorro, starring Val Kilmer, which I reviewed here a year ago today. Last weekend, I finally delved into their James Bond series.

The first in this series adapts—like the first Bond film—the fifth of Ian Fleming’s original novels, Dr No.

Dr No takes place several months after From Russia With Love, which ends on a stunning cliffhanger requiring Bond, in the followup, to have undergone extensive convalescence. The radio drama opens with Bond’s briefing from M, who wants to make sure Bond is fully recovered but still gives Bond what he thinks will be an easy assignment. One Commander Strangways, a key intelligence operative in Jamaica, has gone missing along with his secretary. The gossips have already concluded that the pair created false identities for themselves and eloped, but M wants Bond to make sure.

Bond departs Britain both relaxed and resentful. He is glad to be back in the Caribbean and working with a Jamaican local, Quarrel, who gave him life-saving assistance in Live and Let Die, but his familiarity with Jamaica and his resentment of the simple job given to him by M cause him to let his guard down. He immediately regrets it. A Chinese girl claiming to work for the Daily Gleaner snaps his photo as he arrives at the airport, and reappears when he and Quarrel have dinner and drinks at a Kingston dive. His suspicions are aroused and never allayed.

Bond encounters another Chinese girl working as a secretary for a local contact. The contact informs Bond that Strangways had been investigating one Dr Julius No, the reclusive owner and operator of a guano mine—which he works exclusively with imported Chinese labor—on nearby Crab Key. Asked to retrieve the files on the case, the secretary reveals that they are missing.

Though Quarrel warns him off of approaching Crab Key, which has a bad reputation—especially after a series of strange accidents involving representatives of the Audobon Society, who have taken an interest in the rare birds that nest on Dr No’s island—Bond decides to investigate more directly.

Quarrel and Bond make the 20-mile voyage to Crab Key by night and, the next morning, meet Honeychile Rider as she gathers shells on the beach. When Dr No’s men arrive and machine gun Honey’s canoe, the three form an ad hoc team as they work both to uncover what Dr No is doing and to survive long enough to escape the island. Not all of them will make it, and the danger will only grow crueler and more grotesque once Dr No captures them.

BBC Radio 4’s adaptation, first broadcast in 2008, hews very closely to Ian Fleming’s novel, even retaining many of the rough edges I would have expected to be sanded off in a modern adaptation—and kudos to them for letting the story be of its time and place. Sticking close to Fleming’s originals is always a plus. Dr No has always impressed me with its strong writing, characterization—especially for Honey Rider—suspense, and grim, brutal survivalist climax. Take what you imagine a Bond film to be like, remove the campiness of the worst of the movies, and cross it with The Most Dangerous Game, and you’re approaching the tone of this book. The adaptation conveys Bond’s doggedness and Dr No’s cruelty expertly, and the story builds steadily in excitement and intensity right up until the end.

The voice acting is excellent across the board. Toby Stephens, who played Bond villain Gustav Graves in the execrable Die Another Die and gave an outstanding audiobook performance of From Russia With Love, is very good as James Bond. Stephens’s Bond combines intelligence and a hard edge where screen Bonds often skew toward one or the other. Lisa Dillon and Clarke Peters offer solid support as Honeychile Rider and Quarrel—Quarrel and Bond’s strong laird and gamekeeper relationship is an often overlooked friendship in the Bond stories—and fans of certain British media will enjoy Peter Capaldi’s brief appearance as The Armourer, Major Boothroyd, the character who first equipped Bond with the Walther PPK and who eventually evolved into the films’ Q.

The standout, however, is David Suchet as Dr No. The villain only appears in the film third or so of the story and has limited “onscreen” time with Bond, but Suchet makes the most of it. His halting, metallic, alien voice is eerie and threatening, and the way he delivers his life story and cold, amoral, transhumanist worldview to Bond and Honey seems believable rather than the mere “monologuing” lampooned in The Incredibles. If, like me, you know Suchet primarily as Poirot, this performance should prove a startling surprise.

Dr No also features good sound effects that set the scene well, especially scenes on the beaches, in the mangrove swamps, and in the warehouses, subterranean quarters, and deathtraps of Crab Key. The adaptation’s original music by Mark Holden and Sam Barbour is a nice accent to the story, invoking the sound of classic Bond film scores without aping it.

For those with children, Dr No may be on the intense side. I listened to it with my kids and they were engrossed by it, finding the story unbearably suspenseful and Dr No unbearably creepy. I selected this one to listen to with them both because it was the first in this series and because I knew the novel had more action and less sex than some of the other stories. That held true for the adaptation, too. Aside from a scattering of mild language—most of it rather blunt discussions of Dr No’s bird guano—it was a good listen for my kids.

If the adaptation has any flaws, it is only through sins of omission rather than commission. This radio drama is just under ninety minutes long, and so while all the major events of the novel are present, they have been streamlined. The novel’s characters are presented well and excellently performed, but some of the depth of the novel has been lost. Bond’s resentments and his interiority are downplayed. Honey tells a shortened version of her tragic backstory—which I wrote about briefly a few months ago—but her goals and her reason for being on Crab Key are not elaborated upon. Likewise, I know why Bond was in the hospital for so long before the events of this story, but someone less familiar with the novels may not. I had to explain a little bit of that to my kids. But these are minor complaints.

The upside of this short adaptation is precisely that it is short—right at an hour and a half, an hour and a half spent on a perfectly paced and executed action-suspense story, perfect for a shorter holiday road trip or a quiet evening listening to the radio.

I had heard lots of good things about these radio adaptations of Fleming’s novels, and now I know why. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, the 2010 dramatization of Goldfinger, starring Stephens as Bond and Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger. You can listen to Dr No, Goldfinger, and the rest of the series in this YouTube playlist.

If you’re traveling over the holidays I hope BBC Radio 4’s Dr No will give y’all a good hour and a half of thrills, and that you’ll go on to listen to more, as I plan to. Even better, read some Ian Fleming in the new year! Regardless, have a merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.

Señor Zorro en la radio

I have a soft spot for swashbucklers—stories of nobility, derring-do, skill with a blade, and unflappable wit in the face of danger—and that’s almost certainly because of Zorro. We had a Disney singalong tape with the “Zorro” theme song when I was a kid, and one of my earliest memories is telling my mom that, when I grew up, I wanted to legally change my name to Zorro. Happily, she dissuaded me—not that I needed convincing once I was actually grown up.

So I shed the enthusiasm for the name but my love of swashbucklers has only deepened with time, especially once I got around to reading a bunch of the classics a few years ago—among them The Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Blood, and my two favorites, The Prisoner of Zenda and The Mark of Zorro. The last of these introduced the world to my favorite swashbuckling hero and has been adapted for film, however loosely, several times. It’s also the basis of the excellent audio drama I want to review today.

When romance and rapiers ruled in Old California

The story takes place in “Old California,” specifically the pueblo of Reina de los Angeles—a considerably sleepier LA than we’re accustomed to imagine—and begins in medias res, as the drunken layabout Sergeant Gonzalez demands more wine of the local tavern keeper and boasts of what he plans to do when he finally catches up to the notorious bandit El Zorro. El Zorro shortly presents himself, the first of many unexpected, ninja-like appearances, and humiliates Gonzalez by slashing a Z into the brute’s cheek before disappearing, unharmed, into the night. The scene is set.

This semi-comic opening also establishes Don Diego de la Vega, the handsome young scion of one of California’s aristocratic caballero families. Don Diego is well-educated and fantastically wealthy, belonging to one of the only caballero families that seems to be thriving under the corrupt rule of California’s governor, but he’s timid, unmotivated, horrified by the violence often required of men of his station, and—relatedly—uninterested in any of the duties or recreational pursuits of his class, whether marriage, bull-fighting, or farming. He’s a dandy. No one takes him seriously.

While Gonzalez and his villainous, resentful superior, Captain Ramón, step up their hunt for Zorro, Don Diego’s father Don Alejandro puts fatherly pressure on Diego to find a wife. Don Alejandro recommends the family of Don Carlos Pulido, who has a beautiful and eligible only daughter. Don Diego duly pays the Pulidos a visit, impressing the whole family with his looks and wealth—seemingly his only good features. Doña Catalina immediately presses her daughter to marry Don Diego just to save their family, which has been caught on the wrong side of political disputes, from disaster. But their daughter, the spirited and virtuous Señorita Lolita Pulido, is repulsed by Don Diego’s foppishness and resists her parents’ insistence on the match.

Unfortunately, as Don Diego feebly pursues courtship with her she also becomes the object of Captain Ramón’s interest—but not his affections, as he is strictly an ambitious and cruel striver.

Meanwhile, Señor Zorro continues his Robin Hood attacks on corrupt officials, especially those who are cruel to the poor—the laboring peons and native indios—or clergymen like Fray Felipe, a hardworking and pious Franciscan with close ties to the Pulidos and Vegas. Captain Ramón takes extreme measures to root out Zorro, who enjoys widespread support among the downtrodden, including arresting and publicly whipping Fray Felipe on false charges. Zorro’s sudden appearance and rescue of the monk—not to mention the vengeance Zorro wreaks as a result—is one of the story’s most thrilling scenes.

There’s much more. Don Diego’s continues his tonedeaf and awkward courtship of Señorita Lolita, while she falls for a man who is Diego’s opposite in every way, the dashing and courageous Señor Zorro. The young, up and coming caballeros of Reina de los Angeles—minus Don Diego, to the derisive amusement of the other young men and the embarrassment of his father—form an honor-bound league to track down and defeat Zorro and save California from his depredations. And Captain Ramón, with increasing desperation and disregard for protocol or morality, attempts to win—or simply acquire—Señorita Lolita.

Part comedy of manners, part adventure story, part superhero thriller, part historical melodrama, party mystery (though you won’t have to try hard at all to guess Zorro’s secret identity)—the swashbuckling and charismatic central character ties all of these elements together, and by the end of The Mark of Zorro all of these threads come together in a fun and exciting climax. It’s pulp, but it’s fun, clever pulp, with a few nice surprises along the way and just the right combination of daring, danger, and death.

The audio drama

The Mark of Zorro originally appeared—as The Curse of Capistrano—in serial installments in All Story Weekly in the late summer of 1919. Over the 102 years since, the plot has been treated as disposable by its numerous adapters, but this 2010 full-cast audio dramatization by Yuri Rasovsky follows the original very faithfully. The plot is condensed and streamlined but most of the major incidents remain in three nicely constructed one-hour episodes. Señorita Lolita has been given a light feminist update, asking for a sword in the final confrontation rather than standing by for Zorro to finish the job, but these touches are purely cosmetic and don’t actually alter the story or its themes.

The music and sound effects, crucial in an audio drama like this, are also top quality, comparable to any of the well-produced stuff I grew up listening to. This dramatization, I am unsurprised to learn, earned a Grammy nomination.

The cast are excellent, with the two standouts being Val Kilmer, who successfully pulls off both the confident and strong Zorro and his weakling alter ego Don Diego with a great deal of wit, panache, and—for Señorita Lolita—charm; and Meshach Taylor as Sergeant Gonzalez, a real miles gloriosus whose swagger, braggadocio, and oblivious selfishness make him both a figure of fun and a genuine threat, especially under the leadership of Captain Ramón. Gonzalez, as my description suggests, is a literary type that goes back to the Romans, but Taylor’s performance removes him from the world of cliché and makes him a believable and entertaining character.

Keith Szarabajka as Captain Ramón and Ruth Livier as Señorita Lolita are also good, with Szarabajka’s Ramón being cold and threatening but not over-the-top. Elizabeth Peña, as Doña Catlina, Lolita’s marriage-obsessed mother, seems to be performing her part sarcastically sometimes but this does not detract from the overall production. Armin Shimerman, as the landlord of the tavern where Gonzalez runs up a huge tab, is also great fun, put-upon but ironic, and his framing narration also sets the imaginative stage quite excellently.

The Mark of Zorro was great fun to listen to both for myself, the lifelong Zorro fan, and my wife and kids. Both the six- and four-year olds enjoyed it a great deal even if they didn’t follow every contortion of the plot, and thrilled to the chases and swordfights.

What makes The Mark of Zorro great

While The Mark of Zorro is enormously entertaining, what makes the story great and worth revisiting is its serious treatment of honor and virtue. These move the plot, motivate the characters, and make their actions comprehensible.

Don Diego adopts his alter ego out of his sense of obligation to the less fortunate, the despised and abused, and the audio drama explicitly invokes the idea of noblesse oblige—an idea running all the way through but never named in the novel. (An understanding of noblesse oblige is also what’s missing in all those idiotic internet discussions of Batman as a “fascist.”) Zorro is a check on the abuses of his peers and a boon to his inferiors, and holds himself to the same exacting standards as any opponent, refusing to engage in an unfair fight, to “punch down” against an inferior with disproportionate force, or to exaggerate his deeds—or allow others to lie about him. Even his use of deception and disguise is a form of filial piety, as he does not want his vigilantism in the face of a corrupt government to endanger his innocent father. Zorro observes limits, because there are greater things than himself at stake.

And this concern with honor and virtue runs through all of the characters—all of the good ones, that is. Señorita Lolita values courage, good looks, education, and wealth, but rejects all of them when they appear in a coward. She rightly expects more, and her hierarchy of virtues, her priorities, are correct and as exacting as Don Diego’s. Don Carlos and Doña Catilina, while played for laughs at first as they attempt, with embarrassing desperation, to get her daughter to marry Don Diego, reveal hidden depths when Zorro, a man they believe to be a villain, appears in their home. Don Carlos in particular repeatedly proves himself to be tougher than he lets on. Don Alejandro, Don Diego’s father, drives his son toward marriage not out of naked interest in wealth or inheritance but out of sense of obligation and stewardship, a trait that is also highly developed in his son, as it turns out.

And even the dashing, high-living young caballeros of California’s aristocratic elite have been so formed and educated that, when they finally confront Zorro and attempt to subdue him, he wins them over not through some kind of cost-benefit analysis or politicking or rhetorical argument about rights and corruption, but by appealing to their understanding of the duty they owe thanks to their status and the honor of serving justice.

(This last was one of my favorite surprises when I first read The Mark of Zorro. As I wrote on Goodreads after that first reading, “Pay attention, Hollywood! You can use character to resolve plot, and not just bigger fight scenes!”)

The only purely pragmatic characters are the villains, especially Captain Ramón, whose virtues in a number of areas—especially courage and skill with a blade—are ruined by his resentment, his ambition, and his self-serving pragmatism. This is never clearer than when he tries to force his courtship (much too fine a word for his intentions) on Señorita Lolita. His dishonorable but effective brutality makes his comeuppance—as well as those of the venal governor of California and the boastful Sergeant Gonzalez, who nevertheless gets the last word—at the hands of the moral and law-abiding all the more satisfying. The finale of the story is almost a dramatization of Burke’s dictum that “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”

In our cynical age, a story like The Mark of Zorro comes across as black-and-white, simplistic, without the lauded “moral ambiguity” so sought after in prestige TV. But look beneath, past that platitudinous criticism, and you’ll witness a balletic dance of virtue, reputation, honor, and honesty that demonstrates, in its fun and pulpy way, just how simplistic the opposite really is.

Conclusion

This is ostensibly a review of the excellent full-cast audio drama by Hollywood Theater of the Ear, and I hope you’ll check that out and enjoy it. With holiday travel approaching as I write this, it may be an excellent way to pass three hours on the road with your family. My wife, kids, and I certainly enjoyed it over our Thanksgiving travels. But I hope you’ll seek out The Mark of Zorro in book or movie form as well. I have the Penguin Classics edition, but it is widely available from other publishers, including for free online at Project Gutenberg, and if you check out a film version, the 1940 adaptation starring Tyrone Power is loose but broadly faithful to the book and a lot of fun, with the excellent Basil Rathbone offering a serious swordfighting challenge to Señor Zorro.

Chesterton on talking to oneself

From a piece he wrote critiquing his own play, Magic: 

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Magic is a wonderful little comedy that I read some years ago during a bout of depression. It deals with faith, reason, and skepticism on the scale of ordinary life. The most dramatic thing that happens in this play, in which characters furiously debate whether magic is, in fact, real, is a lamp turning on. 

With characteristically Chestertonian wit and humor, Magic insists on faith and reason, rather than faith or reason, and dramatizes the impoverishment of humanity when the two are opposed. But it's not a straight allegory or morality play; Chesterton leaves things ambiguous, including the very subject of the play. 

If it's so ambiguous, then what's the point? you might want to ask. I don't know, but Magic was exactly what I needed when I read it, the same way many people claimed to have been saved from madness by Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday. To quote his introduction to the book of Job, in reference to God's refusal to answer Job's questions: 

The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Magic has been revived a few times in out of the way places by fellow devotees of Chesterton. (Here's a review of a production from about the time I read the play.) It's never been staged anywhere close enough for me to see it performed, but I hope that will change someday. 

In the mean time, do check Magic out. It's a short three act play; you can easily read it through in one sitting. It's available free at Project Gutenberg and in volume 11 of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, which is still a work in progress (at 37 volumes!) from Ignatius Press.