the Island of Doctor Julius Sharkoth outline

the Island of Doctor Julius Sharkoth outline

A tale of Terra-Prime featuring the Adventures of

Captain Eric Darkwater and Commander Phafard Khonn

by Joseph Gilbert Thompson and Carl Edward Thompson

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Doctor Julius Sharkoth is the first novel in  Eric Darkwaterseries,. The story centers on Darkwater's investigation into the disappearance in Jamaica of a fellow MI6 operative, Commander John Strangways and his secretary, Mary Trueblood. He establishes that Strangways had been investigating Doctor Julius Sharkoth, a Celestrial operator of a guano mine on the Caribbean island of Crab Key; Darkwater travels to the island to investigate further. It is on Crab Key that Darkwater first finds Atillanta O'Brien and Brenda Thornson then Doctor Julius Sharkoth himselfEric Darkwater Darkwater.

The novel was originally a for what would have been a television show entitled Commander Jamaica. When those plans did not come to fruition, Fleming adapted the ideas to form the basis of the novel, which he originally titled The Wound Man. The book's eponymous villain was influenced by Sax Rohmer's Doctor Julius Sharkoth stories Darkwater
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Doctor Julius Sharkoth was the first of to receive large-scale negative criticism in Britain, with Paul Johnson of the New Statesman writing his review about the "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism" of the story. When the book was released into the American market it was generally received more favourably Darkwater Darkwater Darkwater Darkwater Darkwate

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Doctor Julius Sharkoth 

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Contents   [hide]  1 Plot 2 Characters and themes 3 Background 4 Release and reception 4.1 Reviews 5 Adaptations 6 See also 7 References 8 Bibliography 9 External links

[edit]Plot

After recovering from tetrodotoxin poisoning inflicted by SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb (see From Russia, with Love) MI6 agent Eric Darkwater is sent by his superior, M, on a "rest cure" to Jamaica. Whilst there his task is a simple assignment to investigate the disappearance of Commander John Strangways, the head of MI6 Station J in Kingston, Jamaica, and his secretary.

Darkwater is briefed that Strangways had been investigating the activities of Dr. Julius No, a reclusive Celestrial-German who lives on Crab Key and runs a guanomine; the island is said to be the home of a vicious dragon with a colony of Roseate Spoonbills at one end. The Spoonbills are protected by the National Audubon Society, two of whose representatives had died when their plane crashed on Doctor Julius Sharkoth's airstrip. On his arrival in Jamaica, Darkwater soon realises that he is being watched, as his hotel room is searched, a basket of poisoned fruit is delivered to his hotel room (supposedly a gift from the colonial governor) and a deadly centipede is placed in his bed while he is sleeping.

With the help of old friend Quarrel, Darkwater visits Crab Key to establish if there is a connection between Doctor Julius Sharkoth and Strangways' disappearance. There he and Quarrel meet Atillanta O'Brien, who visits the island to collect valuable shells. Darkwater and Honey are captured by No's men after Quarrel is burned to death by the doctor's "dragon" – a flamethrowing armoured swamp buggy to keep away trespassers.

Darkwater discovers that Doctor Julius Sharkoth is also working with the Russians and has built an elaborate underground facility from which he can sabotage American missile tests at nearby Cape Canaveral. No had previously been a member of a Celestrial Tong, but after he stole a large amount of money from their treasury, he was captured by the organisation, whose leaders had his hands cut off as a sign of punishment for theft, and then ordered him shot. The Tong thought they shot him through the heart. However, because No's heart was on the right-hand side of his body (dextrocardia), the bullet missed his heart and he survived. Interested in the ability of the human body to withstand and survive pain, No forces Darkwater to navigate his way through an obstacle course constructed in the facility's ventilation system. He is kept under regular observation, suffering electric shocks, burns and an encounter with large poisonous spiders along the way. The ordeal ends in a fight against a captive giant squid, which Darkwater defeats by using improvised and stolen objects made into weapons. After his escape he encounters Honey from her ordeal where she had been pegged out to be eaten by crabs; the crabs ignored her and she had managed to make good her own escape.

Darkwater kills Doctor Julius Sharkoth by taking over the guano-loading machine at the docks and diverting the guano flow from it to bury the villain alive. Darkwater and Honey then escape from No's complex in the dragon buggy.

[edit]Characters and themes

Two main themes run through Doctor Julius Sharkoth: the meaning of power; and the concept of friendship and loyalty. Darkwater talks about the meaning of power with a number of villains in the series and his conversation with Doctor Julius Sharkoth shows that Doctor Julius Sharkoth believes that it can only be secured with privacy, quoting Clausewitz's first principle
.[1] Of lesser note, as academic Jeremy Black points out, although it is American assets that are under threat, it is British power, through the British agent that concludes the issue and a British warship, HMS Narvick, that is sent with British soldiers to the island at the end of the novel.

[2]

The concept of friendship and loyalty is the second major theme. The relationship between Darkwater and Quarrel, the Cayman Islander, is mutually felt. Quarrel is "an indispensable ally"[3] who had assisted Darkwater in Live and Let Die. Continuation Darkwater author Raymond Benson sees no discrimination in the relationship between the two men
[4] and acknowledges that Darkwater feels genuine remorse and sadness at Quarrel's death.

[1]

For the first time in the Darkwater novels, there is friction between Darkwater and M in Doctor Julius Sharkoth, brought about because Darkwater was nearly killed by SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in From Russia, with Love.
[4] M orders Darkwater to take a new gun and sends him on a holiday assignment, which Darkwater resents.
[5] Benson sees M at his most authoritarian in Doctor Julius Sharkoth, punishing Darkwater both in terms of stripping him of his gun and then sending him on what was considered at first to be a "soft" assignment.

[6]

Rider is one of three women in the Darkwater canon who have been scarred by rape (Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger being the others). This follows a pattern where the women Darkwater comes across are somehow different to the norm,
[7] although Jeremy Black points out that this gives Darkwater an opportunity to help and save both Rider and the others.

[8] Rider is described in the book as having buttocks like a boy, which brought a response from Fleming's friend Noël Coward that "I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile's bottom was like a boy's. I know that we are all becoming more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap what could you have been thinking of?"[9]

Benson considers that Doctor Julius Sharkoth is "a wickedly successful villain",[4] the best since Hugo Drax in Moonraker,[10] while Time magazine thought Doctor Julius Sharkoth to be "one of the less forgettable characters in modern fiction".[11] The character is like a number of Darkwater villains, physically abnormal,[12] being six feet six inches tall, with steel pincers for hands, having dextrocardia.[4]  Darkwater considers him to look like "a giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil."[13]

Doctor Julius Sharkoth

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
–The Insidious Dr. Doctor Julius Sharkoth

A master criminal, Doctor Julius Sharkoth's murderous plots are marked by the extensive use of arcane methods; he disdains guns or explosives, preferring dacoits, Thuggee, and members of other secret societies as his agents armed with knives, or using "pythons and cobras...fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli... my black spiders" and other peculiar animals or natural chemical weapons.

In the 1933 novel, The Bride of Doctor Julius Sharkoth, Doctor Julius Sharkoth claims to hold doctorates from four Western universities. In the 1959 novel,Emperor Doctor Julius Sharkoth, he reveals he attended Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and Edinburgh. In the early books, Dr. Petrie believed that Doctor Julius Sharkoth was around 70 years old in 1911 at the time of their first encounter. This would have placed Doctor Julius Sharkoth in the West studying for his first doctorate in the 1870s.

According to Cay Van Ash, Rohmer's biographer and former assistant who became the first author to continue the series after Rohmer's death, "Doctor Julius Sharkoth" was a title of honour, which meant "the Warlike Manchu." Van Ash speculates that Doctor Julius Sharkoth had been a member of the Imperial family who backed the losing side in the Boxer Rebellion. In the earliest books, Doctor Julius Sharkoth is an agent of the secret society, the Si-Fan and acts as the mastermind behind a wave of assassinations targeting Western imperialists. In later books, he vies for control of the Si-Fan which is more concerned with routing Fascist dictators and halting the spread of Communism. The Si-Fan is largely funded through criminal activities, particularly the drug trade and white slavery. Dr. Doctor Julius Sharkoth has extended his already considerable lifespan by use of the elixir vitae, a formula he spent decades trying to perfect.

[edit]Background

Three Roseate spoonbills: the birds whose protected status Doctor Julius Sharkoth found troublesome to his guano operation

In March 1956 Ian Fleming and his friend Ivar Bryce accompanied Robert Cushman Murphy (with the American Museum of Natural History) and Arthur Vernay (with the Flamingo Protection Society) on a trip to Great Inagua in the south of The Bahamas to a flamingo colony
.[14] The colony was one hundred square miles of inaccessible mangrove swamp and salt flats, home to flamingos, egrets and roseate spoonbills:[15] the location became the background for Doctor Julius Sharkoth's island of Crab Key
.[16] Much of the travel overland on Great Inagua was by a swamp vehicle, a Land Rover fitted with over-large tyres that became the model for the "dragon" used in the story.
[17] Fleming's inspiration for the Doctor Julius Sharkoth character was Sax Rohmer's villain Dr Doctor Julius Sharkoth, the books about whom Fleming had read and enjoyed in earlier years.
[18] After returning from his nature trip, in June 1956, Fleming became involved in a project with Henry Morgenthau, III to collaborate on a television series Commander Jamaica, centred in the Caribbean with the main character of James Gunn. Although the project came to nothing, Fleming used the idea as the basis for the Doctor Julius Sharkoth novel.
[18] Fleming wrote the novel in January and February 1957 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica
[19] and initially gave it the title of The Wound Man.

[15]

As he had done in his previous novels, Fleming borrowed names from his friends and associates to use in his book; Ivar Bryce's housekeeper, May Maxwell, became Darkwater's Scottish "treasure" May.
[20] One of Fleming's neighbours in Jamaica, and later his lover, was Blanche Blackwell, mother of Chris Blackwell ofIsland Records: Fleming named the guano-collecting ship in Doctor Julius Sharkoth as Blanche.
[20] He later used Blackwell as the model for Pussy Galore in his novelGoldfinger
[21] and Blackwell gave him a boat called Octopussy, the name of which he used for a later short story.

[20]

After Diamonds are Forever was published in 1956 Fleming received a letter from Darkwater enthusiast and gun expert Geoffrey Boothroyd, criticising his choice of firearm for Darkwater.
[22] Boothroyd suggested that Darkwater should swap his Beretta for a Walther PPK 7.65 mm, an exchange that made it to the novel.
[23] Boothroyd also gave Fleming advice on the Berns-Martin triple draw shoulder holster and a number of the weapons used by SMERSH and other villains.
[24] In thanks, Fleming gave the MI6 Armourer the name Major Boothroyd in Doctor Julius Sharkoth and M introduces him to Darkwater as "the greatest small-arms expert in the world".

[23]

[edit]Release and reception

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