Permission to Kill (Blue) is a website dedicated by Spy films, television and books and much, much more. The great thing about spy films, television shows and books, whilst they are a genre unto themselves, they cross over into so many others genres. You can find spy stories that are Arthouse, Comedy, Drama, Thriller, Horror, Action, Adventure, Morality Plays, Propaganda, Exploitation, Sexploitation, Blaxploitation, Bruceploitation (and practically any ‘ploitation’ you care to name), Rom-Coms, Science Fiction, History…the list is endless. No matter what your taste or mood, there is a spy story to suit you.
Why spy?
Good question. I guess it started with the film, The Spy Who Loved Me, which I saw numerous times at the local drive in. Maybe it even started before that. Spymania in the sixties permeated every facet of popular culture. Get Smart was endlessly repeated on television, and the children’s shows like Marine Boy, had a very Bondian edge to them – almost as if they had used Thunderball as their starting point and expanded from there. Batfink and Secret Squirrel, had loads of spy references. So, perhaps, Spymania had filtered into my subconscious via the television shows I watched as a tot. Each in turn preparing me for my first encounter with Bond, James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me.
The film then lead me to the Bond books, although at the beginning I was quite confused. The first book I found in a bookshop was a re-release of The Man With The Golden Gun with Roger Moore on the cover. Anyone who has read Fleming’s books will tell you, that The Man With the Golden Gun is not the ideal place to begin reading the series. First it has a rather strange beginning (resolving the cliff-hanger ending from You Only Live Twice), and then evolves into what is probably the weakest book in the series. But non-the-less I persevered with the series, and by the time I got to Live and Let Die, I really began to figure out what the series was all about.
Things moved on from there. For book reports at school, I’d cover Len Deighton (although I must confess that I never finished Spy Story, and the night before the report was due, went down to my local video store and hired out the movie – which in turn was actually worse than reading the book).
David lives in Melbourne, Australia, which has a population of 3.74 million people of which David is now considered the city’s 3,729,845th most dangerous man. He spends his time in between writing spy reviews (and moonlighting at Teleport City) loitering around casinos and in bars.
Contact
If you’re interested in anything about this site, please drop me a line, either via a comment on a specific article or by email to:
david at permissiontokill dot com.
