Hollywood turned spy fiction’s most hard-boiled killer into Austin Powers
James Bond wasn’t the only suave-but-brutal spy on the 1960s pulp-novel scene. While Ian Fleming sparked the craze with his 1953 debut novel Casino Royale, which introduced the world to 007, seven years later, Donald Hamilton would introduce a deadlier spy into the international arms race in Death of a Citizen. Matt Helm is retired and living a quiet life as a journalist in New Mexico, before being drawn back into the world of espionage when a young woman from his past appears asking for his help. The books eschew the glamor of Bond, instead offering up a hard-boiled violence and scrappiness that makes them feel more like noir than the super-spies we’re used to.
Unless you were scouring the vintage spinner racks for noir gems — or reading a lot of manga magazines in Japan (we’ll get there) — you might never have come across Helm at all. Or if you did, it might have been in an entirely different guise: In 1965, Columbia Pictures acquired the Matt Helm book rights and quickly cast Dean Martin as the killer counter-agent. If that sounds like an unexpected casting for the older retired spy turned back-in-business cold-blooded murderer, you’d be right. Columbia didn’t want to make Matt Helm movies, they wanted to make James Bond-inspired spoof films — and it transformed the character forever.
Casting Martin and veering away from the grim realism of the books, the Technicolor world of The Silencers reimagined Helm as a lackadaisical, boozy, singing spy surrounded constantly by beautiful women in varying states of undress. Within minutes of the film beginning there are two musical numbers — one sung by Helm himself — and a comedic bathing scene, establishing immediately that this is a far cry from the bleak world of Hamilton’s
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