In 1958, Fleming wrote a review of The Spy’s Bedside Book, an anthology of spy stories edited by Graham and Hugh Greene, to which he himself was a contributor. The first sentence read: ‘I cannot understand why the great spy novel has never been written.’ He had, in fact, just completed a rather good one himself.
Among the items that piqued his imagination during the 1955 Interpol conference in Istanbul had been a report by the Indian representative on the magnitude of gold smuggling and the ingenuity of its practitioners. It was the second most smuggled commodity after heroin, the man said. In 1954 alone his country had intercepted more than six million pounds of contraband bullion, and this was barely the tip of the iceberg. So long a financial shadow had the war cast on the world’s currencies that everyone wanted gold, and there seemed no end to the means they would use to get their hands on it. As always, the combination of treasure and intrigue proved irresistible.
Fleming began his research in the summer of 1957 and by the time he arrived in Goldeneye the following January he had a plot mapped out. Goldfinger centred, as with Moonraker, on a millionaire villain who liked to cheat at cards (also, in this case, golf). Unlike Drax, however, who planned to destroy Britain with a missile, Auric Goldfinger wanted to control the world’s gold supply – his ultimate goal being to seize the contents of Fort Knox. When his activities threatened to destabilise Britain’s economy, Bond was put on the case. Goldfinger was a splendidly unpleasant man, with a deft touch in torture and revenge: when one of his employees betrayed him he suffocated her by coating her entire body in gold paint; and when he caught Bond spying on him he splayed him across a saw table and waited patiently for him to talk as the circular blade moved slowly towards his groin. Almost as sinister as Goldfinger was his Korean henchman, Oddjob, who had a cleft palate, was a karate expert, ate cats and wore a steel-rimmed bowler hat that doubled as a deadly Frisbee.
On the plus side, Bond was aided by his old friend Felix Leiter and a lesbian aviatrix named Pussy Galore who started in the employ of Goldfinger but was successfully turned (in more senses than one) by 007. The climax came when the combined efforts of Bond, Leiter and Galore succeeded in thwarting Goldfinger’s attempted assault on Fort Knox. But this was just a false horizon. As with Diamonds are Forever, further sensation awaited. This included not only the death of Goldfinger but the satisfactory outcome of Oddjob being extruded at high altitude through an aeroplane window.
Fleming was at the top of his game. Goldfinger was full of energy and the longest of his novels. But his personal life was becoming ragged, his relationship with Ann having reached a state that could kindly be described as one of mutual bewilderment. Increasingly they went their separate ways, which in Fleming’s case took the form of a prolonged trip to the Seychelles in April 1958.
He was travelling on journalistic business for the Sunday Times, the object being to report on a treasure hunt – not just a haphazard quest like his metal-detecting efforts at Creake Abbey in 1953 but the genuine, copper-bottomed article supported by maps, historical research and a share issue with a potential return of £120 million. That the prospector (an ex-officer at Buckingham Palace) genuinely believed he was on to something, and did so with a fervour that by most standards would classify him as mildly insane, made it all the more enticing. The shareholders alone were of interest. As Fleming wrote of one: ‘In 1938 an elephant knelt on his left leg while a tigress chewed off his right. But that is how it is in this story. Even the smallest walk-on parts have a touch of the bizarre.’
Getting to the Seychelles was itself an adventure, involving a twenty-four-hour flight to Bombay followed by a four-day journey by ship. Fleming was delighted by the fact that as they neared shore they were greeted not by seagulls but a large bat. And when filling out the customs declaration, ‘Instead of the usual warning about importing alcohol, agricultural machinery and parrots, I was cautioned that “Passengers must specifically state if they have in their possession OPIATES, ARMS AND AMMUNITION, BASE OR COUNTERFEIT COINS.’ The treasure hunt fitted perfectly into this scenario, carrying as it did a whiff of skulduggery, piracy and subterfuge. But it was the Seychelles themselves that took centre stage. Fleming was absorbed by their colourful history and the eccentric lives of their inhabitants. He noted that the cathedral clock struck twice in case people hadn’t heard it the first time, that it was an offence to carry more than one coconut, and that a local paper had just recorded the case of Regina v Archange Michel (indecent assault). ‘What do you make of that?’ he wrote.
The flora and fauna were equally theatrical, including sang-dragon trees that oozed red sap when cut, cowries twice the size of golf balls that glittered like aquatic jewels, emerald lizards with blood-red toenails, and white terns that flew out to sea in pairs, seemingly with locked arms ‘like perfect skaters on a giant rink of blue ice’. Best of all was the ‘Vallai de Mai’ – which no less an authority than Gordon of Khartoum had located as the Garden of Eden – whose trees bore fruit and flowers that were, as Fleming explained, of ‘grotesque impudicity [. . .] When it is dark, they say that the trees march down to the sea and bathe and then march back up the valley and make massive love under the moon. I can well believe it.’
The result was published in three consecutive issues of the Sunday Times under the title ‘Treasure Hunt in Eden’. Part travelogue, part mystery story and part paean to a romantic outpost on the rim of the British Empire, every paragraph shone with enthusiasm. It was one of his finest pieces of journalism, yet one that for all its energy carried a wistful coda. ‘I could convey no picture of these treasure islands,’ he wrote, ‘without explaining that the bizarre is the norm of a visitor’s life and the vivid highlights of the Seychelles are in extraordinary contrast to the creeping drabness, the lowest-common-denominator atmosphere that is rapidly engulfing us in Britain.’
Determined to keep drabness to a minimum, he embarked on an Italian holiday with Ann, followed by a trip to Monte Carlo where he had arranged a meeting with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis to discuss scripting a film about the casino. Although they reached a verbal agreement Fleming had to turn it down because he was shortly afterwards invited by CBS to write a series of Bond adventures for television. That June he flew to America to discuss matters, but for one reason and another the deal fell through. It was a disappointment but not too much because a further opportunity arrived in November when he was introduced to film producer Kevin McClory who was keen to develop Bond for the big screen.
All in all, life was looking good, and the year had supplied so much novelistic material that it was hard to distil it into a single volume. Accordingly, he decided that Bond’s next outing would best be served by a collection of short stories.
TO GRAHAM HUGHES, ESQ., Goldsmith’s Hall, Foster Lane, Cheapside, E.C.2.
In the course of his research Fleming approached several experts, some of whom found his queries too dubious for their normal course of business. Mr Hughes was among them, and directed Fleming towards a more accommodating firm, Johnson Mattheys.
30th August, 1957
I really am most grateful for the trouble you have taken over my questions, and would you please thank Mr. J. S. Forbes for having provided many of the answers.
I realised that a lot of my queries were most improper ones to address to The Worshipful Company and I confess that your maidenly question marks in answer to some of my murkier questions made me smile.
I do apologise again for all the trouble I have caused you and for the many raised eyebrows there must have been at Goldsmith’s Hall in the past few weeks.
I will now proceed to pester Mr. Roberts of Johnson Mattheys and I hope he will be as indulgent as you have been.
TO S. C. ROBERTS, ESQ., Messrs. Johnson Mattheys, Hatton Garden, W.C.1.
30th August, 1957
Your name has been given to me by Mr. Graham Hughes of Goldsmith’s Hall and I wonder if you would be kind enough to help me. I am writing a novel of suspense in which Gold plays a conspicuous part and I am most anxious to document myself on some out-of-the-way aspects of the metal.
Mr. Hughes has helped me over many of my questions and he suggests that you might be kind enough to educate me on some other aspects of the subject.
I would also greatly appreciate being allowed to watch the actual process of melting miscellaneous gold objects at your refinery. May I call upon you at any time when you have half an hour to spare?
Please forgive me for enlisting your help in these author’s problems but experts in gold are very few and far between.
TO ANN, Goldeneye
Ann refused to come to Jamaica that year. It wasn’t her fear of flying, or the prospect of a stormy crossing by sea, that put her off. Rather, it was the slow disintegration of their marriage. The past few months had been hard for both of them and Ann saw Goldeneye as one source of their woes.
Sunday [early January, 1958]
My darling,
It is all just the same except that everything is bigger and more. The flight was perfect, only five minutes late at Mo Bay. Mrs D’Erlanger was on board with her daughter, which may have helped.1 She seemed quite pleasant and was very queenly with the ground staffs at all the stops. I arrived in a tempest and it has stormed more or less ever since – torrential winds and rains which are going on now and look as if they would go on for ever. Thank God for the book at which I hammer away in between bathing in the rain and sweating around the garden in a macintosh [. . .]The sofas were covered with [stains] as it appears the servants have used the house as their own since I left. Paint peeling off the eaves, chips and cracks all over the floor and not one bottle of marmalade or preserves. So I have had to set to and get in the painters etc. who are still banging away after a week. Noël and company aren’t coming out till April. The Nude is to have a season at San Francisco. Apparently Noël wears a crew cut in it which must look horrible.
Well, that’s what Flemings call a Sitrep, just to show you I’m alive. I can’t write about other things. My nerves are still jangling like church bells and I am completely demoralised by the past month. I think silence will do us both good and let things heal. Please put your health before anything else. Try and put a good face on the house2 and don’t let your hate of it spread to the others or we shall indeed end up a miserable crew, which would be quite ridiculous to say the least of it.
Take endless care of yourself.
XXX
Ian
TO ANN, Goldeneye
The tribulations of Goldeneye aside, Ann resented having to spend time in Kent, where she knew nobody and languished alone while Ian went off happily to play golf. She wanted them to find a new home, away from his old stamping grounds. Fleming was uncertain – Ann had recently spent time in a clinic and was taking a variety of anti-depressants – but he went along anyway. They eventually settled on a house in Sevenhampton, near Swindon, which, after extensions and several years’ building work, had all the attributes they required but managed at the same time to suit neither of them very well.
My love,
At last a letter from you after more than two weeks. They both arrived together – a left and right hook! Well, if life somewhere else will make you happy we must move, as anyway living with an unhappy you is impossible. But do remember that one cannot live by whim alone and chaos is the most expensive as well as the most wearying luxury in the world. And for heaven’s sake don’t hurry. Do let’s take real backbreaking trouble before we spend all this fresh money and have to spend more keeping up the sort of house I suppose you are looking for. And I beg you to have a stream or river in the grounds, I shall simply pine away if we go to live in the middle of a lot of plough with deadly little walks down lanes and dons every weekend.3 But anything, anything to make you smile again and find you somewhere where you will rest and not tear yourself to pieces. I’m terribly worried about your health and I pray that Enton’s prison walls have mended your darling heart and somehow got you off this tragic switchback of pills which I implore you to stop. They have nothing to do with the [Bekesbourne] Palace but are a way of life which is killing you, and me with you because it horrifies me so much. You’ve no idea how they change you – first the febrile, almost hysterical gaiety and then those terrible snores that seem to come from the tomb! Darling, forgive me, but it is so and all I get is the fag end of a person at the end of the day or at weekends. If a new house will help all that let us move as soon as we can and I will have to invent a new kind of life for myself instead of golf which I shall want to play neither with Michael Astor nor Hughie. I’m fed up with other people’s neuroses. I have enough of my own. But don’t pretend that I am always travelling or am always going to travel. One changes and gets older and anyway by next summer I will have seen the world once and for all. Here is different because it is peace and there is that wonderful vacuum of days that makes one work. And do count the cost. Your pot is down to about 70,000 and two more years at 10,000 a year will reduce it to your iron ration of 50 after which we shall just have to live on income. Mama can easily live another ten or twenty years.4 Living on our combined incomes means that we shall not have more than 5000 a year which is as rich as one can be. One can live well on that in one house but not in two. These facts have got to be faced just as it had to be faced that we should leave St Margaret’s quickly.
My darlingest darlingest love get well and write me a happy letter. I would give anything for one. Bless you and hugs and kisses.
TO ANN, Goldeneye
Tuesday [undated]
My sweetheart,
A vulture is sitting on top of the roof above my head. It is squatting on its stomach across the gable like a hen roosting and looks too ridiculous. When I walked out into the garden just now away from my bondage I thought this would be a bad omen and that there would still be no letter from you. I have spent a whole week getting up and peering towards the tray to see if something has arrived. But the funny vulture was a good omen and there was a nice fat packet from you which I have now devoured. I think you manage to write very sweet letters in answer to my vehement ones most of which I always regret when they have gone, and I promise I understand every bit of your point of view. If I FIGHT my case it is just for the same reason as you FIGHT yours. We both feel the other is getting too much of the cake when in fact there’s plenty for both if only we’d sit down peacefully and share it instead of grabbing. I envy you your life of parties and ‘the mind’ and you envy I suppose my life of action and the fun I get from my books. The answer is that compared to most people we are both enviable and lead enviable lives. I perfectly see your point about the house and I only beg that where we finally settle will have something that appeases my savage breast – some outlet for activity, because I am hopeless and like a caged beast in drawing- and dining-rooms and there is nothing I can do about it. It’s instinctive. You used to sympathise with it and in a way I admire it in me, but I realise it must be hell to live with and I can only say that if it has an outlet I can keep it under some sort of control.
I must now go and bathe in the grey sea and then go for a long walk up a mountain to sweat the gloom away. I shall be home in a minute my love. Kisses and kisses and kisses.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
28 June, 1958
My dear Ian,
I have just finished Goldfinger, & have found that it stuck to me like a limpet, or limpet-mine. I think it well up to your best Bond level, full of ingenious invention, & fantasy, & interesting or curious or unfamiliar detail. You certainly needn’t have warned me about the golf. I found the tension of the game tremendous. In fact, I believe you could create extreme anxiety out of a cake-judging competition at a Women’s Institute – one of the cakes would probably be a product of nuclear fission, or of bacterial warfare at least.
I was quite sorry to see the last – and what an exit! – of Oddjob: one had got so used to having him around. I particularly liked the conversation with the gangsters – and of the gangsters – at the conference table. Pussy is a real wit – I should like to read a whole book about her.
I don’t much like the circular saw business. I think it too like a caricature of your previous torture-scenes. It doesn’t (for me) create alarm or suspense – it is too wildly unreal. Surely a circular saw makes far too much noise for any simultaneous talk to be heard? And anatomically I am a little worried. Whizz goes a fly-button – but didn’t other objects get in the way first, or does Bond have undescended testicles?
Couldn’t you dispense with this sort of torture-scene here, and make use instead of the zillionaire’s hypnotic powers? Couldn’t he use them on Bond and silly Tilly, in order to get a hold over them, & get then aboard the westward-bound aircraft? Yes?
I don’t feel that the circular saw produces any frisson in the reader – merely a guffaw. Am I wrong?
Also, p. 111, Colonel Smithers is a fearful bore. Do we need him at all? And if so, could we have his lecturette shortened or omitted? It is terribly unreal to me. Bond had surely only to consult an encyclopedia if he wanted to know about gold. I should be inclined to cut the visit to the Bank altogether.
I enclose a list of notes & queries. I expect Daniel will be sending you more, when he has read the story.
I have corrected your spelling of cabochon, carrosserie, bagagiste, & Alsatian.
Is there any particular reason for writing “Mister” out in full instead of “Mr”?
And what happened to the Claddagh ring? I did hope it would turn up again. I expect Goldfinger melted it down & sent it off to India . . .
Now I fear this letter will look like a picking of holes, or attempted picking of holes, in the stout & brilliant fabric you have woven. Not at all, of course. I only wish it to be as well armoured as possible against the digs of envious reviewers & readers. Speaking for myself, I must say I have enjoyed the proceedings immensely – more, in some ways, than ever before. And, as you know, I send you every possible wish for the utmost success.
I shall look out for the Home Service on 10 July,5 & shall hope to see Q. of S. in the Sunday Times,6 & to see you when you come back, with gold on your fingers, from N.Y.
TO MISS JENNIFER ARMOUR, Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 30 Bedford Square, W.C.1.
Jennifer Armour, Cape’s marketing director, wrote enclosing the proofs of advertisements due to appear in The Bookseller, and also requesting Fleming’s signature in a copy of Goldfinger. It was a present for her brother, who was shortly to turn twenty-one ‘and whose literary education (and consequent behaviour) has been almost entirely confined and influenced by James Bond’. She explained that he had been expelled from both school and the Navy and was ‘a generally Bad Lot, all on account of Bond’.
11th March, 1959
This seems to be a pretty poor 21st Birthday present for what sounds like an expensive young man, but anyway here is the autographed copy. Tell him that both Winston Churchill and I were black sheep once and that, as long as he doesn’t make it a habit, it isn’t a bad way of life up to around the age of 21, which is approximately when my own shade of black dwindled to its present elephant’s breath grey.
Many thanks for the pulls of the advertisements. The long one is very saucy indeed and perhaps you noticed that the News Chronicle also commented on it.
TO BERNARD DARWIN, ESQ., Dormy House Club, Rye, Sussex
In one of his finer authorial moments Fleming managed to dedicate three whole chapters to a game of golf without once losing the reader’s interest. The match, between Bond and Goldfinger, ended in the latter’s defeat despite his having cheated. However, as many golfers pointed out, Goldfinger had theoretically won. It concerned a matter of balls.
8th April, 1959
Thank you very much for your kindly letter and I will now confess that a lot of my cronies at the Royal St. Marks, such as Beck and Hill, say they would have given the match to Goldfinger because he ended the match with the ball he had started with. It is clearly a matter for the Rules of Golf committee and the matter must, of course, be raised officially with Gerald Micklem.
Fleming’s friend Anthony Berry (son of his employer, Lord Kemsley) wrote to say that the journalist Jack Jones would mention Goldfinger in the Western Mail – for which service he, Berry, expected to be rewarded in gold bullion. He had, however, one small criticism concerning wine: ‘But should not Goldfinger have known that Piesporter Goldtropfchen is a Moselle and not a Hock?’
8th April, 1959
I shuddered when I got your note and hastily reached for the book. Within an hour I was talking to Ian Gilmour7 and he also made the point.
It is maddening and I have hastily put in a correction for the next edition they are printing. I had asked my invaluable secretary, Una Trueblood, to check on one or two facts in the manuscript and, in particular, to ring up my wine merchant and ask him for the name of the finest hock he had. When he produced this one I put it in without question. Obviously I must change my wine merchant.
I hope Jack Jones will give it the works in his series and, when he does, an old gold filling from one of my teeth will reach you in return.
When can I come down and visit you both to discuss Kemsley Newspapers and canasta?
TO LEONARD RUSSELL, ESQ., 14 Albion Street, Hyde Park, London, W.2.
Leonard Russell was Literary Editor of the Sunday Times, as well as being a friend of Fleming and a fellow golfer.
9th April, 1959
It really is shameful that you haven’t yet finished “Goldfinger”. I suppose you’re lounging around on a tiger-skin sofa eating a big box of chocs and reading Diana Cooper!
I’m very proud of your performance on the golf course since my lesson. The Royal St. Georges is blushing with pleasure at their newly acquired fame. But there is talk that, in fact, Goldfinger won the match because he began and ended the 18th hole with the same ball and I am being strongly urged to submit the whole matter to the Rules of Golf committee. This I am doing today.
You are missing nothing here and if I was you I should stick to the chocs and the tiger skin.
Love to Dilys and see you both soon I hope.
TO MISS R. N. RENDLE, 48 Hammond Road, Fareham, Hampshire
27th April, 1959
How very kind of you to have written and I am delighted that you are such a firm fan of James Bond. Some of his critics don’t like him because he enjoys himself too much!
I suppose one day James Bond will come to a sticky end but, at the present moment, he is in excellent health and quite able to look after himself. I know he will be encouraged to stay alive in view of your interest in him!
I enclose a dreadful photograph of myself which you have my permission to put on the fire.
TO JACK JONES, ESQ., The Western Mail, Cardiff
29th April, 1959
I have been away for ten days, but I must write immediately to thank you sincerely for the extremely kind things you wrote about “Goldfinger” in the Western Mail. It was wonderfully encouraging appreciation by somebody who would not normally stoop to my kind of book, and I am most grateful.
I quite see your point that the book should have ended before the last two chapters but I’m afraid I had no further plans for Mr. Goldfinger and I am a devotee of the corny ending where the villain dies and the hero gets his girl – though in this case it wasn’t really more than half a girl! But, in the end, I was sorry to see Goldfinger go. He was a so much nicer man than James Bond!
Again with my warmest thanks for your most kindly critique.
TO THE HON. ANTHONY BERRY
29th April, 1959
I must say you and Mr. Jack Jones did me proud and I have written today to thank him.
Thank you, too, for wasting so much space on me. Unfortunately I have looked in vain for the gold filling and I can’t trace it. I fear it must have been melted down to make my wedding ring for Anne.
However, I’m sure you will agree that gratitude is worth far more than gold bullion, so here it comes.
TO SIR FREDERICK HOYER MILLAR, G.C.M.G., C.V.O., Permanent Under Secretary, The Foreign Office, Downing Street, S.W.1.
Anticipating problems with prospective film or television deals, Fleming had written to the Foreign Office requesting assurance that his books did not breach security guidelines: ‘My books are fantastic and, having had experience in these things, I have taken pains to see that they would not give offence to my old friends in the Intelligence world. I also know from senior members of that world that, far from causing offence, the adventures are followed with affectionate interest tinged with hilarity by members of “The Firm”.’ On receiving clearance he gave fulsome thanks.
3rd June, 1959
Forgive me for not having written before, but I only got back from abroad yesterday.
First of all, thank you very much indeed for your swift and kindly response to my rather bizarre request, but I am horrified to hear that you are one of my “ardent readers”. I shall have to put up my sights a bit higher in future!
I think your suggested formula is very reasonable and goes as far as could be expected. It should be perfectly adequate for the film and television people and of course you can take it for obvious reasons – not least of which is that I am still a member of the special branch of the R.N.V.S.R . [Royal Navy Volunteer Supplementary Reserve] – that I shall keep a sharp eye on any film or television production which may eventuate.
It would be very kind if you could send me a formal note on the lines you suggest.
When next we meet I will invite you to seal this pact in James Bond’s latest stimulant. This, on the lines of pink gin, is pink Steinhager – a tough Austrian schnapps that definitely quickens the trigger finger!
TO J. H. DOVE, ESQ., 12 Selborne Terrace, Heaton, Bradford 9
4th June, 1959
Thank you very much for your letter of May 12th and, in theory, I entirely agree with you.
In fact, I tried hard to cut out these “he saids” and “she saids”, leaving in only those which are necessary for sense and continuity.
A matter of taste comes in here and I do not like dialogue to be as curt and bald as it often is in modern writing and I prefer “he said” to “Bond said” unless it is necessary to indicate the identity of the speaker.
However, as I write my next book, my knuckles will smart from your cane and I will see if I can do better.
TO STANLEY BOWLER, ESQ., F.R.P.S., F.R.S.A., 37 Burton Road, London, S.W.9.
While replying to Mr Bowler on a matter of photography, Fleming’s mention of Norman Lewis may well have stemmed from the fact that he had recently asked him to report on Cuba where, despite official reports to the contrary, he was certain trouble was brewing.
4th June, 1959
Very many thanks for your extremely perceptive and interesting letter of May 17th.
Of course you are quite right and I will confess that, although I discussed the matter at some length with my friend who is a distinguished practitioner of your craft, Mr. Norman Lewis, the result was very much of a fudge about which I had many qualms.
Now that you mention your alternative, it is a maddeningly obvious solution to the problem and one of which I had sufficient knowledge to make use after consulting with an expert such as yourself.
Should I have cause to dabble again in photography, I shall certainly take advantage of your kind invitation to consult you.
In conclusion, I am most grateful for your valuable letter and I apologise for insulting the intelligence of yourself and countless other experts in your field.
TO DR G. R. C. D. GIBSON, 1 The Green, Anstey, Leicester
Dr Gibson, one of Fleming’s most diligent motoring correspondents, was delighted to see that Bond had graduated to an Aston Martin and enclosed a card for the Aston Martin Owners Club: ‘I’m sure he would enjoy being a member of the A.M.O.C. although I’m not so sure that we would feel comfortable at having him around!’ He had much enjoyed Goldfinger but ‘although not a psycho-pathologist, I think it is slightly naughty of you to change a criminal Lesbian into a clinging honey-bun (to be bottled by Bond) in the last chapter.’ Incidentally, why didn’t Fleming try an adventure about Formula 1 racing? ‘Nobody has yet written a good novel on the subject.’
23rd June, 1959
Thank you very much for your splendid letter of June 17th and for your kind invitation for James Bond to join the A.M.O.C.
Since neither Bond nor his biographer are owners of an Aston Martin, I can do no more than pass your invitation on to the head of Admin. at the Secret Service from whose transport pool the DB III was drawn.
Incidentally, I don’t agree that the car should be described as the “Mark III”. That reads a bit too stuffily!
I also disagree with your penultimate paragraph, couched though it is in such graphic language. Pussy only needed the right man to come along and perform the laying on of hands in order to cure her psycho-pathological malady.
I have in mind a story with motor racing as its background, but it isn’t quite along the lines you helpfully suggest. I will try and get around to it in due course and shall not be surprised if I then receive a sheaf of acid complaints from experts such as yourself.8
Again with many thanks for cheering up my morning at the office.
TO WREN HOWARD
The architect Erno Goldfinger, whose modernist structures were making their mark on London’s skyline, was unhappy that Fleming had used his name. Fleming did not know him personally, but his record working for the Daily Worker and the British Communist Party ensured a vigorous response.
Goldeneye, Oracabessa, Jamaica, B.W.I.
Tuesday [undated]
Dear Bob,
Many thanks for your letter and first of all may I send warm congratulations to you all and particularly Michael [Howard] for the splendid production of Goldfinger which has just reached me? Michael has done wonderfully by all my books but this is by far his best and the cover is a stroke of genius. By the same token please pay ten guineas from my account as a present to the individual who bowled out the Canasta mistake. This would have cost me dear and I am most grateful to whoever it was. Please tell him so.
Okay for Foyles and many thank for the success.
Don’t stand any nonsense from this Golden-Finger. There may be few in the UK telephone directory but get your sec to ring up the US information people at the embassy and count the number in the New York directory. Ditto the German embassy with their telephone books. And sue his solicitors for the price of the copy you sent him. Tell him that if there’s any more nonsense I’ll put an erratum slip and change the name throughout to GOLDPRICK and give the reason why.
Hope you do well with the book and I’ll be back around the tenth to lend a hand. I have sent William a note about progress on my next.
Regards to Jonathan and all.
The exact nature of Goldfinger’s complaint remains uncertain, but Michael Howard thought it worthy of serious consideration, given that the Daily Express was about to serialise the book. As he replied on 13 March, ‘I hated like mad giving way to Mr Goldfinger but in your absence and time being so short I was disinclined to take the responsibility of standing firm and perhaps having trouble with the serialisation. If anything had been done to cause the Express to delay publication they might easily have cancelled the deal which would have cost you too much money. We had discovered quite a bit about the gentleman in question. None of it was very pleasant and all of it made us unusually wary.’ Goldfinger was placated with an apology and six free copies of the offending tome.
When Fleming flew to Jamaica in 1959 he had already made a head start on his forthcoming portfolio of short stories. Among the host of peculiarities that had caught his mind during his trip to the Seychelles the previous year was the stingray – or more specifically its tail. Possession of these fearsome items was strictly regulated: citizens were forbidden to own a specimen more than three feet long, it had to be bound at each end and could only be used as a walking stick. As Fleming pointed out, in the wrong hands they could be vicious weapons: ‘A single lash with the five foot tail can maim for life.’
Fleming used it to dramatic effect in ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, which he wrote shortly after his return to Britain in 1958. Here, Bond is on leave in the Seychelles when he encounters an American millionaire, Milton Krest, cruising the islands in search of rare specimens for his tax-dodge charity, the Krest Foundation. The object of his attentions when Bond meets him is a pink-striped fish – the Hildebrand Rarity – to acquire which he is happy to poison great stretches of ocean. A brash, brutal man, he has a trophy wife named Liz whom he likes to keep in order with the aid of ‘the Corrector,’ a three-foot stingray tail (unbound) that hangs on the bedroom wall. When one day he is found dead with the Rarity thrust down his throat it is clear that his wife was the culprit but the incident is hushed up as an accident.
The expat community of the Seychelles also provided a source of inspiration. ‘There are innumerable wafer-thin “Colonels” living on five hundred a year [who] are uninteresting people, the flotsam and jetsam of our receding Empire,’ Fleming wrote, ‘who put nothing, not even a touch of the authentic beach-comber back into the haven they have chosen to whine out their lives in.’ He gave a milder but no less scathing portrait of the claustrophobic nature of colonial life in ‘Quantum of Solace’, a cautionary tale in the Somerset Maugham style1 that describes the fate of a glamorous air stewardess who marries a shy diplomat stationed in Bermuda, only to find after she embarks on an adulterous affair that her seemingly unworldly spouse has a fine line in revenge. The quantum of solace to which the title refers is the measure of love that allows a marriage to survive; when it reaches zero there is no hope. Perhaps this was a reflection on the state of Fleming’s own relationship, but more likely it showed his increasing despondency with Bond and life in general. Having listened to the tale, as recounted by the Governor of the Bahamas, Bond leaves for his next task – a meeting with the FBI and US coastguards – in anticipation of an event ‘edged with boredom and futility’.
Like ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, ‘Quantum of Solace’ had also been written the previous year, so with these two stories in his pocket he only had to come up with a few more. But even then little ingenuity was required: he simply plundered some of the ideas he had submitted to CBS for a potential television series. Not that they were any the worse for that. They included ‘From A View To A Kill,’ concerning a Soviet assassin, based in a forest outside Paris, who targets motorcycle couriers working for SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe); ‘Risico’, a drug-running tale set in Italy, with a spectacular chase around Venice’s Lido that involves one of Bond’s pursuers stepping on an unexploded mine; and ‘Man’s Work’, the story of a female archer who seeks to assassinate an ex-Nazi who has killed her parents for the sake of their Caribbean estate. It did not matter that they were old material. Each of them was vivid, heartfelt, well researched – for ‘Man’s Work’ Fleming consulted his weapons expert Geoffrey Boothroyd about bows and arrows2 – and above all they had his natural feel for place and atmosphere.
Yet Fleming wasn’t sure about them. In a letter to Ann he said that at least one of the stories wasn’t worth publishing. Later, the polite yet perspicacious William Plomer also had some thoughts about the direction Fleming was taking. Of one line in ‘Man’s Work’ he commented: ‘These “random thoughts” are diverting. Something new. One never supposed that Bond’s thoughts were ever “random”. It makes him almost human.’ And there were, as so often, doubts about the title. Fleming’s first suggestion was The Rough with the Smooth, which eventually transmuted into For Your Eyes Only, from one of the stories that itself had started life as ‘Man’s Work’.
When Fleming returned from Goldeneye that spring he was faced with a variety of tasks. The first was to write an account of his friendship with Raymond Chandler, who had died earlier in the year. After several rejections it was eventually published by London Magazine in April 1959. The second priority was to reorganise his position with the Sunday Times. Lord Kemsley had sold the paper to Roy Thomson in June the previous year, thus terminating Fleming’s advantageous arrangement. Thanks to his numerous contacts, among them the editor C. D. Hamilton, he was paid a fee of £1,000 for a set number of articles per annum, and even retained a seat on the editorial board. Less comfortable was his situation with The Book Collector. Ever since he had assumed outright ownership in 1955 there had been squabbles between himself and Robert Harling, the modernisers, and John Hayward and John Carter, the traditionalists, with Percy Muir hovering uncertainly in the middle. As was becoming clear, a compromise between the two sides was unlikely, and their correspondence was full of petty misunderstandings accompanied by petulant threats to resign.
These, though, were run-of-the-mill matters compared to a sudden wave of interest in Bond’s screen potential. An American producer, Maurice Winnick, who had links to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contacted Fleming on his return from Goldeneye with a view to adapting 007 for television. Then there was Fleming’s old friend Ivar Bryce who, in a casual, millionaire-ish manner, had decided to become a film producer. By chance he struck lucky with his first offering The Boy and the Bridge, directed by Kevin McClory, which came out in July. With a view to expanding his career he proposed to found a film studio, Xanadu, and wrote Fleming a personal cheque for $50,000 worth of shares in the company in return for rights to a Bond story. His attorney, Ernie Cuneo, visited London in April – ‘charging round like a bull in a china shop knocking down the Wardour Street and Elstree inmates like ninepins’, Fleming wrote fondly to William Stephenson – and later dashed off a draft plot.
None of the approaches were solid. Winnick’s television schemes fell away, as did Bryce’s plan for a Xanadu studio – Fleming never cashed the cheque, knowing Bryce’s undependable ways – but a deal with McClory remained on the cards, and hope alone was enough to raise his spirits. So much so that in October he wrote an article for The Spectator headed immodestly ‘If I were Prime Minister’.
Fleming’s prescription for Britain – ‘I am a totally non-political animal’ – was a hefty dose of whimsy into which had been stirred a surprising amount of good sense. He recommended that the Isle of Wight be turned into a vast pleasuredrome of casinos and maisons de tolérance. He would pass laws to ‘stop people being ashamed of themselves’, would abolish overtime, appoint a Minister of Leisure to ensure the population enjoyed itself, and would reform men’s clothing, ‘which I regard as out-of-date, unhygienic and rather ridiculous’. He would also introduce a minimum wage, abolish expense accounts ‘and other forms of financial chicanery’, promote the crafts and apprenticeships, reform the Press, encourage a constant flow of emigration within the Commonwealth and replace petrol cars with electric ones. His government’s banner publication would be a quarterly called Hazard that provided unvarnished statistics on the dangers of processed food, alcohol, tobacco and shoddy car manufacture, as well as providing the correct odds for football pools and Premium Bonds. This, he said, would allow him to face with a clear conscience the fact that, ‘from the Exchequer’s point of view, the most valuable citizen is the man who drinks or smokes himself to death’.
All of these, he admitted, were small things. The big things were time-wasting, ‘too vast and confused for one man’s brain’. Atomic weapons, for example, were just one of the matters he would leave to be decided by his Ministers and ‘the wave of common sense which, it seems to me, by a process of osmosis between peoples rather than politicians, is taking rapid and healthy control of the world’.
Nuclear warfare, of course, was one of the great fears that underpinned British life during the Cold War. Nevertheless, Fleming was disingenuous in his claim that atomic weapons were too big for the consideration of just one man. He was considering them quite thoroughly for his next book, Thunderball.
TO JOHN HAYWARD, ESQ., C.B.E., 19 Carlyle Mansions, London, S.W.3.
As part of his ongoing wrangle over The Book Collector Fleming raised a point about payment of a bill.
17th December, 1958
I was rather surprised at your suggestion this morning that I should pay out of my own pocket £42 for the auditors’ fee for The Book Collector and, on thinking it over, I am really not quite clear what your argument is. The company paid its own auditors’ fee last year – £63. Why should there now be a change?
You say that the company is running at a loss and that I should do something to reduce this loss on the grounds that you and Percy both give services to the company without remuneration.
Let us be clear about this. There is no reason why you and Percy should give services to The Book Collector without remuneration. We have some £2,000 in the bank and there is no reason why you and Percy should not be paid appropriate fees like any other contributors.
As to the periodical running at a loss, the object of our decision last week to increase our advertising rates was to correct this situation.
My contribution to The Book Collector was to save it from extinction and pay the costs of its foundation as a company and I have never pretended to be of more use to the company than as an occasional host.
You say that Percy also agrees that I should pay the auditors’ fee. If that is so, which I have yet to hear from him, I shall at once reconsider my position vis-à-vis The Book Collector and arrange by one means or another to sever any connection with it.
But these are strong words and I hope you will agree that the periodical can continue on its way in its previous cheerful, if rather happy-go-lucky, fashion.
To which Hayward replied, ‘You say that you were “rather surprised” – you bet I was rather surprised too! I innocently supposed that you would jump at the opportunity of lending a hand.’ He also pointed out that contributors were never paid, except when they were in the direst of financial positions. And so it all went on.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
12th April, 1959
Dear I,
I’ve greatly enjoyed The Hildebrand Rarity. “Whacko!”3 seems the best comment. I found Liz a little underdone at first, but she certainly redeemed herself in the end. A few stray comments: [. . .]
The ending is excellent – tantalizing. I hope Bond got the Corrector as a souvenir – and managed to remember to collect the tail of the sting-ray he killed before embarking for Chagrin. (I’m not quite happy about the single palm tree – I feel it would have collapsed under so many boobies, &c. Could there perhaps be a ruined “installation” of some sort left over from the War? It would lend atmosphere. Otherwise Chagrin suggests slightly one of those comic desert islands so hackneyed of caricaturists. Or do I fuss & quibble too much?) The story has been much enjoyed by your g.r. (gentle reader).
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
14th April, 1959
Thank you a thousand times for the encouraging and hilarious examination of “The Hildebrand Rarity”. You really are marvellously prompt at doing my homework for me and I shall, of course, slavishly obey your instructions and amend accordingly.
Michael Howard wants to read it, so could you please pass it on to him and I will, in due course, send a lorry to collect it.
The Spectator has sent back my piece about Chandler saying it is too long for them. I dare say Shakespeare used to run into this sort of trouble, but I shall now send it on to Encounter as quick as I can before the whole subject goes stale.
I am in the grips of the most ghastly series of tele-folk and I have two meetings at Capes with these people this afternoon. I suppose one day I shall have to accept the basket of golden coconuts they persist in offering me, or at any rate saying that perhaps they might offer me in certain circumstances. Ah me!
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
Next came ‘From a View to a Kill’.
18th April, 1959
My dear I,
Terribly exciting! How do you do it? Brilliant opening – excellent Bond’s-eye-view of Paris (which was overdue) – a nice plain name for the girl for a change – tension well maintained – Excellent climax. Very few quibbles but . . . [Amongst Plomer’s points, which mostly concerned Fleming’s erroneous descriptions of flowers was: ‘Brown squirrels are generally, I think, called red squirrels.’]
I take off my crash-helmet to you. I can’t wait for the next story – at least, I can – I must – because I’m about to make a little sortie to Bavaria, & expect to be back by mid-May. By then you will have written several more, I hope.
Unless told to the contrary I’ll pass the typescript on to Michael Howard before I go.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
‘Risico’, which was perhaps the story with which Fleming felt least happy, followed.
12th May, 1959
Following the straight left I delivered about two weeks ago and which will be waiting for you on your return, here comes a nasty right hook in the shape of the fourth short story of the bunch of five.
My suggestion is that we should put these four together in a book with the fifth, “Quantum of Solace”, in the middle of them, and call it:
THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH.
Five Secret Exploits
of
James Bond.
I suggest starting with “From A View To A Kill” then “Man’s Work”, then “Quantum of Solace”, “Risiko”[sic] and finishing with “The Hildebrand Rarity”.
I have heard nothing from Michael on the first two you shunted on to him but you might care to suggest to him that we could discuss the whole project when I get back from Venice, where I am taking Anne on Thursday, around June 1st.
Sorry to shovel these two heavy spadefuls on to the old beetle’s back but that definitely completes your stint for this year.
13th May, 1959
My dear I,
I placed “Risico” on the top of the mounds of typescript awaiting me, & read it with my usual keen curiosity to see what you have written. The Italian setting makes a nice change & the sandy purlieus of the Lido are nicely touched in. The business of the Grundig chair is adroit – I think Bond ought to have noticed it, & smelt a rat if not a grundig. A nice moment when the pursuer is blown up – another when the central harpooner is seen to be Colombo. Perhaps because Colombo turns out to be so cosy & cordial, the tension is much relaxed, and the climax is (to me) less exciting than it ought to be. In fact, I think it the least exciting of the collection of short stories so far. Would it perhaps be possible to keep the reader in suspense a bit longer by making Colombo keep Bond in suspense a bit longer? But I don’t suppose you want to alter or revise what you have written, & perhaps I am being too fussy. But in spite of the new setting (which I’m all in favour of) I feel that perhaps this story is a little too close to formula and not quite rich enough in those little sardonic or mondain inventions or details you use so well.
I’ll pass the typescript on to Michael Howard. [. . .]
I enclose a little bunch of quibbles wh. I hope will be useful.
p. 6, l. 4 up – “wry sense of humour”? The word “wry” is terribly overworked by fictionists at present, & is commonly attached to a smile, laugh, or grin. I don’t like it any better attached to a sense of humour. I think what you mean is that M. was ironically conscious of his obsessions, or that he could regard them with a half-humoured detachment. Yes? Please not “wry” [. . .]
p. 54, l. 4–6 “sickening thud.” The most worn of all trite expressions. Even “horrible thump” would be better. “Spread-eagled” seems also a bit worn, antique and heraldic. Why not say “and lay in a grotesque heap, with one dislocated leg protruding”? Or something of that sort.
Now I think you must check your Italian spelling [. . .]
17th May, 1959
My dear Ian,
Man’s Work is most exciting, & I’ve much enjoyed it. I enclose a few comments.
I am passing the story on to Michael together with your plan for the book & your suggestion about discussing the project when you return. I like the order in which you have arranged the contents. The title is not, I think, electrifying.
I hope you’re both enjoying yourselves very much. Don’t step on any land-mines in the purlieus of the Lido, and if you can think of a better title . . . You could perhaps use Man’s Work as the title, keeping the sub-title about Five Secret Exploits.
TO MISS NOELA MONEYPENNY, 83 Strong Avenue, Graceville, Brisbane
25th June, 1959
Your letter has finally caught up with me here and I am very amused by your query.
I really can’t remember how I came to give M.’s secretary your name. It seemed to me a pretty and unusual one and I expect that was the only reason.
I have just had a look in the London telephone directory where I find there are three Moneypenny’s, all apparently male. I expect, if you looked into the matter, you would find that it is a very old Anglo-Saxon name.
Anyway, thank you for your charming letter and I am sorry I can’t give you any more interesting or romantic reason for borrowing your name.
TO WREN HOWARD
In the hope of giving the firm a much-needed injection of vigour, Cape’s board had appointed an American editor named Robert Knittel. His tenure was short-lived, but he lasted long enough to persuade Fleming to put his film interests in the hands of a professional agent, rather than relying on his own haphazard efforts.
Dear Bob,
Encouraged by Robert Knittel and pestiferated by conflicting interests and bids, I have now placed all my film, television and dramatic rights in the hands of M.C.A. Mr. Laurence Evans of their office here is the man who has taken me under his wing and if and when you get any of these maddening letters from independent producers and other fly-by-nights, would you please pass them straight on to him.
Bob Knittel said that if I got married to M.C.A. he would write a letter to Jules Stein requesting a red, or at least a pale pink carpet treatment for me, and it would be very kind indeed of Bob if he could do this so that M.C.A. from the top to bottom knows that I have powerful friends and that they have acquired a potential diamond mine!
Sorry to bother you with all this shilly-shallying but it is a great relief to me to have rid myself of this mink-coated incubus.
If Mr. Winnick re-appears on the scene, which I think improbable, would you please refer him also to Mr. Evans.
TO WREN HOWARD
As early as July 1959 Fleming was getting himself in a tangle over film rights, the question being whether or not in a previous agreement with the Rank Organisation he had signed away Bond in his entirety along with the rights to Moonraker. On 1 July he wrote to Wren Howard, ‘It does seem to me that there is a nasty delayed action bomb ticking away beneath my chair so far as future film and television rights in “James Bond” are concerned’. The matter was eventually clarified, but not before Fleming sent a sharp note to Cape.
15th July, 1959
Dear Bob,
I am rather appalled by the contents of your letter of July 14th and I am very surprised that the strongly adverse opinion of [law firm] Rubin stein Nash about the “Moonraker” contract was not reported to me way back in April and May.
It was quite by chance that I myself checked on the “Moonraker” contract and raised just the points of Rubinstein Nash in my letter of July 1st.
In the meantime, and before signing up with M.C.A., I have sold a one-time television spectacular in “From Russia With Love” to Hubbell Robinson Associates [an offshoot of CBS] and I have also sold the rights to a full length feature film of James Bond of which I am now doing the script. This was sold to Xanadu Productions, an independent producer belonging to a friend of mine.
I regard this as a very serious matter indeed unless we can find some way out of the mess. What do you advise?
There seems to me to be two possibilities:
a) Either go ahead and hope that Rank won’t notice but, in this case, am I being fair to the two recent purchasers and shall I not be placing myself as well as them in a position of considerable jeopardy?
b) Would it be best to write a nonchalant letter to Miss Joyce Briggs along the lines of the enclosed?
I must say that, with the best will in the world, I am surprised that this contract with Ranks was not more carefully negotiated by Jonathan Capes and that I was not informed earlier of the serious situation revealed in April and May of this year, despite the fact that we had considerable correspondence about similar doubts in the case of the “Casino Royale” contract.
TO M. HOWARD
1st October, 1959
Dear Michael,
I have thought over the question of a title and I rather like ‘FOR YOUR EYES ONLY’. This used to be stamped on secret papers in the early days of the war and is still occasionally in use.
If you like this, it could perhaps go on the jacket above a really splendid colour photograph extended to the borders of a fine rule human eye (with a grey iris – this is James Bond’s). The pinkish surround could then be bled upwards and downwards into, say, a pale grey, on which the lettering could be superimposed.
I think this could be made handsome and startling.
If you like this idea, perhaps we could re-title ‘Man’s Work’ accordingly and start the book with it. If you could let me have that story back I could write in an appropriate sentence or two embodying the title.
TO M. HOWARD
26th October, 1959
Dear Michael,
Here is Dicky Chopping’s proof which I discussed with you on the telephone. Personally, I think it is absolutely splendid and I’m so glad you are inclined to agree, even without seeing it.
I also enclose Dicky Chopping’s comments for your professional eye. Will you please take it all on from here with Dicky, as I have got to be away for the whole of November?
My only immediate comments, with which I think Dicky agrees, are that the colours should be as bold as he can possibly make them and I’m prepared to sacrifice the grey-blue of James Bond’s eyes for a brighter blue if Dicky would prefer it.
I explained to Dicky that logically “For Your Eyes Only” should be stamped on a portion of a document – at the top of it and not interfering with the text – and I enclose a draft of how this might look on a real document and with words which would, in fact, be appropriate to my story. The title should be red and perhaps, if it amused Dicky, rather fuzzy as if it really were a rubber stamp.
I really do think Dicky is a most ingenious chap. If he were wise he would put himself entirely in our hands and we could keep him constantly supplied with exciting work.
Over to you.
P.S. Having dictated a draft scrap for Dicky, I think I had better leave it to you and him how and where it, or part of it, is used in his design.
TO D. N. DAVIES, ESQ., Messrs. Lentheric, 17 Old Bond Street, W.1.
D. N. Davies, of the toiletry specialists Lentheric, wrote to congratulate Fleming for mentioning his firm’s products and enclosed a sample for his delectation. En passant, he mentioned that his wife had worked with Fleming in Naval Intelligence during the war.
10th December, 1959
Thank you very much indeed for your kind letter of December 2nd and for the fine Lentheric travelling kit you were kind enough to send me. I am glad to see that the case leaves plenty of room for a Beretta!
As a matter of fact, it is not James Bond who uses your, or any other, shaving lotions. I am ashamed to say that it is very often a subsidiary character or occasionally a villain. But we must assume that, even with Lentheric, all your customers can’t be heroes!
I do indeed remember your wife. Patricia Trehearne was by far the prettiest girl in the whole of Naval Intelligence and she brought a light of varying intensity into all our eyes. It is only right that she should have entered into such a fragrant union with the head man at Lentheric. Please give her my warmest regards.
Again with many thanks for your kindly inspiration.
‘Not many people knew Chandler, so I will not apologise for the triviality of our correspondence. It fitted in with our relationship – the half-amused, ragging relationship of two writers working the same thin, almost-extinct literary seam, who like each other’s work.’
Ian Fleming, London Magazine, December 1959
When Raymond Chandler published his first story in 1933 it was a defining moment in his career. ‘After that,’ he wrote, ‘I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.’ Much the same could have been said of Fleming, and indeed their lives followed strangely parallel courses. Born in Chicago, 1888, Chandler was educated in Britain at Dulwich College – even took British citizenship – and worked in a variety of jobs that included journalism and a spell at the Admiralty, before finding his true metier. By the time the two men met, in 1955, Chandler was famous for his punchy crime books starring private eye Philip Marlowe, the most recent of which (appropriately titled The Long Goodbye) had come out in 1953. But, at the age of sixty-six, he was in decline. Plagued throughout his life by alcoholism and depression, he reached a nadir following the death of his wife in December 1954. After a botched suicide attempt in February 1955 he sold his home in La Jolla, California, and returned to Britain.
It was in May 1955, at a lunch given by the poet Stephen Spender and his wife Natasha, that the two authors’ paths crossed. Fleming admired Chandler for his naked display of bereavement but at the same time was fascinated by the picture of decaying genius that he presented. ‘He must have been a very good-looking man,’ he recorded, ‘but the good, square face was puffy and unkempt with drink. In talking he never ceased making ugly, Hapsburg lip grimaces while his head stretched away from you, looking along his right or left shoulder as if you had bad breath. When he did look at you he saw everything and remembered days later to criticise the tie or shirt you had been wearing. Everything he said had authority . . .’
They had much in common: they enjoyed the same writers, patronised the same bookseller, Mr Francis of Prince’s Arcade, and were prone to the same moments of self-doubt. When Fleming lent him a copy of Moonraker Chandler rang a few days later to say how much he had liked it and to ask if a few words of praise would help. For Fleming, who was undergoing a crisis of confidence, it was just the boost he needed. ‘Rather unattractively’, he wrote, ‘I took him up on this suggestion . . .’
TO CHANDLER
26th May, 1955
Your elegant writing paper makes you sound very much at home, and I shall call you up next week and see if you would like to walk round the corner and pay us a visit.
Incidentally a good restaurant in your neighbourhood is Overton’s, directly opposite Victoria station. Book a table and go upstairs where you will find an enchanting Victorian interior and the best pâté maison in London.
I wouldn’t think of asking you to write to me about Moonraker but if you happen to feel in a mood of quixotic generosity, a word from you which I could pass on to my publishers would make me the fortune which has so far eluded me.
Incidentally, The Spectator is almost girlishly thrilled that you will do The Riddle of the Sands for them and the things you said to me and I published about Prince’s Bookshop have brought Francis a flood of new business. So the impact you are having on London is that of Father Christmas in Springtime.
4th June, 1955
I cannot imagine what I can say to you about your books that will excite your publisher. What I do say in all sincerity is that you are probably the most forceful and driving writer, of what I suppose still must be called ‘thrillers’ in England.
Peter Cheyney wrote one good book, I thought, called Dark Duet, and another fairly good one, but his pseudo-American tough guy stories always bored me. There was also James Hadley Chase, and I think the less said of him the better. Also, in spite of the fact that you have been everywhere and seen everything, I cannot help admiring your courage in tackling the American scene . . . Some of your stuff on Harlem in Live and Let Die, and everything on St Petersburg, Florida, seems to be quite amazing for a foreigner to accomplish.
If this is any good to you would you like me to have it engraved on a gold slab?
It was not only good but excellent, and the imprimatur of such an established author gave the Bond novels the impetus they needed. Fleming appreciated it wholeheartedly.
TO CHANDLER
6th June, 1955
These are words of such gold that no supporting slab is needed and I am passing the first sentence on to Macmillan’s in New York and Cape’s here, and will write my appreciation in caviar when the extra royalties come in.
Seriously, it was extraordinarily kind of you to have written as you did and you have managed to make me feel thoroughly ashamed of my next book [Diamonds are Forever] which is also set in America, but in an America of much more fantasy than I allowed myself in Live and Let Die.
There’s a moratorium at home at the moment as the Duke of Westminster1 (whom may God preserve) has ordered us to paint the outside of our house and the whole thing is hung with cradles and sounds of occasional toil.
But they will be gone in a few days’ time and I hope you will be one of the first to darken our now gleaming doorway.
TO CHANDLER
29th June, 1955
Just to remind you that you are having lunch with us on Thursday, 30th June, at one o’clock.
Victoria Square is about three hundred yards away from you, quite close to Victoria Station – or to Buckingham Palace, whichever way you look at it.
Apart from my wife Anne, there will be a friend of mine, Duff Dunbar a brilliant lawyer and one of your fans; Rupert Hart-Davis, the best young publisher in England who does the crime reviews for “Time and Tide” in his spare time. If anyone else comes along I will warn you but it is certainly no heavy-weight affair and nobody will say: “How do you think up those wonderful plots Mr. Chandler?”
Despite living in nearby Eaton Square, Chandler proved an elusive guest. When at last he accepted an invitation to lunch, the occasion was not a success. ‘Our small dining room was over-crowded. Chandler was a man who was shy of houses and “entertaining” and our conversation was noisy and about people he did not know. His own diffident and rather halting manner of speech made no impact. He was not made a fuss of and I am pretty sure he hated the whole affair.’
That Chandler attended at all was probably because Natasha Spender was present. Since the death of his wife he had embarked on a path of semi-platonic promiscuity, transferring his affections from one hopeless object of desire to another. He seemed lost without women, and Natasha was one of many at whom he cast his eye. As Fleming wrote, ‘In the few years I knew him, he was never without some good-looking companion to mother him and try and curb his drinking. These were affectionate and warm-hearted relationships and probably nothing more. Though I do not know this, I suspect that each woman was, in the end, rather glad to get away from the ghost of the other woman who always walked at his side and from the tired man who made sense for so little of the day.’
Chandler left Britain shortly afterwards to begin the process of reapplying for US citizenship, but he returned in 1956. One of his first tasks was to review Diamonds are Forever at the invitation of Leonard Russell, Literary Editor of the Sunday Times. He was ambivalent in his praise and concluded with the words: ‘Let me plead with Mr. Fleming not to allow himself to become a stunt writer, or he will end up no better than the rest of us.’
When Fleming wrote to thank him, Chandler replied:
FROM CHANDLER
11th April, 1956
Dear Ian,
Thank you so much for your letter of Wednesday and if the payment for my outstanding review had been received a little earlier I should have been able to eat three meals a day.
I thought my review was no more than you deserved considering your position on the SUNDAY TIMES and I tried to write it in such a way that the good part could be quoted and the bad parts left out. After all, old boy, there had to be some bad parts. I think you will have to make up your mind what kind of a writer you are going to be. You could be almost anything except that I think you are a bit of a sadist!
I am not in any Hampstead hospital. I am at home and if they ever put me in a hospital again I shall walk out leaving corpses strewn behind me, except pretty nurses.
As for having lunch with you, with or without butler, I can’t do it yet – because even if I were much better than I am I should be having lunch with ladies.
TO CHANDLER
27th April, 1956
Dear Ray,
Many thanks for the splendid Chandleresque letter. Personally I loved your review and thought it was excellent as did my publishers, and as I say it was really wonderful of you to have taken the trouble.
Probably the fault about my books is that I don’t take them seriously enough and meekly accept having my head ragged off about them in the family circle. If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond. You after all write ‘novels of suspense’ – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.
But I have taken your advice to heart and will see if I can’t order my life so as to put more feeling into my typewriter.
Incidentally, have you read A Most Contagious Game, by Samuel Grafton, published by Rupert Hart-Davis?
Sorry about lunch even without a butler. I also know some girls and will dangle one in front of you one of these days.
I had no idea you were ill. If you are, please get well immediately. I am extremely ill with sciatica.
FROM CHANDLER
1st May, 1956
Dear Ian,
I am leaving London on May 11th and should very much like to see you before I go. I suggest that we have lunch together at one of your better Clubs if you can arrange it. I don’t think you do yourself justice about James Bond and I did not think that I did quite do you justice in my review of your book, because anyone who writes as dashingly as you do, ought, I think, to try for a little higher grade. I have just re-read Casino Royale and it seems to me that you have disimproved with each book.
I read several books by Samuel Grafton, but the one you mention I don’t know; I will order it.
I don’t want any girls dangling in front of me, because my girls do their own dangling and they would be extremely bitter to have you interfere.
You know what you can do with your sciatica don’t you?
FROM CHANDLER
9th June, 1956
I didn’t like leaving England without saying good-bye to the few friends I knew well enough to care about, but then I don’t like saying good-bye at all, especially when it might be quite a long time before I come back. As you probably know, I long overstayed the six months allowed, but I had a compelling reason, even if I get hooked for British income tax. I am also likely to lose half my European royalties, which isn’t funny. It’s all a little obscure to me, but there it is. And it doesn’t matter whether your stay in England is broken half a dozen times. If the time adds up to over six months within the fiscal year, you are it.
I am looking forward to your next book. I am also looking forward to my next book.
I rather liked New York this time, having heretofore loathed its harshness and rudeness. For one thing the weather has been wonderful, only one hot day so far and that not unbearable. I have friends here, but not many. Come to think of it I haven’t many anywhere. Monday night I am flying back to California and this time I hope to stick it out and make some kind of a modest but convenient home there.
I am wondering what happened to all the chic pretty women who are supposed to be typical of New York. Damned if I’ve seen any of them. Perhaps I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I do have a feeling that New York is being slowly downgraded.
Please remember me to Mrs. Fleming if you see her and if she remembers me (doubtful). And how is His Grace the Duke of Westminster these days? Painting lots of houses, I hope?
TO CHANDLER
22nd June, 1956
Dear Ray,
How fine to get not one but two letters from you – and one of them legible at that.2 I hope you have left a forwarding address with the Grosvenor or otherwise you will think me even more churlish than you already do.
I cannot understand your tax position and I certainly do not believe that we will try and squeeze your European royalties out of you for over-staying your time a little. If it looks like something fierce of that kind, please let me know and I will make an impassioned appeal on your behalf.
Eric Ambler has a new thriller coming out next week, which no doubt Prince’s Bookshop will send you. If not, I will. It is better than the last two but still not quite the good old stuff we remember. I have done a review for the Sunday Times headed ‘Forever Ambler’ which struck me as a good joke.
My own muse is in a bad way. Despite your doubts, I really rather liked Diamonds are Forever . . . It has been very difficult to make Bond go through his tricks in From Russia, With Love, which is just going to the publishers.
Shall be in and around New York and Vermont for the first fortnight in August and, in the unlikely event that you should happen to be in reach of the area, please let me or Macmillans, New York, know and we will share a Coke in which the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler have been soaked overnight. Which, I understand, is the fashionable drink in your country at the moment.
FROM CHANDLER
4th July, 1956
Dear Ian,
I have already ordered Eric Ambler’s new thriller since he told me about it some time before it came out. I think the title of your review, ‘Forever Ambler’ is a pretty good joke in the third class division.
Of course I liked Diamonds are Forever and I enjoyed reading it, but I simply don’t think it is worthy of your talents.
It is unlikely that I shall be in New York or Vermont in August. It is much more likely that I shall be in Paris. Frankly a Coke in which the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler has been soaked overnight hasn’t reached La Jolla. What does it do to you? The fashionable drink in this country is still Scotch.
TO CHANDLER
11th July, 1956
Dear Ray,
I cannot believe that you will end up by having trouble over your tax problems here. Our tax gatherers do not come down hard on the foreign visitor, and I am sure they will accept your medical alibi. I strongly advise you not to worry about the problem until faced with some kind of a demand.
As for my opera, you are clearly living under a grave misapprehension. My talents are extended to their absolute limits in writing books like Diamonds are Forever. I am not short-weighting anybody and I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve. The way you talk, anybody would think I was a lazy Shakespeare or Raymond Chandler. Not so.
My only information to help you on your Paris visit is that on Thursdays, in the night club below the Moulin Rouge, there is an amateur strip-tease which might bring a flicker even to your worldly eyes. But I have not sampled it, so this information is not guaranteed.
Now get on with writing your book and stop picking your nose and staring out of the window.
By now Chandler was in a bad way, drinking heavily and making heavy weather of what would be his last novel, Playback. When Fleming looked at it he saw ‘a formless jumble of sub-plots, at the end of which Marlowe was obviously going to marry a rich American woman living in Paris’. Gloomily, they discussed Marlowe’s future. Chandler thought it would be the end of him: his wife would sack his secretary, redecorate his office and make him change his friends. Then, because she was so rich there would be no point Marlowe working and he would eventually drink himself to death. Fleming tried to cheer him up: ‘I said that this would make an excellent plot and that perhaps he could save Marlowe by making Mrs. Marlowe drink herself to death first.’ But Chandler couldn’t muster the enthusiasm: ‘The truth was that it had nearly all gone out of him and that he simply could not be bothered.’
Back in the United States, towards the end of 1957, Chandler sent Fleming an oversized panoramic postcard ‘From the World-famous Palm Canyon’ in Colorado. This was followed shortly afterwards by another in which he chastised Fleming for teasing his latest female companion about their relationship.
TO CHANDLER
29th November, 1957
Why do they think that Palm Canyon is ‘world-famous’? What world do these people frequent?
It was fine to see your gusty script again and to know that you are still alive, and I heartily approve your plan to move over here. Perhaps you will get so bored here that you will be forced to get on with that long-overdue book.
Naturally I never rag O. about you. She’s been telling tales. She is a wonderful girl and I guess you are very good for each other.
Hurry up and come along.
When Chandler returned to London in 1958 he was on a downward slope. Fleming gave him an introduction to the Italian gangster Lucky Luciano in the hope that he would do an article for the Sunday Times.
TO CHANDLER
19th March, 1958
Dear Ray,
Please see page 11 of the enclosed Sunday Graphic. As you see, your bird looks in good health and spirits but that spaghetti looks a trifle under-cooked.
Henry Thody, who writes this story, is the Sunday Times and Sunday Graphic representative in Rome and I could arrange for him to meet you and chaperone you down to Naples, make all arrangements, and see you off.
He is a splendidly eccentric chap with huge black handle-bar moustaches and you will like him.
Now all you need is your tickets.
So far as Capri is concerned, I should start off for a day or two at the Qui Si Sana, which is in the village of Capri in the middle of the island. But then I should explore a bit and perhaps move to one of the hotels down at Piccolo Marina, which is right on the sea.
I enclose the ten shillings which you kindly loaned me and, although the bank rate is 7%, I have not added interest because I think you are rich enough without it.
See you on Monday at one o’clock at the Boulestin.
Ha Ha! about catching you at the Etoile with that pretty girl. You’d better get yourself organised!
The Luciano initiative was a failure, culminating in a lengthy screed that Fleming damned as ‘sheer bad writing’. On 10 July, they held a conversation in a twenty-minute BBC radio broadcast, The Art of Writing Thrillers. Chandler was already drunk by the time Fleming collected him at 11.00 in the morning, and much of what he said had to be deleted. When he apologised for mentioning masturbation a BBC woman consoled him: ‘It’s quite all right Mr. Chandler, we hear much worse things than that.’
Afterwards they had lunch at Boulestin’s, where the conversation took a reflective turn. What did the future hold? How would their careers end? Taxation, they agreed, had killed the wealthy writer and films were the only salvation. Chandler said that Dashiell Hammett ‘had never let his work decline. He had just written himself out like an expended firework . . . [In the end] as one grew older, one grew out of gangsters and blondes and guns and, since they were the chief ingredients of thrillers, short of space fiction, that was that.’ Pertinently, given the anxiety Fleming would face over this very question, they discussed how authors like themselves could get rid of the albatross they had slung around their necks. Chandler shrugged and said he could never kill Marlowe, ‘because he liked him and other people seemed to like him and it would be unkind to them’.
They never saw or heard from each other again. Chandler decamped to America, and although Fleming sent him a copy of his latest book he received no reply. Rumours came in early 1959 that Chandler had delirium tremens and was unwell. On enquiring at Prince’s Arcade Bookshop, which had a standing order to send Chandler anything they thought he might like, Fleming learned that this year they had not been asked to. Mr Francis agreed that this was very bad news indeed. Chandler died a week later on 26 March 1959.
Fleming wrote an account of their friendship for the London Magazine but regretted not having produced the glowing obituary that appeared in The Times. He never forgot how much he owed Chandler for that first, favourable review. ‘I wish I had been the author,’ he wrote, ‘so that I could have repaid him for the wonderful tribute he had written out of the kindness of his heart for me and my publishers.’ Perhaps, too, he felt a sense of loneliness at the departure of yet another of his literary heroes. They had begun to vanish with alarming rapidity over the past decade and with them had gone the context in which he had established himself. No longer was he the brave new writer of Casino Royale but a man whose time, like Chandler’s, was running its course.
When he sent the article for approval to Chandler’s agent, Helga Greene, she agreed sorrowfully that he had captured the man: “Don’t correct anything please: the mistakes are hardly important enough and the overall picture is correct, only a little bleaker, thank God, than the reality”. Contradictorially, though, she later wrote, “I was so furious that it was difficult to write at all. I wonder if the sarcasm will get through Fleming’s thick skin?” She attached a note to Chandler’s file in UCLA saying “that the executrix of the estate wishes to point out that this article is quite inaccurate and should not be used as a basis for any studies on how Raymond Chandler worked or wrote”.
During the last half of 1959 Bond’s future on the silver screen quavered uncertainly. Inspired by Ernie Cuneo’s first draft for a screenplay, Fleming had produced a sixty-seven-page treatment, with substantial alterations and additions, which he then passed on to Ivar Bryce and the producer Kevin McClory. In turn, McClory made his own suggestions and amendments to which were added the attentions of a professional screen writer, Jack Whittingham. By the end of the year, however, Bryce’s interest had waned, leaving McClory still enthusiastic but with no certainty of a backer. Meanwhile, Fleming had other things on his mind.
Lord Kemsley having sold the paper to a new magnate, Roy Thomson, Fleming’s easy-going arrangement with the Sunday Times was coming to an end. In November 1959 he was sent on a trans-global expedition from which sprang a series of articles that would eventually form the first half of his travelogue Thrilling Cities. The journey took him to Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and New York. Each destination had its own charm, but in an age when any flight was an adventure his description of air travel was almost as thrilling as the cities themselves. Few readers could resist the exoticism of a sentence that read, ‘An hour or more of slow, spectacular sunset and blue-black night and then Beirut showed up ahead – a sprawl of twinkling hundreds-and-thousands under an Arabian Nights new moon that dived down into the oil lands as the Comet banked to make her landing.’
It was to be one of his last assignments as a Sunday Times employee. As the Kemsley apparatus adjusted itself to Thomson’s regime, Fleming looked for a new office and a new secretary. For the former he settled on a room in Mitre Court, off Fleet Street, and for a secretary he chose Beryl Griffie-Williams, who would prove a dedicated, efficient, fiercely loyal guardian and one on whom Fleming would increasingly rely. Then, in January 1960, he was off to Goldeneye for another Bond novel.
Given that McClory’s project seemed to be in a state of flux, Fleming saw no reason not to use elements from the outline as a basis for his next novel, Thunderball. The book starts with Bond being sent for a detox at the Shrublands health retreat where, after a contretemps with one Count Lippe, whom he scalds to immobility in a steam bath, he learns that an American plane containing atom bombs has been hijacked from its base in Britain, and the two countries are being ransomed to the tune of £100 million. Behind the demand is a group called SPECTRE, ‘The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion’ – of which, it transpires, Count Lippe was a member. SPECTRE is a perfect storm of evil, combining veterans from every violent organisation in the world – the Gestapo, Triads, SMERSH and the Mafia – under the overall control of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Born in the Polish port of Gdynia, to a German father and a Greek mother, Blofeld is an overweight, asexual, power maniac who, like most Bond villains, has a physical peculiarity: the pupils of his eyes, like Mussolini’s, are completely surrounded by the whites. But while Blofeld is the spider in the web, it is one of his subordinates whom Bond must face: Emilio Largo, ex-member of an elite Italian naval unit, whose luxury yacht, the Disco Volante, supposedly involved in a hunt for sunken treasure, is anchored off Nassau.
Flying to the Bahamas, Bond teams up with his old friend Felix Leiter to locate the hijacked plane, now camouflaged in shallow water. Having enlisted the support of Largo’s mistress Domino, whose brother had been the pilot, Bond launches an underwater assault with the aid of American frogmen to retrieve the bombs. When cornered by Largo in an undersea cave he is saved by Domino, who fires a spear gun into Largo’s chest. On both sides of the Atlantic the operation is known by the code name Thunderball.
Fleming wasn’t happy with the manuscript, which he thought not up to his usual standard. Perhaps this was because he had lived with the idea for so long that it had lost its freshness, or maybe that having a ready-made outline to hand he dashed it off too fast. In January he warned Wren Howard to, ‘Tell Wm. P. I’m half way through a long and very dull Bond & to sharpen his red pencil as never before.’ He was, however, fond of his latest villain, Blofeld – so much so that he gave him his own birthdate, 28 May 1908 – and would feature him in another two adventures.
If Fleming wasn’t happy with the book then McClory and Whittingham certainly weren’t either. As far as they were concerned Fleming had simply stolen their material. He replied that he was writing a book of the film, should it ever materialise. Differences of opinion led to lawyerly exchanges and a 1963 court case that was settled with Fleming’s admission that his novel was based on a treatment by himself, McClory and Whittingham.1
Even as the idea of a Thunderball film began to disintegrate, Fleming worked the broadcast seam. In March 1960 he met a glamorous agent named Ann Marlow, at Sardi’s in New York, and later that year, over champagne and scrambled eggs, he assigned her agency rights for TV and radio. Tearing a piece off the menu he scrawled boldly, ‘To MCA – I would like Ann Marlow to be my exclusive radio and television representative – worldwide’. To which he added his signature and address.
Later, he followed the success of his first ‘Thrilling Cities’ articles with a second instalment that saw him driving across Europe to report on Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. He examined everything with his usual eye for the unconventional, and in Naples was delighted to secure an interview with ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the Mafia boss who had helped the Allies during their occupation of Italy in the Second World War.
Then, in November 1960, he was back in Beirut for a connecting flight to Kuwait, whose rulers (under the auspices of the Kuwait Oil Company) had invited him to write a book about its emergence as an oil-rich, modern state. He wasn’t the first to be enlisted as a Gulf propagandist – Dylan Thomas had written pungently about the region for Anglo-Persian Oil in 1952 – but although Fleming managed to uncover a tale of missing treasure, and described an extraordinary battle between a scorpion and a tarantula, he struggled to muster any enthusiasm for the place. When the Kuwait Oil Company received his manuscript, titled State of Excitement, they were not happy with it, and in the end it was never published.
Throughout 1961 Fleming continued to pursue Ann Marlow as an avenue to Bond’s televisual success. But then came a firm offer from film producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.2 Faced, at last, with the chance of achieving what he had always hoped for, Fleming struggled to extricate himself from his deal with Marlow. In the end she conceded gracefully.
Thunderball being a contentious topic, Broccoli and Saltzman decided to start with a different novel: Dr No. Their arrangement with Fleming involved one or two legal hesitations but by 1962 filming was underway.
TO A. L. HART JR., ESQ., The Macmillan Company, 60, Fifth Avenue, New York 11, U.S.A.
Before leaving for Jamaica, Fleming sent his friend and publisher Al Hart a note to say that he was quitting Macmillan in favour of a different US publisher, Viking.
2nd December, 1959
We spoke and I still have blood on my hands from the meeting but this is now the formal letter which I suppose is necessary.
Briefly, I would be very grateful if the Macmillan Company would release me from my contract with them so that I can try my hand with the Viking Press.
As you know, several publishers have tried to persuade me to leave Macmillans and I have always resisted them on the grounds of my general satisfaction with Macmillans and in particular because of the very happy personal relationship you and I have always had together.
On the other hand, I have always felt slightly lost in the huge firm of Macmillans and I would like to try my hand at a smaller house to whom I would perhaps be more important. Several of my friends, including Graham Greene and Peter Quennell, are published by Vikings and it is they who have recommended the firm to me.
I have spoken with Vikings and I believe they will consider inviting Macmillans to sell them the old James Bond titles as and when they go out of print with you. I hope this may be possible.
Finally please believe that I am most grateful to Macmillans for having given me shelter for so long and so rewardingly. As for yourself, I will not offend you with any clichés. All I can say is that I expect we shall both miss each others letters.
I am sending a copy of this to Phyllis Jackson at M.C.A. who are now, after the departure of Naomi Burton from Curtis Brown, my North American agents and I expect she will be getting in touch with you about the details of all this. I am also sending a copy to Jonathan Capes to keep them informed.
TO RICHARD CHOPPING
22nd March, 1960
It was very nice to hear from you, although the subject is rather a grisly one about which Michael Howard had already written to me in Jamaica.
I entirely agree with you that all your work ought to be much more highly paid, but I am thinking much more of squeezing the millionaires.
The position regarding the wonderful jackets you have done for me – and the last one is just as splendid as the others – is that Jonathan Capes pay their standard fee of 25 guineas and I pay the rest. I have always been very happy to do this, since your work is so marvellous that I am left with a picture that both Annie and I love to have, but I have not really bargained – though I am sure I ought to have – for more than double the usual price.
How would 100 guineas suit you?
If you feel this is a miserable recompense, please add on what you think would be a fair compromise and I shall naturally agree, but only on condition that you continue to do my jackets every year.
The main thing is that it was marvellous of you to take on the job so readily and so quickly and so brilliantly, and I assure you I shall not argue if you think a higher price would be right.
See you very soon I hope.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
29th March, 1960
I was delighted with your brother’s joke from Jamaica, and so was Annie. I am sorry I missed him.
Fragrantise is one of my own words for 1959, and I apply it lavishly.
I have finished a giant Bond, provisionally called “Thunderball” (which the critics will know what to do with).
For all I know it is just about that, and I am wondering if it is worth doing a fresh typescript before you have seen it.
You may say that it needs drastic re-writing. I certainly got thoroughly bored with it after a bit, and I have not even been able to re-read it, though I have just begun correcting the first chapters. They are not too bad – it is the last twenty chapters that glaze my eyes.
Would it be a good idea, however mucky and totally uncorrected the type, if you were to give it a piercing glance before I start hacking around?
If you think it will get by, that will be all right, but if you think it definitely won’t I would go down to Swanage or somewhere and try and do some re-writing – much as I should hate it.
I do not know if you will think this is a good idea or not – probably not. Anyway, please let me know and I will bring the stuff, or not, with me when we have lunch together.
Would Wednesday, the lucky 13th April, suit you? I am longing to see you and hear all the gossip.
TO MRS. JEAN FRAMPTON, Mayfield, Bockhampton, Christchurch, Hants.
Jean Frampton was the typist who turned Fleming’s messy manuscripts into something fit for the typesetters. She often had useful comments to make, and for this book Fleming implored her to spare no efforts.
31st March, 1960
Dear Mrs. Frampton,
I hope you will now clear your desk for a further chore on my behalf.
I have written a full-length James Bond story, provisionally called “Thunderball”, and I am correcting my original manuscript bit by bit. I now enclose the first four chapters which I would be most grateful if you would type, one original plus four or five copies, whichever is easier for your machine.
I am afraid this is not a good typescript and I would be deeply obliged if you would apply your usual keen mind to any points – absolutely any – that might help the book get into shape.
Naturally this kind of editing would earn an extra fee and I only ask you to undertake it because your occasional comments on the work you have done for me have been so helpful.
Anything that your quick eye and mind falls upon, however critical and in whatever aspect of the writing, would be endlessly welcome.
I am sorry to have to pass on to you a rather half-baked job, but I have so much work pressing in on me from all sides that in this particular instance a little help from an intelligent person like yourself would be most valuable.
I shall be sending you further chapters as I go through them for obvious errors.
TO RICHARD CHOPPING
20th July, 1960
I gather Michael Howard has had a talk to you about a possible jacket for a new book, and I also gather that you are waiting on me to hear further details of the picture I suggested to you when last we met.
Briefly, I would now very much like you to do a picture for me, whether it will be a jacket or not, for a fee of 200 guineas, if you think that reasonable.
The picture would consist of the skeleton of a man’s hand with the fingers resting on the queen of hearts. Through the back of the hand a dagger is plunged into the table top.
Michael and I will assemble the props and send them down to you if you feel you would like to do this picture, and a tentative deadline would be early September if you can possibly manage that.
Please do this Dickie as it would be a really wonderful subject for your macabre vein.
FROM MICHAEL HOWARD
As Fleming continued to worry about the quality of Thunderball, Michael Howard wrote to reassure him.
18th August, 1960
I suppose it is because you present such an urbane and sturdy front to the world that one tends to forget the quivering sensibilities of the artist which lie behind it. But they must account for those acute pangs of doubt and dissatisfaction which you have repeatedly expressed to William and to me, for which neither of us can see any real justification.
Let me say first of all – since sometimes I have been inclined to let this be taken for granted – that we want to publish THUNDERBALL: but more than that, may I assure you that I have the fullest confidence that we can take your sales a great stride forward with it. I mean to sell just twice as many as before and I shall not rest until we do. And what’s more I mean to sell them at 16s. so there will be even more in it for you. [. . .]
The only criticism of any substance which I would make is at the end, where I really feel that some explanation is needed for Domino’s sudden reappearance on the seabed, having apparently escaped ‘with one mighty bound’ from her captivity and torture aboard the ‘Disco’ and furnished herself with a bikini and aqualung despite her state of shock. That, however, is one of the points you are already polishing.
For the rest, I am inclined to believe that the rather more realistic approach and absence of excruciating incidents is an advantage. So is the length which is not, by any means, excessive and I did not find my interest flagging anywhere. The underwater scenes, the little bit of gambling, the sidelights on catering arrangements are all excellently done and exactly what is expected of you. Really you have done it again quite superbly and you need have no qualms at all. Congratulations!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
22nd August, 1960
A thousand thanks for your cheering letter and I will now get down to the corrections I hadn’t already done. The final draft should be with you this week and I will also do a blurb very shortly.
So far as the oil story is concerned do you think you could procrastinate for a few more weeks until I can clear my desk of other commitments and get around to having a talk with them. Surely there is no great hurry. I don’t go out there until November and I won’t have written the piece before Christmas. Couldn’t we let the whole project stay where it is for a few more weeks?
Again with a thousand thanks for your encouraging letter. Apparently Viking are also very pleased with the book, so at least some of my fears were unjustified, and naturally I am pleased with your plans to give it a real shove this time.
I have had two or three talks with Dickie Chopping who seems to be getting on splendidly with the jacket having found a really splendid knife in Colchester. He has accepted my idea of green baize for the background and this should make something a bit more striking.
TO MRS. R. J. FREWIN, Apartment 305, Toronto 12, Ontario, Canada
Mrs Frewin of Toronto, a sharp-witted and observant fan, took Fleming to task over several inconsistencies in his novels. Among other things she wanted to know why: a) the light above M’s door seemed to be green in one book and red in another; b) Bond gained his 00 qualification for killing a man in cold blood yet later said he had never done such a thing; c) the method for contacting head office seemed to vary; d) Bond took his coffee now black, now white; e) M’s office was variously on the ninth floor and the eighth; and f) some of Fleming’s dates didn’t work.
Additionally, she bemoaned the incapacitation of Leiter in Live and Let Die, begged Fleming to resurrect Mathis, and told him not to write any more short stories: ‘They don’t do him justice and your female fans may not have husbands who read Playboy. (So maybe the money is quicker, but since when has Bond cared about money).’3 To assist him in future endeavours she supplied a plot featuring Bond, his old secretary Miss Ponsonby, and Mathis.
‘I look forward with great anticipation to the next installment.’
13th October, 1960
Dear Mrs. Frewin,
Thank you for your really wonderful letter. In searching for even the meagrest riposte, may I point out that ‘instalment’, the last line of your letter, is spelt with only one l.
Now, let me say at once that all your points are extremely well made though you slipped up badly in not noticing that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, and that the brakes on the Orient Express are not hydraulic but vacuum.
Here are the answers to your specific points:
a) Miss Moneypenny, for obvious reasons, objected to having a red light in her room, and insisted on the more appropriate pastel shade bulbs, until the day the Office of Works repainted her room in green. The day after the painting was completed, and not noticing the green light against the green paint, she went into M’s room with some signals to find him fast asleep at his desk. She tiptoed out, but at once rang up the works department and had a red light fitted, which is still there.
b) Forgetfulness.
c) For security reasons the regulations for contacting headquarters are changed from time to time.
d) Bond only takes cream with his coffee at breakfast time.
e) The floors were re-numbered when two floors were concertinaed into one to accommodate very large and bulky equipment for a new communications centre. The top floor is now the eighth.
f) Yours also truly puzzled and I must talk to Bond about this.
You will realise, of course, that in writing James Bond’s biography I am entirely dependent on what he tells me, and if he is occasionally equivocal, particularly in the matter of dates, I assume that he has some sound security reason for confusing me.
So far as your general comments are concerned, I should mention that Felix Leiter is by no means incapacitated, as you will have seen from ‘Diamonds are Forever’. He reappears in excellent health in the next volume of the biography entitled ‘Thunderball’, which will be published here next April.
Mathis is in good health and spirits and Bond tells me he is almost certain to run into him again in the near future.
Thank you also very much for the suggested plot (Bentley please, not Bently!) but I am not sure that Bond is as keen as all that on Miss Ponsonby. She has recently shown signs of withering through over long protection of her virginity, and even Bond has complained to me that she is becoming neurotic.
Finally, in exchange for a letter which has given me a vast amount of pleasure and entertainment, I am sending you a copy of my last book which, it appears from your letter, you have not yet read. I am sorry it consists of short stories, but I can only write what Bond tells me. These were fragmentary adventures between his longer assignments.
Again with my warmest thanks for your deep analysis of my opuscula.
‘It’s “me” again’, Mrs Frewin replied. While thanking him for the copy of For Your Eyes Only, she felt it wouldn’t go amiss if she said that he had a poor grasp of Canadian idiom, knew little about Quebec’s linguistic niceties, had obviously never visited Canada in October and on her side of the Atlantic ‘installment’ was spelled with two ‘l’s.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
31st August, 1960
Dear Michael,
“Thunderball”
One or two points while I remember them.
I think readers, and certainly reviewers, must be getting rather fed up with our paeans of reviewing praise, on the back of the jacket. Can you think of any new way to say what a splendid chap I am without all these quotations? Anyway, the reviews of “For Your Eyes Only” weren’t all that hot though there is a good one in the New Yorker which my secretary has if you want it.
The other suggestion is that this book should have a very good sale in the whole of the Caribbean area4 and particularly Nassau, where it should arrive at the height of the season. Would you like to consider taking the trouble to have one of those paper bands, or whatever they are called, across the jacket of your consignment to those parts, saying, for instance, “The thriller set in the Bahamas”?
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
Howard had enquired about a detail in Thunderball where the hijacker released cyanide gas to kill the plane’s crew. Also about Fleming’s possible promotion of Booth’s gin.
My Dear Michael,
Many thanks for your letter and for the proof of the jacket which I think is quite excellent although the cards look a bit dirty and frayed at the edges. I suppose we can’t brighten them up a little.
I agree that the re-write of my blurb is no great improvement. I have amended the one in the proof copy you sent me and you may even think that this is better.
I have corrected my proof to date but have had one or two suggestions from Vikings which I shall incorporate.
I am not quite sure what you mean about the film “North by North West”, but anyway I am checking whether it was released on the Odeon circuit. I think the Cyanide capsule was far enough away from the murderer not to have affected him. 100% oxygen is essential, as if the air bleed was left on he would suck in some of the cyanide gas. The distinguished Wing Commander from the Air Ministry, who briefed me in all this, seemed quite happy about Pettachi breathing it in, and if 25 minutes is bad for him I am afraid we must just fudge it.
I don’t know how the gin thing is going, but I couldn’t bear shirts. I don’t mind James Bond’s name being used but I’m afraid I don’t want my name to appear in promotional stuff.
I am getting on with the Kuwait book, and will get in touch with you as soon as I surface.
Heaven knows how I am going to get around to having a bash at the Thrilling Cities book, and I am afraid we must postpone any more work on it until the spring, I simply cannot squash it in.
By the way, please congratulate your printers on their proofs [of Thunderball] – very clean indeed with only a very few of the tiniest of literals etc.
I shall be sending you my corrected proof in a day or two. Could you please marry it up with your own corrections to save me time and worry, and if there are differences of opinion perhaps we can settle them over the telephone.
Kuwait was hell!
TO ADMIRAL J. H. GODFREY, Florence Ward, St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, S.E.1.
Fleming’s old boss at Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, was in poor health and had sent his now-famous assistant a note from hospital.
6th December, 1960
Sorry for the delay but I am completely submerged in Kuwait.
I saw the soothsayer during the last week of October, but, alas, I haven’t kept a note of the exact date. He held my wrist watch and after discussing various other problems he said, more or less, “I see a naval officer friend of yours, he is in some kind of parental position towards you and you are friends. I can quite clearly see a naval cap badge. This friend of yours is not well and I think he would appreciate a letter from you. I advise you to write to him.”
I’m afraid that is all I can remember, but you can imagine that your postcard came as something of a shock!
I do hope you are getting along all right. I shall do my best to come in and see you again this week or next, but this blasted book is making a terrible turmoil out of my life. And, just at this moment, another close friend of mine, Duff Dunbar, whom I think I have talked to you about, has had some kind of a stroke and is getting near the danger list, so that is also piling on the pressure.
Anyway get well as soon as you can, and then take it easy – useless piece of advice for someone with your lively mind!
TO MISS ANN MARLOW, Apartment 15C, 1160 Park Avenue, New York 28, N.Y.
In March 1961 Fleming suffered a heart attack. While recuperating he wrote to assure Marlow that he would soon be up and about.
My dear Ann,
A thousand thanks for your fragrant good wishes, but I can assure you that I shall be firing on all cylinders in a very short while indeed. I have spent the last three weeks in this prison writing a children’s book, so the time has not been wasted.5
My arrangement with M.C.A. is simply that they are my agents for television, film and radio, and also, in America only, for books and magazine articles etc.
Here is a copy of my agreement with them which please return in due course as it is my only one.
I only met Sandford once but he seemed to me quite bright. I expect all they are worrying about is getting their 10% and this, if anything happens, I suppose they will do.
Thunderball is going great guns over here and I see that Boucher in the New York Times was fairly kind to me the other day after insulting me for many years.
It was lovely to hear from you and I pray you won’t also burn too many candles at too many ends.
TO JACK WHITTINGHAM, The White House, Oxshott, Surrey
Whittingham, the scriptwriter for McClory’s project, suffered a heart attack at much the same time as Fleming and wrote to exchange news.
10th May, 1961
Dear Jack,
I am horrified to hear that you have been on morphine and not only that, but that you are already contemplating your next stint at Whitsun. Is this really wise, or can you take the new thing on in a fairly leisurely fashion? It seems to me that you are getting back into your professional stride a bit quickly!
I am so glad that your legal advisor is now in touch with my solicitor. I don’t wish to sound ominous or to pre-judge anything, but I do think from what I hear from the legal cohorts on our side, that a graceful composure of such differences as you and I may have between us might be wisdom.
However, as I say, this is all on the “Old Boy” wave and the main thing is that we should both be in good heart (!) again as soon as possible.
Again, with warm thanks for your kindly letter
TO ANN MARLOW
1st June, 1961
My dear Ann,
I am now back in business and this is just to thank you very much for your letter of May 12th and to hope that you do in fact come over to London during June.
I have had a sharp squawk out of Phyllis Jackson about your and my financailles, but she arrives here on Sunday and when I see her next week I shall calm her down.
The point, as I see it, is that our arrangement is that you would like to have a shot at seeing if you can get a James Bond series going in much the same way as you dealt with Willie Maugham.
This option will obviously not be in perpetuity and the scribble I gave you over the scrambled eggs was simply to give you freedom of action with sponsors, agents, etc., for a reasonable time to test the market.
If you see no prospect of getting the property off the ground presumably you will tell me so and the responsibility will then revert to M.C.A, and you will return the engagement ring!
Personally, of course, I am hoping very much that it will be you and not some Mr. Finkelstein who becomes commère of James Bond on television, and I hope, when you have time, to hear if you have had any result, positive or negative, from your preliminary sniffing around.
But the main object of this letter is simply so that I can tell M.C.A. with a clear conscience that the James Bond properties are not in escrow to Marlow in Perpetuity, which is, in their legal minds, what they seem to think, under the spell of your beauty, has happened.
In American show-biz, and indeed in all show-biz, it seems to be just no good saying “she is just not that kind of person” or that you and I and Bill happen to be friends, this is not the language of show-biz.
So will you be an angel and write me a note covering these points in some fair and sensible way, so that I can tell M.C.A to shut-up and stop interfering in our “affaire”.
Willie Maugham passed through here while I was in the London Clinic during siesta hour and was not allowed in! I wrote to tell him that at my age one needed rest after lunch and that he really ought to follow my example and not go traipsing around London at three o’clock in the afternoon! It was a shame as I had greatly looked forward to talking to him about you.
Forgive this letter which seems to have got dreadfully long and verbose.
TO ANN MARLOW
14th June, 1961
My dear Ann,
You really are an angel to have been so swift and kind with your cable and letter.
The position is that a large and worthwhile producer wishes to make a full feature film of James Bond with an option on the rest of the books. The condition, of course, is that I will not dispose of the radio and television rights during the continuance of this agreement.
In fact my scribble to you over the scrambled eggs was I now see from reading my contract with M.C.A. as you will have seen, a definite transgression on my relationship with M.C.A. which has always been pleasant and fruitful.
So what I would now like to ask you is to send me back that paper and in exchange I will ask M.C.A. to grant you on my behalf some sensible option rights as and if this present deal peters out as I have found so often happens in show biz.
I do hope that you will think this sensible and reasonable and, above all, friendly and fair.
If and when you agree I can tell you that if this present rather major project comes off and the property gets rolling, I shall do my best to see that you get a seat on the bandwagon – if any!
I will tell you more about all this when I see you in New York and in the meantime thank you again for being such a darling.
TO ANN MARLOW
3rd July, 1961
You really are an angel and I am not in the least surprised that you should feel rather ‘miffed’ by the way things have worked out. But the point is, as I told you, that there is a considerable film deal pending which, greatly depends, of course, on absolute cleanliness of copyright which, according to M.C.A., could not be achieved while my blank cheque to you was outstanding.
All I can do at the moment is to order you a small memento from Cartiers in token of my esteem and affection, and I shall bring this over in the Queen Elizabeth leaving on the 20th. So please keep some minutes for me for delivery and further explanations.
Mark you, all this film business may be just talk in which case our financailles can go forward undisturbed. But in all this I have simply had to be guided by M.C.A. and when I hold your hand again it will simply have to be M.C.A. who slips on the ring, as this property is now so extensive and has so many facets that if I am to milk it successfully the campaign will have to be pretty masterly.
But, as you say, we have the rest of our lives and I now once again assure you that if and when television comes into the picture your interests will be paramount with me.
Meanwhile, of course, I am longing to see you again, though by doctor’s orders it can’t be scrambled eggs this time!
TO ANN MARLOW
12th July, 1961
Alas, the medical brains of Britain have forbidden me to visit America next week, so those minutes I was going to steal from you will have to go to somebody else.
The small token from Cartier will have to reach you by other means and anonymously, but when it turns up you will know it is from me, it is ‘From London with Love’.
It’s all very maddening and I pray that fate and the doctors will be kinder later in the year.
TO ANN MARLOW
15th August, 1961
Your re-addressed letter of July 18th nearly brought about a divorce as it found its way into my wife’s mail, and although I had explained to her my deep admiration and affection for you when I got back from America, quite a lot of explaining had to be explained.
(I refrain from vulgarly suggesting to you, “you’ve got the name let’s have the game”!)
First of all, I am terribly sorry that this MM business had gone awry.6 It is really very silly of her as this was a wonderful piece of casting that would have vastly added to her prestige. I do hope you scramble out all right with some equally splendid girl.
I haven’t seen Saltzman’s announcement in the New York Times, but in fact, as is usual with show biz, nothing has yet been signed, and anyway if they go ahead with their film programme it will be many years before television comes into the picture.
When and if it does, I shall press your suit, if you see what I mean, with vigour.
But I am sure you will agree that if Saltzman makes a success of the films the value of any television series will be vastly enhanced.
Meanwhile I am pestiferated by doctors and lawyers and am rapidly becoming a shadow of the scrambled eggs man you know.
Have just had a cable from Bill Stephenson, please explain the situation to him as sympathetically as you can.
TO HARRY SALTZMAN, ESQ., 16, South Audley Street, London, W.1.
Producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli soon discovered, as Cape had before them, that Fleming liked to become involved in the minutiae of production.
31st August, 1961
Dear Harry,
While I remember it, I met last night an extremely intelligent and attractive coloured man called Paul Dankwa,7 who is studying law here but has been very much taken up by the bohemian set, and I have met him on and off for several years.
He told me he had just finished appearing in the film ‘A Taste of Honey’.
I think it would be worthwhile you tracking him down and having a look at him for the role of Quarrel in Dr. No. His address is, 9 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales’s Drive, Battersea, telephone Macaulay 5212.
I told him I would mention his name to you and he was very excited at the prospect.
He has all the qualities this role demands and, in particular, a most pleasing personality and good looks.
TO MRS. BLACKWELL, Bolt, Port Maria, Jamaica
Apart from suggesting possible cast members, Fleming decided to organise accommodation in Jamaica for the film crew of ‘Doctor No,’ and to arrange a recording studio for the soundtrack. Writing to his neighbour (and mistress) Blanche Blackwell he wondered if her musically inclined son Christopher might like the job.8
25th October, 1961
Forgive the typing but a lot of this is going to be boring stuff for you to pass on to Christopher.
The Company has written to Christopher giving him most of the dope and asking him to be their local contact and production assistant on ‘Dr. No’.
They will probably want him to do such miscellaneous jobs as recommending hotel accommodation and beating down the proprietor, for 60 or 70 people. He will also have to dig out and suggest local actors and actresses for small parts and keep an eye on the labour to see that it keeps working happily during the six or eight weeks they will be shooting.
The suggested location is the Morant Lighthouse area with those swamps behind and the beach you and I know.
I have suggested that they put the team up at Anthony Jenkinson’s hotel, but I am not sure if he has enough rooms. Christopher might like to have a word with him about it. But of course they may decide it is too far from Morant and prefer one or other of those hotels up behind Kingston.
They also want to do all their musical score for the picture in Jamaica, and this should be a real chance for Christopher to seek out talent and lease them his recording studio.
I have no idea what fee to recommend Christopher to ask for, but I should think £100 a week for his general services and extra for studio and sound recording, etc. But perhaps he had better wait and see what they offer when Saltzman, the producer, and the rest of them arrive around January 11th.
I am sure Christopher will do this job splendidly and I think he will find it enormous fun.
The producer, Terence Young,9 seems very nice and the man they have chosen for Bond, Sean Connery, is a real charmer – fairly unknown but a good actor with the right looks and physique.
If Christopher does well on this assignment it can easily lead to others in Jamaica and elsewhere and an exciting sideline for him.
All your news about the hedge and the flowers is very exciting. You are an angel to have taken so much trouble and I am longing to see it all.
But this is dreadful news about the car. I have always feared you would run into trouble with it and it’s a blessing that you survived. For heaven’s sake get something smaller and more manageable for those twisty roads, and stop driving so fast, there’s absolutely no hurry!
My Jamaica plans are now changed after many stormy sessions [with Ann] and we come out together around January 20th and have much the same programme as last year.[. . .]
No other news for now, but it certainly looks as if we are all going to have great fun with this film business in January.
TO SIR WILLIAM STEPHENSON, 450 East 52nd Street, New York
Stephenson cabled to berate Fleming for not making enough of his publicity – ‘appears to me that you are haughtily sniffing the end of a Smith and Wesson forty five’.
Many thanks for your chastening cable which actually fetched up at the right address. Please use it frequently.
Not much news from here. My host of medical advisers seem to be delighted with my recovery and, as you can imagine, I am losing no time in loosening up on their counsels of moderation in all things.
The film deal with United Artists is going ahead and they are going to film “DR NO” in Jamaica in January and February, and the advance party has already gone out to prospect for location. But, as usual with show business, no actual money has actually changed hands yet.
I shall be coming out to Jamaica around January 18th and will be paying you my usual visit around the middle of March. So please warn The Pierre to lay in plenty of oysters.
TO HARRY SALTZMAN,
Fleming had already received several offers to promote products, all of which he treated with a casual shrug. Whether or not the film company wanted to consider ‘product placement’ he left to their own decision. The brand in question remains unknown.
7th December, 1961
My dear Harry,
I have acknowledged the attached but told them to get in direct touch with your Company.
Incidentally, I expect you will be getting similar approaches from other branded products used by James Bond.
I don’t know what your policy in this matter will be, but I have personally found that the use of branded names in my stories helps the verisimilitude, so long as the products are quality products.
Admittedly one is giving free publicity to these people, but I don’t think it matters so long as their products are in fact really good.
Anyway, over to you.
TO DAVID NIVEN, ESQ., White’s Club, 37, St. James’s Street, London, S.W.1.
The actor David Niven,10 whose TV company had recently failed in its bid to acquire rights to James Bond, wrote on 23 October 1962 to ask if Fleming could think of a suitable character – ‘a high-class crook, à la “Raffles” or a super-modern “Sherlock Holmes” – for him to play in forthcoming four-part series. ‘Will you, dear chum, look back through your files and come up with something a little off-beat that would suit me?’ Despite a proposed fee of £1,000, Fleming turned the offer down.
7th November, 1962
My dear David,
I have just this minute come back from New York working on just such a project as you suggest but for an entire television series, and the copyright situation would be terribly snarled up if I went into business with you, and I think I should gracefully decline.
However, why don’t we eat a few pounds’ worth of Colchesters together (at your expense) some time after you arrive? And if I have had enough baths by then I may have dreamt up a bright idea in one or another of them.
But I should warn you that my brains are boiling with the effort of keeping James Bond on the move, and I confess that my chief reason for Operation Colchester would be to see your endearing mug again.
I have to be in Tokyo from the 14th to 21st and if I eat their deadly blow fish on the wrong day of the month I may not show up, but at any rate I shall depart this life with
Affectionate regards to yourself.
Niven tried again the following year, suggesting that he could write under the pseudonym Charlie Hopkins ‘and thereby not involve your valuable name in anything as tawdry as television!! In any event, don’t forget I really am highly experienced in this line of country and whether you ever do anything with us or not, do not hesitate to pick my microscopic brain.’ As further inducement he added that, ‘I suppose you have become my favourite writer next to Chaucer.’ Again, Fleming declined.
TO RAYMOND HAWKEY, ESQ., 50 Campden Hill Towers, London, W.11
Raymond Hawkey11 had produced a ground-breaking cover for the Pan paperback edition of Thunderball. His design, which included two bullet holes, was so striking that it inspired thriller writers for years to come.
9th April, 1963
Dear Raymond Hawkey,
Thank you very much for the pulls of the really brilliant cover you have designed. I think it is quite splendid and I don’t think the filthy little Pan sign spoils it too much.
But what happens to the skin in subsequent books? Will it change colour?
Thank you also for the amusing photograph of me and Len Deighton. I am sorry to say I thought Evans’ piece was pretty skimpy, but don’t tell him I said so!
TO ANN MARLOW
Marlow, ever optimistic, wondered if Fleming would be interested in a TV series about incidents in his life.
15th October, 1963
My dear Ann,
It was lovely to hear from you and your television idea sounds very interesting.12
The trouble is of course that I have no control over these television series on which Eon Productions have the option after the completion of three full length James Bond feature films.
So I’m afraid the only course is for you to put your ideas to Harry Saltzman and see if he will wear them.
Naturally I would love to be involved with you over all this, but, as Terence Young should have told you, I have absolutely no say in the matter.
The Simenon interview wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very cleverly edited and put together, but I expect it will appear somewhere in the States before long.
Please give my best love to Bill and Mary when you see them next.
With much affection.
TO ANN MARLOW
Despairing, Marlow suggested a programme devoid of Bond called Here’s Fleming!
29th October, 1963
My dear Ann,
At last I have got the picture clear, but I am sorry to say that I simply hate the idea.
I have far too much to do anyway and I also greatly dislike projecting my image any further than I can throw it.
I am terribly sorry, but there it is and you must forgive me once again.
By 1961 Fleming’s life had become more complicated than he would have wished. Apart from the stress of writing, which was beginning to wear him down, he and Ann were drifting apart. She was conducting a thinly disguised affair with Hugh Gaitskell, a high-ranking Labour politician, while Fleming was consorting openly with Blanche Blackwell, who owned a nearby house in Jamaica. It was all rather sad.
The turmoil seemed to have had no effect on his output, however. Perhaps it even jolted his imagination, for when he returned from Jamaica he delivered a manuscript that departed radically from the norm. Instead of the standard Bond saga, he had written a pseudo-autobiographical interlude in the life of a young woman named Vivienne Michel. Fleeing disappointment in love, Canadian-born ‘Viv’ leaves Europe to travel solo through the Adirondacks on a Vespa scooter. When she becomes involved in an insurance scam at the isolated Dreamy Pines Motor Court, James Bond arrives to rescue her from certain death. It contained some excruciating details that were obviously based on Fleming’s early sexual experiences. And the language used by Viv to describe her saviour slipped into the farthest corners of Cartland. But it had its charms, and for the time (and for the author) it was a brave stab at reinventing Bond. At Bedford Square they thought it was just the ticket.
Fleming was on full charge when he handed it in. He had always been accused of writing beneath his abilities and now he had produced something that if not exactly literature was at least new. There was also his latest book, Thunderball, which had just been released and was selling well, and he had delivered the manuscript for State of Excitement, his book about Kuwait. Also, as a nod to his status as proprietor of The Book Collector, he had been invited to address the Antiquarian Booksellers Association’s gathering in late July. He was full of confidence, and riding high on his success.
But his health was failing. For a long time he had had problems with his heart, to which had recently been added difficulties with his kidneys and back. He was uncertain about Bond’s prospects and the legal difficulty over Thunderball had taken its toll. In early April, while at a Sunday Times meeting, he suffered a major heart attack. His friend Denis Hamilton ushered him out of the room and helped him to hospital.
Outwardly, Fleming treated it as no more than a setback. ‘Being ill is heaven!’ he wrote on a postcard to his half-sister Amaryllis. On the other side, in a typically wry touch, was a picture of an Aztec crystal skull. Jokingly, he drew a skull and crossbones on the back of the envelopes he sent to his friends. To Percy Muir he wrote that ‘years of under work and over indulgence’ had caught up with him. Behind the façade, however, he realised that life would never be the same again.
During his convalescence at the London Clinic and later at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, he was forbidden a typewriter lest he strain himself by writing a new Bond. Undeterred, he ordered pen and paper and embarked on a children’s story based on the bedtime stories he told his son Caspar. It was about a magical car called ‘Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang’.
A famous racing car, long since abandoned in a scrapyard, Chitty is rebuilt by the indefatigable tinkerer and inventor Commander Caractacus Pott. When Pott takes his family on an outing to the Kent coast, Chitty reveals hidden secrets. She not only flies, but swims and drives under her own command if the Potts are in danger. When the Potts uncover a secret cache of weapons in France, they blow it up. And when gangsters take the Pott children hostage, meanwhile pondering a heist on a famous Parisian sweet shop, it is Chitty that saves the day. Underpinning the book was Fleming’s favourite mantra: ‘Never say “no” to adventures. Always say “yes” otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.’
His initial suggestion for an illustrator was Wally Fawkes, whose cartoons appeared in the Daily Mail under the nom de plume Trog. But the Mail refused to allow their star cartoonist to work for an author whose books were serialised regularly in strip form by the rival Daily Express. As an alternative, Cape approached the illustrator Haro Hodson, but after a few trials Fleming thought his sketches were not quite right. Finally, they appointed the acclaimed artist John Burningham, whose Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers had won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1963.
But this was in the future, and in the meantime he found himself with another bit of Bonderie on his hands. To help launch the Sunday Times’ new colour supplement, due out in 1962, C. D. Hamilton asked him to write a short story featuring 007. ‘The Living Daylights’, which Fleming dashed off that October, saw Bond in Berlin, providing cover for a defector who was being pursued by a Russian assassin, codenamed Trigger. The assassin, it transpires, is a woman whose cover is as a cellist in an all-female orchestra. ‘There was something almost indecent in the idea of that bulbous, ungainly instrument splayed between her thighs,’ Bond reflects. ‘Of course Suggia had managed to look elegant, as did that girl Amaryllis somebody.1 But they should invent a way for women to play the damned thing side-saddle.’ When the moment comes, Bond fires not to kill but to disarm.
By late 1961 the film deal he had signed the previous year was catching fire, with an extraordinary amount of pre-production publicity that included far-fetched plans for new editions of Dr No put forward by Harry Saltzman. And his US sales had received a massive boost when, earlier that year, an article in Life magazine had listed From Russia with Love as one of President J. F. Kennedy’s ten favourite books. By any standards it had been an extraordinary time. And yet, there was his health.
In 1961 Queen magazine published an article titled ‘Six Questions’. The first was: ‘What do you expect to achieve in the sixties? Are you aiming at any particular quality or quantity of work?’ Fleming, one of several contributors, replied: ‘One can never expect to achieve anything – even less if one is in the fifties and living in the sixties.
Since I am a writer of thrillers I would like to leave behind me one classic in this genre – a mixture of Tolstoy, Simenon, Ambler and Koestler, with a pinch of ground Fleming. Unfortunately I have become the slave of a serial character and I suppose, in fact, since it amuses me to write about James Bond, I shall go on doing so for the fun of it.’
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
From Goldeneye, February 1961, ‘Friday, perhaps’
My dear Wm,
Thank you a thousand times for your sparkling & hilarious letter which had both of us rolling in the Bougainvillea. I am much relieved that you could stomach Kuwait. I felt almost ashamed at asking that you should read it & sub it. But I was so fed up & overstuffed with the subject that the M.S. had come to nauseate me. My main concern was to make it look as little as possible a P.R.O. job & from what you say I may at least have been successful in that. Of course it will get a majestic pasting from the Arabists who will get it for review but to hell with them! I’m tired of their snobbish coterie & have been for years.
The new Bond is very odd & heaven knows what you will think. I am a 23 year old French Canadian girl & writing rather breathlessly which comes, deceptively I suspect, easy. Bond is just today about to rescue her from an ugly predicament!
Good misprint in the Gleaner – about a wedding “Not to be sartorially outdone, the bridegroom wore an orchid in his bottomhole”.
A. sends much love in which I join.
From Goldeneye, dated ‘Saturday’
Dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your newsy letter & your father’s splendid puff in the S.T. Good news about the subscription but it still leaves you with the well-packed shelves in the warehouse! If you get some early copies, would you send me one. My secretary has my movements – Nassau & then N.Y.
Bad news about Graham Greene particularly as he is a friend & stayed in this house the whole of Nov. I’m afraid we must come clean and apologise.2 Would you ask Anthony Colwell3 to do this, at my request, enclosing brochure & quote from cutting? I’m rather upset as I think I raised this point in my first letter about his draft blurb.
Got a very nice letter from Wm. & he seems to have been able to stomach the book. About a blurb – I v. much doubt if I can manage this before I get back as my mind is too much elsewhere. But why the hurry? It has only just gone to the Sheikhs!
Rather surprised about Courtaulds. What are the arrangements & what the reward?4 I was asking Booths £5,000 for the privilege – not that they were willing to pay it – but Courtaulds is a £50,000,000 company. They should definitely not trade on my handiwork whatever publicity my books get. And I shall also want many dozen shirts made to measure from their stuff! Would you ask Elaine Greene of M.C.A. to get in touch with them and screw them good and proper. And please rush me copies of their copy. I won’t alter unless it is too ghastly – but no point making a fool of the chap. I do wish I had been consulted about all this. You know I was very much against the project.
Paul Gallico will be too long for N&T [Now and Then] but we may put it to some other good use.
OK for 29th in Scotia.
Don’t at all like the idea of Face to Face.5 I am no good at that sort of thing & dislike being eviscerated.
Just finishing The Spy who loved me. It will be about 55,000. Absolutely no idea what it’s like but it wrote rather easily which is a bad sign I expect.
TO C. D. HAMILTON, ESQ., Thomson House, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, London, W.C.1
19th April, 1961
My dear C.D.,
Although neither of us knew it I am afraid I was in the middle of a rather major heart attack this time last week. One never believes these things so I sat stupidly on trying to make intelligent comments about the thrilling new project [the colour supplement] about which I long to hear more. However, a thousand thanks for noticing my trouble so quickly and for shepherding me away when the time came.
Alas, this is going to mean at least another month in the Clinic without moving and then two or three more behaving like an old man. But after that I hope I shall be quite all right again, though I shall never be able to pack quite so much into my existence as I have foolishly been trying to do.
Anyway all is well and I am splendidly looked after, and in a week or two when I am allowed to see people I do hope you will come by and tell me more of these exciting plans.
As I am not supposed to be writing I will ask my secretary to sign this and send it off. In the meantime thank you again for taking me firmly by the hand!
From ‘Shrublands’, April 1961, Sunday
My dear Wm,
I have been here for nearly a week, condemned to four more, & then 5 months inactivity. Heart! I think telling all those funny stories in Glasgow6 was the last straw!
Now, forgive me for adding one more pat on the poor dung-beetle’s back but this is going to stop me doing much work on “the S who L’d me” and as I have grave doubts about it would you be an angel & read it in its present, not bad, typescript – but entirely privately – & then tell me what you think. You see, there is an excellent opportunity to kill off Bond, appropriately & gracefully, & though when it came to the point in the story I forbore, I feel, and have felt before this address, that the time has come.
If you would read it, would you be an angel & call here on Wed a.m. if you can manage (sleep in p.m.) & I will explain more & give you the shovelful to take away.
Forgive this whiff of miscellaneous grapeshot & fear not for my health which in fact is quite excellent & will become far better for this very necessary little jog in the ribs from the Holy Man.
P.S. No primroses from Bob Howard, please!
TO MRS. VALENTINE FLEMING, Grosvenor House, Park Lane, London W.1.
24th April, 1961
Darling Mama,
Forgive me dictating this but they still refuse to let me do any writing.
I adore the splendid anthurium and its buds are already showing a fine form. It was a terribly clever idea as it’s such fun seeing how it changes every day and thank heaven it will outlast my three or four more weeks in this dump.
As for caviar and smoked salmon, they just about keep me alive!
Next week I shall be allowed to have an occasional visitor, so please come in and tell me that you have found yourself a good expensive maid to look after you.
With stacks of love.
TO THE RT. HON. CHRISTOPHER SOAMES, C.B.E., M.P., Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Whitehall Place, London, S.W.1.
24th April, 1961
My dear Christopher,
You may have seen from the public prints an exaggerated account of a mild malaise that is keeping me away from the bridge tables. (By the way poor old Dovercourt passed on in the next room last Saturday!)
Now the point is that I am condemned for the rest of my life to three ounces of hard liquor per day, and since I have to be really rather careful about it I wish to concentrate on the purest and finest liquor obtainable in England. This vital piece of information will be known in your Ministry – i.e. which is the finest refined spirit, gin whisky or brandy on the market at any price.
Do you think you could possibly extract this vital piece of information on the absolute understanding that this is for my private information only?
I am so sorry to bother you with this picayune enquiry, but it is just conceivable that you also may be interested in the reply.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
To keep Fleming’s mind busy Michael Howard sent him one of Cape’s latest – Mad Shadows, a tale of dysfunctional family life by the twenty-year-old Canadian author Marie-Claire Blais.
Thank you very much for the charming note and I can assure you that I shall be firing on all cylinders again before too long. Meanwhile I am writing a children’s book, so you will see that there is never a moment, even on the edge of the tomb, when I am not slaving for you.
I read the Canadian prodigy last night and was macabrely fascinated. I suppose this is the sort of best fairy story our children will all be reading in the future.
As always a beautifully produced and jacketed book, again the jacket so good it deserved an author to it!
Hope you are not getting too stuck with Thunderball. Do please let my secretary know from time to time how you are getting on with it.
TO HUGO PITMAN, ESQ.,7 Willmount, Ballingarry, Thurles, Co. Tipperary
25th April, 1961
Dearest Hugo,
Thank you for your lovely letter which was just the glass of champagne I needed.
My doctors are delighted with me and I think I only have another two or three weeks here before being allowed to go down to Brighton to sit in one of those blasted shelters and look at the yellow sea.
After that I shall gradually get back into commission and the only difference in my life will be that you and I have to have lunch on the ground floor of Scotts instead of the first!
With much love to you and kisses for any women who may be around you!
TO THE REVEREND LESLIE PAXTON, Great George Street Congregational Church, Liverpool
In between letters to family, friends and editors, Fleming found time to rebuke a vicar in Liverpool, who had recently lambasted Bond as the epitome of worldly vice.
25th April, 1961
Dear Mr. Paxton,
I see from the public prints that the Sunday before last you preached a sermon against the leading character in my books, James Bond, and, presumably by association against myself.
Now, having had a Scottish nonconformist upbringing and considering myself at least some kind of sub-species of a Christian, I am naturally very upset if it is thought that I am seriously doing harm to the world with my James Bond thrillers.
Would you be very kind and let me have a copy, if you have one, of your sermon, so that I may see the burden of your criticisms and perhaps find means of mending my ways if I feel that your arguments have real weight behind them.
I can, of course, myself see what you might mean about my books, but it occurs to me that you may have put forward profounder arguments than those which are already known to me.
Forgive me for troubling you in this way, but I am sure you will agree that the prisoner in the dock should at least know the burden of the charge.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
28th April, 61
My dear Ian,
I am in the middle of being absorbed by the results of your collaboration with Mademoiselle Viv (Bimbo) Michel – your best she-character up to now – and am annoyed at having to break off the process of absorption to write a letter. But I do want to say that I think the book full of your usual brio and Schlauheit & to let you know that I am much enjoying as well as absorbing it.
If you like, I would like to look in on you next Wednesday morning at about 11.30. I could bring with me a very few notes & queries, & could tell you by then how the book strikes me as a whole. Send me two words to say
a) if I may come & see you then;
b) if I may hand the typescript over to Michael Howard on Wednesday;
c) if there is anything else I can bring you.
When I do come, I will try not to exhaust you by prolonged loquacity.
I hope you are feeling as free as possible from anxieties & fatigue.
Your old chum Bob Howard asked me to give you his best messages & to say that he hadn’t written to you only because he doesn’t want to badger you with correspondence.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
From Clinholm, 30th April, 1961
My dear William,
As you can imagine, your first reactions to the book were a shot of mescalin, but don’t feel you have to be gracious about the second chunk for fear of plunging me beneath the sod. From you I need no placebos. Only the true verdict will do & I can assure you that my E.C.G. can stand anything now. Let us decide about Michael when we have spoken at 11.30 on Wed. If you feel there is much to be done, I would rather do the tidying up before it gets into the pipeline.
I am of course longing to see you & please bring nothing but your face! Your last visit was more beneficial than you can imagine – apart from other considerations, to hear other peoples’ tales of woe greatly reduces the perspective of one’s own.
Coming to Metropole, Brighton, on Monday, fortnight until Friday. With Annie. It would be lovely to fix a ‘déjeuner sur l’herbe’, or ‘sur les sables couvertes de capotes anglaises’,8 somewhere between us. Please consider & deliver your instructions on Wed.
Am receiving the most extraordinary advices from various genii. “Be more spiritual” (Noël Coward), “write the story of Admiral Godfrey” (Admiral Godfrey), “Be sucked off gently every day” (Evelyn Waugh).
Over to you!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
31st May, 1961
My dear Michael,
Many thanks for your letter of May 26th and also for the book which I liked very much at first sight. If I go on liking it I will certainly write you a short review for “Now and Then”.
I am now sending you the first two “volumes” of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Heaven knows what your children’s book readers will think of them, but they are in fact designed for a readership of around seven to ten.
If you decide that you like them much will depend on the illustrator and I wonder if we couldn’t get Trog. He is by way of being a friend of mine since he did the John Bind series in Fluke. I only fear that he might be too expensive.
Anyway please let me know what you think of the whole gambit and we will then decide what to do about it.
M.C.A, New York, liked the SWLM, but I haven’t yet heard from Vikings whom I had asked for plenty of suggested corrections and I will wait for them before going over the ms again.
But I would be very interested to hear the reactions of your readers if and when you get any.
I am now gradually reactivating myself and I hope to be up in London for about two days each week. Though much will depend on a gigantic medical conference this afternoon.
Yours ever.
TO MRS. VALENTINE FLEMING, Hotel Mirabeau, Monte Carlo, Monaco
Fleming’s mother, who since the war had flitted between various grand addresses, smart hotels and exotic destinations, had come temporarily to rest in Monte Carlo with her ancient beau, the ninety-eight-year-old ‘Monty’, Marquis of Winchester.
1st June, 1961
Darling Mama,
I am now up and about again but still not supposed to write much so please forgive the dictation.
It was lovely to get your birthday present and I shall have great fun buying myself something to relieve the boredom of convalescence.
Brighton for a fortnight was a great tonic, and at a giant meeting of the various doctors yesterday they seemed satisfied. Though it does sound as if convalescence from one of these things is, in fact, more or less endless and that I shall have to “take care” for ever more, which is very much against my nature.
However, as everyone says, it might have been much worse and you will be amused to know that The Times had actually written my obituary when it seemed that the tomb was about to yawn! I am doing everything I can to see if I can’t get hold of a copy.
Please don’t worry too much about the house [Sevenhampton]. I am not happy about it myself but it’s quite impossible being married unless you are prepared to compromise, and I shall just help Anne as much as I can with it and go fifty/fifty on the cost. At least it will be a good solid base in the country, and I expect fairly soon after it is finished we will forsake Victoria Square, and I shall take to planting lupins, or some other elderly and responsible pursuit, as it seems that strenuous golf is now out for always.
It sounds as if you have at last got your Monte Carlo life more or less straight, and I am delighted that the Rolls is being a success, and I do hope that the maid will be a real help. As for Monty, I do beg you to leave all the grisly nursing to nurses and not wear yourself out carrying bowls of soup (and other hospital ware!) around.
It is sweet of you to offer the Villa Mary, but it doesn’t look as if we shall be able to get away for some time. Why don’t you move into it yourself, or are you really happier in that small cell in the Mirabeau?
Caspar is getting on very well at [his school] Summer Fields and curiously enough being pushed rapidly up the school. He has even been made head of his dormitory, from which I can only guess that the other inhabitants must be the most appalling collection of little monsters. Anyway he is looking wonderful and one of the factors that decided us on Warneford was that he simply adores having a place to run about in, and it will be close by both for Summer Fields and Eton, and it has the Thames nearby for expeditions.
Please don’t worry any more about me. I shall just have to adjust myself to “growing old gracefully”, which will be a most entertaining spectacle for my family and friends!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
Howard replied on 5 June to Fleming’s letter of 31 May: ‘CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG’s adventures have me enthralled. She is truly an invention of genius, and I trust that you can reel off at least ten more episodes with no trouble at all.’ He was less certain about an idea that Fleming put forward in the interim, that they should be published under the pseudonym ‘Ian Lancaster’.
6th June, 1961
My dear Michael
Very many thanks for your letter of yesterday and I am delighted that you like the first two CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANGS. I must confess that I have no idea what to do with her next, but I suppose it would be possible to keep up to a book a year.
So far as the illustrator goes, if Trog were interested I am not sure it wouldn’t be desirable to enter into some kind of partnership with him by which he would be assured of, let us say, a third of the royalties. This would give him enthusiasm in the project and make the thing a joint effort, which such books should really be. If you think well of the idea and you see no objection, I would not be worried if you were to have a talk with him on this basis. Perhaps the best idea would be to have a triangular lunch together if you can fix that. He is an extremely nice man and great fun, and from the quality of his cartoons in the Spectator I am quite sure he has the graphic qualities we need, though he would have to bend his mind rather carefully to the original drawing of the car which must, I think, not look too funny.
I doubt if you will get much reaction out of William. I mentioned the project to him but he can’t bear children’s books and it will be much more important I think to get the judgement of your regular children’s books advisor.
One small point while it crosses my mind. I find that in these children’s series the parents very often can’t remember if little Billy has had just this particular adventure. So might I suggest that each volume should be in a distinctive colour and that the number of the adventure should be emphasised?
Of course I have no objection to being linked with the books in a vague way, but I am not sure that that will necessarily help their sales!
I will press on with correcting TSWLM and will hope to have it with you by the end of the month, though of course Vikings may come in with a shower of suggestions and criticisms.
By the way, although it is something of a trade secret which you should keep to yourself, The Sunday Times is going to break out into a shiny paper colour supplement instead of its magazine section towards the end of the year, and it is quite possible that they would like to serialise these CHITTY-BANG-BANG stories. Although this would gobble up a lot of your readership, not everybody in England reads The Sunday Times, but you might bear the possibility in mind from the point of view of timing the illustrators’ work.
I only mention this now as C. D. Hamilton has just been on the telephone about something else and I mentioned our new venture and he was enthusiastic.
You may be amused to see what Macmillans have done with your jacket. Pretty good for them!
Yours Ever.
TO THOMAS H. GUINZBURG, ESQ., The Viking Press Inc., 625 Madison Avenue, New York 22
Guinzburg, head of the American publishing house Viking, was uneasy about Fleming’s latest. He wrote on airmail paper (Fidelity Onion Skin) that, ‘the various readers feel this draft, while it is certainly acceptable Fleming, is not quite top-grade Fleming’. He suggested he put the manuscript aside for a while and write a couple of other books first. Cape, he pointed out, had already established a market for Bond but, ‘We, on the other hand, are only just beginning to establish the elements of the specific apparatus that surrounds and enhances the image of Bond, and we are afraid that this story, at least in its present form, does a disservice to that kind of emphasis.’
20th June, 1961
Dear Tom,
Many thanks for your piece of Fidelity Onion Skin of June 9th but I am indeed horrified to hear of poor Harold’s troubles. Please give him my warmest wishes for a rapid recovery and urge him to take a decent and non-business holiday and not to hurry back to work.
Now, about “The Spy Who Loved Me”, oddly enough the very reasons for your doubts about it are those put forward by Capes for any special virtues it possesses.
All at Capes think the breakaway from the routine Bond both healthy and desirable and in his most recent letter Michael Howard expects to do even better with it than Thunderball, which is now just over 40,000.
As for your idea of holding up its publication until I have written a couple more conventional full length thrillers, you seem to think that I am a Rex Stout!9 I have scraps of ideas for future books but nothing in the least firm. And heaven knows when these two imaginary thrillers will, in fact, get written.
Accordingly, I am afraid I must put the ball back in your court. Bond is after all the hero of this book and though he is seen through the looking glass so to speak, Capes are sure that the new gimmick is an excellent idea.
Meanwhile you have had a note from me about Mr. Liebert from the Yale Library, and, unilaterally, I have taken advantage of his offer and he is at the moment correcting the American lingo and the American background to the story with a delighted and very sharp pen. He has undertaken to return the corrected manuscript to me by July 6th, since Capes want to get it into page proof during August.
Perhaps it would be as well for you to put away the uncorrected typescript I sent you and wait to see Cape’s page proofs before you decide what you want to do.
My own recommendation is for you to take the rough with the smooth and drown your doubts in strong liquor.
Incidentally, would you please activate your publicity people and ask them to send me some reviews of T’ball. I have had nothing from Vikings except a few meagre scraps early on, nor any news of how the book is going.
Macmillans, as you know, are producing their Omnibus on July 24th, and no doubt this will also activate your sales of Thunderball.
TO MRS. JAMES BOND, 721, Davidson Road, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia 18, Pasadena
‘It was inevitable we should catch up with you . . .’ On which ominous note Mrs James Bond began her letter of 1 February 1961. Fleming had never made any secret of the fact that he had borrowed his hero’s name from one of his favourite books, Birds of the West Indies, by the American ornithologist James Bond. But now, almost ten years after he had written Casino Royale, news reached the Bonds that ‘you had brazenly picked up the name of a real human being for your rascal’. They didn’t really mind, as the real Bond had led an adventurous life, his colourful exploits being not too far, in the ornithological scale of things, from those of his fictional equivalent. ‘I told MY JB he could sue you for defamation of character,’ Mrs Bond concluded cheerfully. ‘But JBBA [James Bond British Agent] is too much fun for that and JB authenticus regards the whole thing as “a joke”.’
20th June, 1961
Dear Mrs James Bond,
I don’t know where to begin to ask your forgiveness for my very tardy acknowledgement to your letter of February 1st.
I received it in Jamaica and since I was almost on the way to Nassau I decided to telephone the Chaplins on arrival and get in touch with you and your husband.
Unfortunately I could get no reply from their telephone number and I again put your letter aside. Then, when I got back to England in March, I proceeded to have a swift heart attack which laid me out until now, and it is only today that your letter is again before me and blackest of consciences is sitting on my shoulder.
I will confess at once that your husband has every reason to sue me in every possible position and for practically every kind of libel in the book, for I will now confess the damnable truth.
I have a small house which I built in Oracabessa in Jamaica just after the war and, some ten years ago a confirmed bachelor on the eve of marriage, I decided to take my mind off the dreadful prospect by writing a thriller.
I was determined that my secret agent should be as anonymous a personality as possible, even his name should be the very reverse of the kind of “Peregrine Carruthers” whom one meets in this type of fiction.
At that time one of my bibles was, and still is, “Birds of the West Indies” by James Bond, and it struck me that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed and so James Bond II was born, and started off on the career that, I must confess, has been meteoric culminating with his choice by your President as his favourite thriller hero (see Life of March 17th).
So there is my dreadful confession together with limitless apologies and thanks for the fun and fame I have had from the most extraordinary chance choice of so many years ago.
In return I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purposes he may think fit. Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion that might be a way of getting his own back.
Anyway I send you both my most affectionate regards and good wishes, and should you ever return to Jamaica I would be very happy indeed to lend you my house for a week or so, so that you may inspect in comfort the shrine where the second James Bond was born.
TO R. CHOPPING, ESQ., The Store House, The Quay, Wivenhoe, Essex
22nd June, 1961
The jacket season has come round once again and I and Cape do pray that you will once again be the artist for the same fee of two hundred guineas, if you still think that reasonable recompense.
If, as I desperately hope, you agree we are in rather a quandary this time to suggest a suitable motif, and it occurred to me that you might have some brilliant idea for there are no emblems in the book which would be in any way suitable.
The title of the book is “The Spy Who Loved Me” and so what suggests itself of course is a juxtaposition between a dagger or a gun and an emblem representing love, rather on the lines of your gun with the rose.
But what can we use now?
How about one of those frilly heart shaped Valentines with a dagger thrust through it?
Or there might be young ivy leaves entwined in a gun, or forget-me-nots.
But none of these ideas thrill me with the possible exception of the Valentine with a splendid red heart pierced by a dagger.
But it crossed my mind that you have painted many keepsakes for people and that something might conceivably suggest itself to you.
Anyway, first of all, will you please do the jacket and, secondly, will you please have a brilliant idea?
I am back on all fours again and any time you are in London we could meet perhaps here and rub our two brains together.
I will now ring up Heywood Hill and see if they have any Valentines.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
22nd June, 1961
Very many thanks for your letter of yesterday and I am delighted, but mildly astonished, that your Children’s Book department has swallowed CCBB with so much gusto.
As to the points, they are all perfectly legitimate, except that CCBB in fact does a hundred in top gear, though I may have written this in a muddled fashion.
Now you are extremely kind to suggest that someone in Capes might do the editorial polishing and correct the little bits and pieces that have been brought up. I really can hardly bear to look at these stories again and anyway I am knee deep in “The Spy” and other bits and pieces.
So could I now leave the text to you and merely have a final look through the finished product?
I think I have very good news about Trog, whose real name and address is W.E. Fawkes, 24A Eton Avenue, N.W.3.
He is, in theory, delighted with the whole idea and has taken the stories off to read. He has been longing to illustrate a book and is not in any way tied up. So it is possible that you will have another valuable property on your hands as he really is a household name, which will vastly help to sell the series.
He very much likes the idea of a partnership with two thirds of the royalties to me and one third to him.
When he has given his final decision I think I will ask him to get in direct touch with you so that you can talk over the number of illustrations, the use of colour, etc.
I told him that as far as I knew you had no suggested date for publication and that you weren’t contemplating trying to rush this out in time for Christmas, but, in fact, he is a very fast worker and I think would fit in with any plans you may have.
I see the point about trying to have three or four stories to start off with, but I think there is a snag in this.
You will presumably have to market the books at around ten or twelve shillings, and while the average parent might go to two volumes I rather doubt if they would spread themselves to all four.
Moreover, there is the snag that at this moment I haven’t got two more adventures in mind, though I dare say I could conjure another couple up fairly quickly if you were very insistent.
Anyway I will let you know directly Trog gives his decision and then we can get the machinery into action.
As far as “The Spy” is concerned I have nearly finished my own corrections, but in the meantime a remarkable chap has sprung to life in the Library at Yale University with some very sharp comments on the Americanese in “Thunderball”. I was so impressed with his correspondence that I have now engaged him to go through “The Spy” with the sharpest possible pen to smarten up all the gangsterese and other American angles. He has agreed with alacrity, and has undertaken to air mail the text back by July 6th.
Since I fancy he may be very drastic this is going to involve me probably in a great deal of rewriting, but I hope a much improved book.
So I can’t really give you a firm date for delivery of the text until I see how much has got to be done.
Anyway I shall do my very best to get it all finished by the end of July and I hope this will be all right with you.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
Chopping’s artwork for Thunderball had been sent to Macmillan in the US for the attention of their designers. It was returned in a badly scuffed state.
27th June, 1961
I am quite horrified with what Macmillans have done with the Chopping picture and I have no idea what can be done to rescue it.
Chopping originals fetch between £200 and £500 on the London market and God knows how much financial damage has been done to this one, let alone the sentimental value to me.
Since it was through your agency that this was sent to Macmillans I think it would be better for you to write to them as from one publisher to another, sending Al Hart a Photostat to demonstrate the damage.
By the way, something else horrible has happened! I took my son this afternoon to see the new Walt Disney film and it has a flying motor car which circles a church spire! Moreover “The Absent Minded Professor” builds it in his back yard.
This really is the limit.
Would you send one of your intelligence spies to have a look at the film and suggest what amendments we ought to make?
Personally I think we could get away with cutting out the spire of Canterbury Cathedral, but it really is pretty maddening.
TO GUY WELLBY, ESQ., 18 & 20 Garrick Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.2.
Fleming thought a diamond might feature to advantage in Chopping’s composition for the jacket and had asked a jeweller friend, Guy Wellby, to provide photographs. In the end it proved an unnecessary (and expensive) exercise.
12th July, 1961
My dear Guy,
Thank you very much for all the trouble you took over the diamond.
I have now put the whole problem firmly in the lap of Michael Howard, Production Director at Capes, and in due course, though not very quickly I expect, he will make up his mind about the jacket.
My own guess is that the diamond will not work very well for the present book but that we will keep the photographs for possible use in the future.
Anyway, thank you very much indeed and your friend, the owner of this wonderful stone, for your swift and kindly aid, and please in due course send me a bill for the cost, addressed to me in the name of my company, Glidrose Productions Limited.
Please don’t forget to thank the owner most warmly for his kindness.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
12th July, 1961
CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG
Trog says he is delighted with the two stories and is “terribly keen” to do the illustrations.
He is going on holiday from July 22nd to August 4th and cannot do anything before his return.
May I now leave it to you to contact him direct and carry the ball from there, making an agreement with Trog on the lines of my previous suggestions?
CHOPPING JACKET – THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
Chopping will be delighted to do a jacket but has upped his price to 250 guineas and cannot get going for about three weeks.
He scribbled some vague ideas and will scribble some more.
I think this may look a bit like a flower book, and I now suggest to you that he should perhaps cross the carnation with your commando dagger well polished up, with a cipher book background.
You may think the carnation should be pinned to the cipher page with a lover’s knot brooch. I have borrowed some photographs of possible diamond brooches from Cartiers. They would be quite happy to cough up the brooches for this purpose if we paid the insurance. (Mr. Brown at Cartiers is the man to contact).
As to the cipher background, the specimen page I gave to Dickie Chopping is from a Bentley Code10, which they might not like to cough up.
On another page from this book, which I have had photographed, white on black to give a better background, is technical stuff which would not be copyright.
Dickie says that white on black would be very difficult for him and I see his point. But perhaps it could be technically fudged in one way or another.
I enclose specimens of all the possible pages, Dickie only has the crumpled one.
Apart from this possible design I have located in London probably the largest blue-white heart shaped diamond in the world. This belongs to a friend of Guy Wellby, the head of Wellby’s, the jewellers in Garrick Street, and at my expense he has had transparencies made of it and also blown up replicas. (They could, of course, be blown up in colour). The name of the photographer is on the box.
I don’t know if you feel that something could be made of this, either now or in the future, if in the future perhaps you would like to keep them for your files.
Now hurrying on with the corrections to the Spy and with a pile of other chores on my desk I must beg you please to take over from here with Dickie, insuring [sic] that Tony Colwell informs Cartiers and Guy Wellby if we do not require their various jewellery, and otherwise coping with detail.
Personally, I think the carnation with your dagger is the right idea.
Sorry to transfer these two chunks of work on to your lap, but mine is not feeling very solid at the moment.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
27th July, 1961
Here now is “The Spy Who Loved Me” cleaned up as best I know how and I hope to your satisfaction.
Could you give me any idea of when I am likely to have page proofs?
My present plans are to stay in London and Sandwich for the foreseeable future.
By the way, as you may know a vast film deal involving all the Bond books is in progress with United Artists spearheaded by Harry Saltzman who produced “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “The Entertainer”. It looks as if they will start with “Dr. No”.
Saltzman has most grandiose ideas about book sales to be co-ordinated with the film due around April, and he is blasting hell out of Pan’s because he can’t find my titles even in Foyles or Hatchards.
He is talking of subsidising a print order in Pan’s running literally into millions of copies of my titles, and it would obviously be a good idea for Cape’s to ride on the back of this wave of Bonds in some way or another.
But perhaps it would be a good idea for you to keep in touch with Pan’s and get them to let you know exactly what they are planning, particularly in respect of whichever picture Saltzman does first.
If this thing gets off the ground it will presumably be wise of you to have fairly solid stocks of all the titles on hand.
By the way, when your editress has finished tidying up the Chitty stories could you please let me have copies and I will then try and bend my mind to producing two more.
I have received tearful letters from Al Hart so I am sure that everything to do with the Chopping jacket will sort itself out. As to the next one, I feel more and more that it should be your commando dagger crossed with a carnation. A possible background instead of the cipher page might be a torn sheet of paper bearing the title and author’s name, that would leave some corners for the famous wood grain you like so much!
TO JOHN HAYWARD, ESQ., C.B.E., 19 Carlyle Mansions, London, S.W.3.
Although Fleming’s relationship with The Book Collector remained uneasy he nevertheless valued the opinions of its editor.
1st August, 1961
I am still proposing to descend upon you, but since I am being forced to spend most of my time at Sandwich this is not being easy to contrive. So please just expect me sometime this month.
Meanwhile I have been in lengthy correspondence with a certain Fritz Liebert of Yale University Library, who has corrected the Americanese in my next book.
In the course of our correspondence he expressed his highest regard for yourself and claims acquaintanceship both with you and with John Carter.
Anyway with his last letter he sent me the enclosed11 and I wonder if you think it would be suitable for reproduction in The Book Collector, since, as you will see, only two hundred copies have been printed in America.
Personally, I find the story and the picture most attractive.
I have told Liebert that I am passing it on to you with my recommendation, but adding that you are a law unto yourself in these matters. At the same time I asked him for freedom to print in case the piece passed muster with you.
Please don’t bother to answer, but when I see you you must tell me more about this Liebert man, who has, in fact, been exceptionally helpful to me out of the blue.
TO SIR WILLIAM STEPHENSON, 450 East 52nd Street, New York
16th August, 1961
In accordance with your instructions via the darling Miss Green I have the honour to report that my team of mechanics report that the engine, though less oiled than previously, is now running on at least eleven out of its twelve cylinders, and that the twelfth should start firing soon so long as I continue to obey their infuriating instructions, which are, broadly speaking, that I should do none of the things I want to do.
In fact, as possibly in your case, the whole business has been a timely warning not to try and pour a gallon into a pint pot, and I am taking the whole thing very philosophically.
In particular, I have not been siezed [sic] by what they call “coronary neurosis”, which apparently is a very real consequence of one of these attacks. It results in people thinking of nothing except about their health and going about as if they were made of spun Venetian glass. Such people are an infernal nuisance, and since my malady got into the newspapers (in fact to my delight The Times had my obituary re-written by a friend of mine) I am regarded as fair game by all these morons who bore me to death with tales of their symptoms and of the pills and tests they have to take.
But I am, in fact, being reasonably sensible in following the instructions of my various mechanics. That is the reason why I did not come to New York last month as I had intended, and I am staying in London and Sandwich, where my more relaxed golf swing and an increased handicap (I happen to be on the handicapping Committee!) has confounded my enemies.
My strictly commercial love affair with the darling Marlow has gone slightly awry and I asked her to explain the circumstances to you. Briefly, a very big Bond film deal is in the offing and it could not go through so long as she had the option on my television rights, which I had given her over scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in Sardis East in a bemused moment.
She couldn’t have been nicer about the whole thing and surrendered her option. I sent her a small token from Cartiers to signal my love and appreciation. But, in fact, as I have told her, I shall try and see that if and when the film series gets successfully launched and the moment for television series comes along, her name will in some way be linked with the television production.
But naturally I cannot actually promise anything, but only use my best endeavours with United Artists, who are the putative owners of the Bond properties under various options. If they do not take up these options and seriatim the whole property reverts to me, I would once more propose to offer my hand, at least in television marriage, to Marlow.
The deal itself starts with a minimum payment of $150,000 amounting by $100,000 with each further film U.A. makes. There is no object in my arranging a Bermuda company for all these, as the film rights are owned by Caspar’s Trust and therefore avoid all tax. But, in addition, I get 5% of the producer’s gross, which is very carefully defined, and if this should look like getting too big I would consult you again about a Bermudan gambit. But as you know producers profits have a curious way of melting like snow in summer sunshine when anyone else has a share of them, and I think the days of my becoming a millionaire are still some way distant.
Meanwhile I observe the Dows index and remember your dictum that it would be a thousand before the end of the year. Unfortunately you failed to tell me which stocks to buy, so here again I have failed to benefit, except through some minor holdings in Flemings Investment Trust.
By the way, should I now sink back into Caribbean Cement?
No other news except the minor item that I think England is in the process of slowly sinking beneath the waves. She had a very good run and I only hope she does her sinking gracefully.
I am sending you a copy of an article as I think it may amuse you.12 It has just gone to M.C.A. with the suggestion that they offer it first to C. D. Jackson, though I dare say it will turn out to be too technical even for American publication.
Anyway I expect it will make you chuckle.
No other news except that if you bought some Drages shares at 120 you might be able to sell them at 200. But this is not five star guarantee but only from the mouth of two very reliable horses.
With best love to Mary.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
16th August, 1961
My dear Michael,
Many thanks for your letter of yesterday about the new Courtelle advertisement.
I don’t really mind these but they rather annoyed me by writing a patronizing letter offering me one sweater, one pair of slacks, or indeed any one object from their collection instead of begging me to come in and take my pick of their stuff – which I naturally wouldn’t have done but which would have sounded rather handsomer.
In fact I would like them to invite me round some Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon to have a look at all this stuff I am sponsoring. I have absolutely no idea what it looks like.
In the present copy I don’t think they should suggest that Bond wears suits from Savile Row, which he doesn’t, or actually Courtelle shirts, etc., etc., though I don’t mind them saying that people like James Bond wear these things.
I don’t want to make a song and dance about it and I entirely appreciate the points you make.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
For the endpapers of The Spy Who Loved Me, Cape had commissioned a black and white drawing of the situation in which the novel was set.
10th October, 1961
My dear Michael,
I like Lee Vernon’s sketch immensely, and I quite agree with you that it will admirably serve our purpose.
One or two small points which I had indicated in red:
The runaway car gets out of control and goes over the cliff to the right of the Motel. We do not need to see exactly where it went over the cliff, but could we move the rustic chairs and tables down to the right as I have indicated.
I forgot all about the swimming pool when writing the story, and as it would naturally come into the action if it is where Vernon correctly places it, could he please shift it to behind the Motel as I have indicated.
The saloon car should point towards Lake George.
I would rather do without the second sign board, as otherwise this also should have appeared in the book, notably during the fight with the gangsters where it would have been used as cover.
Otherwise I have no comments and I am much impressed with the sketch and particularly with the dark spikiness of the trees.
What a gift to be able to knock off something like this!
One last thought, could the artist vaguely indicate the ‘No Vacancy’ over the front door?
TO CAPTAIN E. K. LE MESURIER, National Rifle Association, Bisley Camp, Brookwood, Surrey
Fleming had invited Captain Le Mesurier of the National Rifle Association to comment on his short story ‘The Living Daylights’.
31st October, 1961
Dear Captain Le Mesurier,
Here now is the story we discussed on the telephone, and I would indeed be grateful for any corrections or suggestions you may have, particularly on the opening pages about Bisley.
Please be extremely tough and critical and don’t spare my feelings.
One particular point on page 25, half way down, is the expression “flash protector” correct? I have a feeling that my war time memory may have failed me.
It is extremely kind of you to allow me to take up your time and brains in this way, and I shall insist on sending you an editorial fee to cover general wear and tear, midnight oil and the heavy refreshment that I am sure it will call for.
This has nothing to do with the N.R.A. as such and I am consulting you privately and using your spare time, so please don’t argue about accepting it.
TO GRAHAM SUTHERLAND, ESQ., O.M., The White House, Trottiscliffe, West Malling, Kent
Fleming had commissioned the distinguished artist Graham Sutherland to provide a picture to accompany his short story ‘The Living Daylights’ in the Sunday Times colour supplement. In the end it was never used.
7th November, 1961
My dear Graham,
The first reactions, while enthusiastic, are that the green is too gay giving the whole thing rather too much of a pastoral quality with which, I expect you have now read the story, you will agree is off-key.
Would you be an angel and take up your brushes again and try a background to the heart of perhaps a window frame or barbed wire and perhaps a gunmetal background.
Also the pontiffs think that the arrow should come from right to left.
Don’t bother about leaving space for lettering as whichever way you do the design it will anyway leave plenty of room.
You are terribly kind to submit to this boring chore and all I can do in exchange, apart from the meagre hundred guineas, is to hand you over the whole bestiary idea without any strings whatsoever.
My pleasure of having thought of a theme that stimulates you is ample reward, apart from your kindness over this blasted jacket.
If you are both not too fed up with me by now I will in fact come by around midday on Friday for some more sausages and mash, but naturally countermand me if it doesn’t suit.
I hear that Douglas is back at the chateau with Richardson.
TO SIR WILLIAM STEPHENSON, 450 East 52nd Street, New York
7th November, 1961
Many thanks for your chastening cable which actually fetched up at the right address. Please use it frequently.
Not much news from here. My host of medical advisers seem to be delighted with my recovery and, as you can imagine, I am losing no time in loosening up on their counsels of moderation in all things.
The film deal with United Artists is going ahead and they are going to film ‘DR NO’ in Jamaica in January and February, and the advance party has already gone out to prospect for location. But, as usual with show business, no actual money has actually changed hands yet.
I shall be coming out to Jamaica around January 18th and will be paying you my usual visit around the middle of March. So please warn The Pierre to lay in plenty of oysters.
TO ANTHONY COLWELL, ESQ., 30 Bedford Square London W.C.1
13th December, 1961
Dear Tony,
Very many thanks for the proof of the jacket which in general I think is splendid though, apart from the points you make, it does seem to me that the background wood has turned rather pink.
You are right about the spelling of Adirondacks, but this may have been my mistake in writing the blurb.
Should not the copyright line “Jacket design by Richard Chopping” be “Ian Fleming”? As it was with the last book and since the picture is my property.
One final point. On the back of the jacket I think typographically the joke slightly misfires. How about putting “Verdicts of THE TIMES!”
Incidentally, Victor Weybright has done a brilliant promotion pamphlet on the Bonds which I am sure will entertain all of you. Unfortunately I haven’t got a spare copy, but perhaps you would like to get one from him.
P.S. And above the credit to Chopping mightn’t we put “Commando dagger by the Wilkinson Sword Company” if that is their right title?
TO D. R. C. BEDSON, ESQ., Executive Council, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Mr Bedson had read The Spy Who Loved Me while spending a weekend with Sir William and Lady Stephenson, and raised a few points. Stephenson, no doubt with some glee, insisted he write to the author. Which he did, stating that Fleming’s description of French Canada and its various groups bore no resemblance to anything he had experienced. Also, if Bond was going from Toronto to Washington he’d have gone via Niagara Falls, Buffalo, then on to the highways through western New York and Pennsylvania. He’d have gone nowhere near Lake St George.
Dear Mr. Bedson,
It is extremely kind of you to have taken so much trouble to write to me so helpfully about my last book.
I quite agree with you that I dealt very cursorily with the French-Canadian problem. I should have delved more deeply and not relied on a casual talk with a French-Canadian friend of mine.
You are of course absolutely right about James Bond’s route, but I had to get him to Lake George somehow and I think we must assume that he was taking a leisurely sightseeing trip.
Anyway, it was very thoughtful of you to have written and I am delighted to hear from any friend of my hero, ‘Little Bill’.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
6th April, 1962
My dear Ian,
How good of you to send me my special copy of The S. who l. M. Best thanks for this tenth knock-out. Of course I have dashed out from under my immense load of dung, & have beetled into a corner & begun to re-read you, which is fatal, because one goes on. “. . . and everyone froze” – and of course one freezes with them.
I notice the New Morality is beginning to appear. Perhaps you saw the letter in the Lit. Sup. about the new novel by Christopher Isherwood (wh. I haven’t read). You must perhaps expect increasing attacks on the grounds of morality. Now that Non-Smoking is coming in too, you will soon find that you mayn’t mention cigarettes. . .
I am hoping to see you – or should I say watch you – at the gathering at Bedford Square on Wednesday. In the meantime let me wish you as I always do, an enormous sale for this book.
TO MRS. FLORENCE TAYLOR, Ford’s Book Stores Ltd., 9 & 11 Market Hall Buildings, Chesterfield
Mrs Taylor wrote icily to say that she ‘did not care for your new book’, that it was ‘a great disappointment’, and ‘I do hope that this is not a new trend in your style of writing.’
18th April, 1962
Dear Mrs. Taylor,
It was really very kind of you to have taken the trouble to write to me and I was touched by your affection for James Bond.
The point is that if one is writing about a serial character one’s public comes to want more or less the same book over and over again, and it was really to stretch my writing muscles that I tried to write like a twenty-three year old girl and put forward a view of James Bond at the other end of the gun barrel so to speak.
But this is a unique experiment and I have just completed the next Bond book, I think the longest yet, in which he appears from the first page to the last.
Again with many thanks for the kindly thought behind your letter.
The brickbats continued. ‘What a let down’, wrote a Canadian reader. From H. S. Baker of New Bond Street – ‘in the sacred name of ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘From Russia with Love’, you hadn’t oughta have done it.’ From one David Ferney – ‘Now look here Fleming, this catering to fifth form eroticism must stop. Do you hear?[. . .] It’s inadequate Fleming, and you know it.’ From an attorney in Chicago – ‘This particular book does not belong in a library any more than a package of garbage does.’
Fleming was dismayed by these and other criticisms. As he wrote, ‘The experiment seems to have failed and I am suffering from multiple contusions as a result of the onslaught of my critics.’
19th April, 1962
‘The Spy Who Loved Me’
I am becoming increasingly depressed with the reception of this book although I don’t think the TLS was as harsh as you gave me to think. But obviously reviewers and, as you know, some of the book trade are upset by two factors. Firstly that James Bond makes a very late entry into the book and, secondly, though this I think weighs less heavily, with the alleged salacity of certain passages.
It is the second of these criticisms to which I am perhaps overly sensitive.
Both I and all of you have treated the whole of the James Bond saga with a light heart and so, with one or two exceptions, have the reviewers, most of whom for the first nine books have been very kind. But in the reviews of The Spy I detect a note of genuine disapproval. This surprises me because of the genesis of this particular book which should perhaps now be explained to you.
I had become increasingly surprised to find that my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, were being read in the schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond when to my mind, and as I have often said in interviews, I do not regard James Bond as a heroic figure but only as an efficient professional in his job.
So it crossed my mind to write a cautionary tale about Bond to put the record straight in the minds particularly of younger readers.
It was impossible to do this in my usual narrative style and I therefore invented the fiction of a heroine through whom I could examine Bond from the other end of the gun barrel so to speak.
To make this heroine a credible figure and one who would be likely to come into Bond’s path, I had to explain her at considerable length and endeavour to make her worldly wise.
This I did by telling the story in her own words of her upbringing and love life which consisted of two incidents, both of which were of a strongly cautionary nature.
The trouble she then got into with the gangsters was of the normal American thriller variety.
Its verisimilitude and the language used were incidentally checked by a member of the University Library of Yale at his own request.
And, just to remove some further ‘heroism’ from Bond, he is depicted as making a considerable hash of his subsequent fight with the gangsters.
After the love scene with the heroine which Bond breaks off in the most cursory fashion, there follows the long homily from the chief detective warning the heroine and the readers that Bond himself is in fact no better than the gangsters. And on that note the book closes.
I haven’t bothered to explain my reasons for writing this book before and I only do so now because the experiment has obviously gone very much awry, and I am in general being criticised for doing almost the exact opposite of what I intended.
This being so, and though we may get more understanding reviews later, I would like this book of mine to have as short a life as possible, and the subject of this letter is to ask you to co-operate.
In particular I would like there to be no reprints after your present edition is exhausted, and I would ask that it not be offered to Pan Books through whom, presumably, it would reach a more junior audience than your hard cover edition.
This will mean considerable financial sacrifice by both of us and I must just ask you to accept your share of this loss in as friendly a spirit as you can muster.
Please don’t bother to reply immediately and perhaps we can talk the whole thing over when I see you after Easter, but I wanted to get this letter away to relieve some of the burden that is in my mind as a result of the book’s reception.
In May 1961 Fleming received a letter from Herman W. Liebert,1 librarian at Yale University and a scholar on the works of Samuel Johnson. Having read Thunderball, Liebert was appalled by the language Fleming made his American characters use. Half the things they said simply made no sense in the US. He enclosed a long list of replacements for words like ‘sponge bag’, ‘damnably’, ‘gammy’, ‘arse-end’ and ‘chap’. He was particularly acerbic on the use of ‘by gum’. As he pointed out, ‘I don’t think an American has said this since the recent death of A. Lincoln.’ And what on earth was a ‘sixpenny sick’?
Despite being hospitalised by a heart attack, Fleming was delighted. Nothing spurred him more than a challenge to Bond’s authenticity. He replied with enthusiasm, and was intrigued to discover that Liebert was not only a book collector but owned a house in Jamaica and had been a member of the OSS, the CIA’s forerunner. To have a fan of such erudition was one thing, but to find he was also a bibliophile, ex-spy and lover of the Caribbean was irresistible. Fleming wasted no time enrolling him as unofficial fact-checker and editor for his latest book The Spy Who Loved Me. They conducted a warm and witty exchange during its publication, for which Fleming paid Liebert with a Cartier pen set that had to be smuggled into the States by a friend to avoid customs charges.
The archive correspondence ends in 1962 but it would be good to think that their friendship continued, and that they eventually met, whether in New York or Jamaica. As Fleming said, ‘I have no doubt that fate will bring us together when the stars are right’. To which Liebert replied philosophically, ‘favete astrae’ – ‘Let the stars decide’.
FROM LIEBERT
May 10th, 1961
Dear Mr. Fleming,
I am an insatiable Bondomane (what sensible man is not?) and found Thunderball one of the very best. But it was very nearly spoiled for me by the supposed Americanese of Leiter and Pederson.
A list of alternate readings is enclosed. A few are optional, most are not; that is, there are one or two an American might use, but most he would never use.
The Bond books are so very good that it hurts to find them at fault in any particular. Won’t you get an American friend with an ear to vet the American dialect from now on? Then they would be perfect.
TO MR. HERMAN LIEBERT, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.
29th May, 1961
Dear Mr. Liebert,
Thank you for your absolutely splendid and invaluable letter of May 10th, but I only plead semi-guilty.
I particularly asked Vikings to clean up this story to spot anglicanisms and I can only suggest that through publishing Graham Greene and me they are beginning to forget their own language.
Mark you, I have set two or three books in and around America and this is the first time I have had such a dressing down, so I am taking the matter very seriously and passing your letter on to Vikings as they have a manuscript in the oven at the moment in which I suspect a great deal of the American gangster talk is very ham.
I shall accordingly suggest to Vikings, if I may, that they approach you with a view, for some miserly fee, to go over the Ms with your blazing eye. We will see what happens.
On the other hand I am not prepared to accept without further witnesses more than around 20% of your suggestions for the very good reason that Felix Leiter has been affected by his international work for CIA, and has picked up a good deal of English in the process. An example is “sixpenny sick”, a very English expression for the kind of boat ride holiday makers take from the sea shore holiday beaches.
Anyway I am indeed grateful for your harsh letter and it was very kind indeed of you to have taken the trouble.
FROM LIEBERT
June 5th, 1961
Dear Mr. Fleming:
I am most grateful for your full, frank, and generous letter, and much concerned that mine gave you the impression of being harsh. Its emotional source was sorrow rather than anger – the sorrow of seeing what seemed a flaw in an author otherwise so sure and so stimulating that he evokes the wish for perfection. Language wouldn’t matter in the host of bad books with which we are all surrounded; it matters desperately to me in books like yours to which I am devoted.
I would be delighted to comb any MS of yours and to offer a list of suggestions that you or Viking could accept or reject. For such a privilege I would not dream of accepting a fee, even the miserly kind publishers usually offer. And of course, if I were offered such a chance, it would shut me up.
I demur at the view Leiter has picked up more than one or two Anglicisms; of the 20 or 30 people I know in CIA (my wartime colleagues in OSS) I don’t think one has picked up any, except rarely in humorous quotes. But you are Leiter’s parent, so I demur.
Delighted to hear there’s a book in the oven; I would love a chance to baste it while it’s cooking.
[PS] Good Lord, I have just done my homework and looked in Who’s Who to be sure I shouldn’t hang a couple of honors (sorry, honours) after your name, and suddenly realize it is you who publish the Book Collector. I suppose I have read the masthead fifty times without waking up. Now I am more than ever at your feet. Incidentally, Jake Carter and John Hayward are both good friends.
I also see you go to Oracabessa. I have a place in Runaway Bay. We must drink together sometime on that blessed isle. You must have known Peter Murray Hill: he and Phyl stayed at my place before he died.
TO LIEBERT
15th June, 1961
Dear Mr. Liebert,
Thank you very much for your letter of June 5th and I am most amused by the number of “bonds” we seem to have.
These, and your apparent enthusiasm, have decided me to take you at your word and ask you to go through the American parts of my next book with a microscope and a very sharp red pencil. I had already passed on your previous letter and notes to Vikings, but I am not sure that they will do anything about it and I would rather take the bull by the horns myself.
I am accordingly sending you by registered airmail a copy of ‘THE SPY WHO LOVED ME’ which, as you will see, is very different from the usual Bond but has considerable American angles which I am most anxious to have stringently vetted by an expert.
What I would pray you to do is to pay particular attention to the gangsterese – improving, re-writing, and even editing snatches of conversation wherever you think fit.
Any additions or amendments to the motel theme would also be invaluable as would any necessary brushing up of the local police procedure and nomenclature at the end of the book.
This is an uncorrected first typescript and you can assume that obvious mistakes have been picked up here. What I want badly to stiffen up are the points I mentioned above and if you decide to re-write whole pages or tear out chunks, I shall not be in the least dismayed – very much the opposite.
For instance, at the moment I feel the gangsters are three-quarters cardboard, and if you choose to change their names, clothes, or anything else about them I shall not object, for at the present moment they look to me rather like Mutt and Jeff.
This is going to be hard work, and I am afraid it must also be fast, as my publishers here are screaming for the corrected typescript at the latest by July 15th which means that I must have your amended and corrected typescript back by July 10th. Please don’t bother about “suggestions”, just write in your comments on the typescript.
So, as you see, I am taking your kind offer very seriously indeed and I am embarrassed to suggest what fee to offer you for this invaluable work. But if you can successfully bring about this vital piece of collaboration I propose to present you with a handsome present from Cartiers as a memento.
I am coming out to New York by the Queen Elizabeth sailing on July 20th and shall be about two weeks in the States, when perhaps we might meet and I could make the presentation!
I hope you will quickly get over the shock of this letter, and it would be most helpful if, on receipt of the typescript, you could send me a brief L.T. cable saying yes or no to the project.
I would also be most grateful if you could keep this whole affair a secret between us, though if the weight of your scholarship is as important as I think it may be, I will take the liberty of dedicating the book to you.
June 19th, 1961
Dear Mr. Fleming:
If, in the cable just now sent, I had given free rein to my reactions on getting your letter this morning, the cable would have bankrupted me. So I settled for “overwhelmed”.
I cannot imagine an offer more exciting, or put in more generous terms. I will do everything I can with the script, and if you feel when it returns that I have done little, that will be because it seemed good as it was, and not through reluctance.
I must go west for a speaking engagement on 6th July, and I will airmail the script back before I leave, so you should have it easily by the 10th.
Grateful as I should be, I hope you will not indulge in a present, for the pleasure and pride I have in the offer to go over the book are more than sufficient reward. The fact that I am doing this work will be graveyard so far as I am concerned.
If you could spare a day to come to New Haven while here (90 minutes by train from N.Y.) we could meet and you could see both the Yale library and my own collections, and I could promise you food and drink fit for a Bond. If you can’t spare the time, I would eagerly come to N.Y. In any event, let us meet.
Renewed thanks and cordial regards.
TO LIEBERT
21st June, 1961
Dear Mr. Liebert,
Thank you for your delightful cable and charming letter and I do hope you are not at this moment cursing your generous impulse.
But once again I abjure you to be as tough as hell with this book, as I am not at all satisfied that the peril represented by the gangsters is nearly powerful enough, or that the realism, though it may get by in England, will stand up to informed readership.
I am afraid it is bound to be a much heavier job than you could have expected, and I shall not be surprised if you are forced to rewrite whole pages.
But, anyway, there it is, and the gift is already on order from Cartiers so I am afraid there is no escape however powerful your nausea.
Incidentally, the Albany call sign is WGY.
Naturally we must meet when I get to America, but as I am semi-convalescent I shall be going straight up to Vermont to a millionaire’s farm belonging to an English friend of mine, John F.C. Bryce [Ivar Bryce], who is married to an American and lives at Black Hole Hollow Farm just across the border from Cambridge, New York State.
Anyway we will fix up a meeting in due course and probably spend a great deal of time roaring with laughter over this extraordinary project.
With my warmest thanks and best wishes for your dreadful labours.
FROM LIEBERT
July 5th, 1961
Dear Mr Fleming:
Viv returns to you airmail registered under separate cover tomorrow. I fear you will find her not as much a changed girl as you hoped – partly because I have not been able to shake loose as much spare time to work on her as I wished, and partly because I am a much better editor than a collaborator. I would have liked to try some re-write, especially about the gangsters, which I agree is the place it is needed most, but by the time I had done what I knew I could do and so did first, the English/American transition, there was no more time.
A little about what I did do. There are two levels of correction, one in red (for the redcoats) of changes I think should be made both in the English and in the American editions; and a second in blue (for the Atlantic) of changes for the American edition only.
The changes are of several kinds: (1) matters of fact; (2) within dialogue by Americans, changes to American current usage fitting to the character speaking; (3) in Viv’s story, changes of English expressions that would either mystify American readers or, though perfectly plain in meaning after a second’s thought, would nevertheless obtrude on and slow the narrative pace. I have left Viv enough Anglicanisms of the kind most familiar to Americans so that they will remember she is Canadian and English-schooled, but have, I hope, pruned enough unAmerican from her so that most American readers will feel that she is simply speaking naturally.
I wish I could come up with better names for the gangsters, because here especially, I think, they have a literary flavor. ‘Horror’ seems to me a bookish word, and I am put off by the feminine ending in ‘Sluggsy’. ‘Slug’ would be better, or ‘Hot Shot’: both are names of real underworld characters of the past, who were notable shots. One very tough thug a while ago was named ‘Chiller’, on the same ground as ‘Horror’, but I don’t know that I like it much better.
My reaction to the whole book is that it is good but different. I like the Viv half of the book, and think the story is vivid, observant fiction; some of your Bond devotees may find it not the Fleming they expect. The second half is Bond enough for any devotee.
I suspect that when you see how little I have really done, in spite of many hours of work, you will want to send that item back to Cartier’s and buy me a drink. I would of done more if I hadda chance, and certainly your very generous invitation gave me carte blanche to do more. It was the time, not the will that was lacking.
Sorry to hear you have been knocked up – a term of very different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I hope your visit here and rest will repair the difficulty. Do let me have your American address, so I can at least get in touch with you while you are here. If there is a chance of seeing you, here or anywhere else this side of Calif., I am yours to command.
Tom Guinzburg of Viking, who was here at Yale a while ago, and whom I knew as a student, phoned the other day to ask about my work on the book. I tried to play it close, respecting your wish for confidence, and did not let on I was doing anything to it until he read me part of a letter from you telling them I was at work, so I presumed then that the secret did not extend to them, if you had told them yourself. He seemed pleased to know that I was working on the script.
No more now as I am off to Ohio for a speech to (rest my soul) a convention of librarians. If I make my address in Sluggsy dialect, it will be your fault.
Just a last word of sincere appreciation for the opportunity you have offered me, so fully and generously. No author could be more open-handed with his opus. What I have come to know about the man I.F. leads me to admire him as much as I have always admired the writer.
TO LIEBERT
12th July, 1961
Dear Mr. Liebert,
I really am most grateful to you for your splendid labours and for your charming and perceptive letter.
I shall pay close attention to all your advices and, from a quick glance, I already see that you have saved me from a thousand otiosities.
Regarding Tom Guinsburg’s communication, I felt I had to tell Vikings that I had called on you for help to stop them hacking around on their own. I hope he was much impressed by the weight of the authority I had invoked.
Now, it’s maddening, but the united medical councils of London have forbidden me to visit America next week. So the meeting I was so much looking forward to will have to be deferred and a small token from Cartier will have to come to you anonymously through whatever channel I can devise. Since it will reach you anonymously, this is to ask you to accept it as a memento of this curious literary association, which comes to you with my affectionate thanks.
I do hope that our meeting will not be too long deferred, and that if I do not catch up with you in America I may do so in Jamaica when, over a glass of flaming Old Man’s Liqueur, we can discuss cabbages and kings.
Again with renewed thanks for your extreme kindness.
FROM LIEBERT
July 17th, 1961
Dear Mr Fleming:
How utterly rotten for you that your health will not permit you to make the trip here. I do hope this is a passing and not a chronic ailment and that you will soon be free of it.
I will, of course, receive the memento you are sending with warm appreciation, though the privilege of being “in” on the forthcoming Bond and of receiving such gracious and friendly letters from you are quite reward enough.
I am glad that some of my advices seem useful; I abjure you to abide by our understanding that they are only advices, and if you at last decide to reject all of them, I will be perfectly satisfied by their having been considered.
One thing I meant to say in my last, which you have already detected by now: I am a heavy hyphener, and you will probably want to neglect my many insertions of that mark.
Missing the chance to see you here makes me insist we meet in Jamaica. We will be at Runaway Bay from 15 December through 6 January, and back again sometime between mid-March and mid-April. I hope some part of our stay will coincide with yours. Though we have less reason to exchange letters now, I hope you will, toward the end of the year, let me know what your Jamaica dates may be.
Give my regards and thanks to the Hayward and the Carter when you see them; I am sure it was partly their vouching for me that encouraged you to make so trusting an offer as you did. I only wish I had had more time to tackle the larger aspects, but I felt my first responsibility was to the verbal problems, and when I had done those, the postman knocked.
I remain much in your debt for a stimulating experience backstage with my favourite fiction character. Let us now hope that your vitality (not I am sure broken down by torture or intercourse) will reassert itself as miraculously as Bond’s.
Until we meet, when I will be able to express my gratitude and admiration in person, believe me,
Faithfully yours,
[PS] You must tell me one day what books you collect.
FROM LIEBERT
July 27th, 1961
My dear Fleming:
The chaste and handsome product of MM. Cartier has just arrived, and is so beautiful that it makes even signing checks a real pleasure.
I find my cyanide fits very neatly in alongside the ink-holder, and I think my thermite people will be able to make up a package just like the ink-tube, so you will see how handy it will be for everyday needs. And as soon as I have the Yale library filmed in microdot, I can close up shop and move to Jamaica with my pen and my swimming trunks.
Seriously, it is a very generous and much-appreciated gift, and I am proud both of its beauty and of its source. Adding it to the fun I had with the MS puts me deep in your debt. Thank you.
I hope your ailment has abated, and that if it does not permit you to come here, it will at least allow you to get to Jamaica later in the year. We will be there 15 December through 7 January and greatly hope this will synchronize.
I hope you will accept the enclosed piece about an item in my collection; I think you will like the fine photographs.
With renewed thanks and warm regards.
TO LIEBERT
1st August, 1961
Thank you very much indeed for your charming letters of July 17th and 27th, and I am glad that the pen has arrived and that you are pleased with it. In fact I find the ball points rather fine, but Cartiers were adamant that they could not get a broader one for you.
I have just this minute been talking to Jonathan Capes who are ecstatic at receiving the cleaned up manuscript so swiftly. And I do thank you most warmly again, not only for the trouble you took, but for your rapidity.
There is more I wish you had done to the book and I am still not very happy with the gangsters, but I accepted I think every one of your suggestions and now the little book must fly on its own.
Incidentally, I am also a great hyphenater and you picked up several I had missed.
I haven’t had a chance to talk about you to Jack Carter or to John Hayward as I have been up to my uvula in miscellaneous mundungus since our correspondence began. I was warmly influenced by the kindness and perception of your first letter.
Alas, it is most unlikely that I shall be in Jamaica before January 10th, but I will let you know my plans nearer the time. In any event we will certainly meet in due course in one continent or another.
Thank you very much indeed for the Johnson’s Head, which I shall take home and read this evening. I must say I am enchanted by the photographs of the bust, what a splendid face!
Having read it I propose to pass it on to John Hayward with a suggestion that he might care to reproduce it in the Book Collector. So please write if you would have no objection to this happening.
August 4th, 1961
Dear Mr. Fleming:
Footnote to Chap. I., requiring no reply.
I hope the garbridge (see OED s.v. mundungus,* 1st quote; a delightful spelling I shall always use) has dropped below the uvula, to the jejunum or even to the levator ani.
John Hayward is welcome to use the piece if he wants it, but if so I would welcome the chance to make two small changes, so ask him to let me know direct if he is going to print. He is indeed a law unto himself; I always say he may have a weak constitution but his by-laws are iron. Give him my love.
May the serious work prosper. May it and health allow you to come south in January. End of footnote.
* Thank you for this lovely word.
FROM LIEBERT
January 16th, 1962
Dear Mr. Fleming:
The stars are indeed unkind to me, to take me away from Jamaica just as you arrive. We had a wonderful month in Runaway Bay, and return wondering why we insist on living so near a pole. Middles are so much better than ends, in everything that counts: women, and bottles of claret, and cigars, books, age, life, and even earth.
We saw in The Gleaner that you were filming “Dr. No” and we look forward to seeing some of our favorite Jamaica landscapes in it. The Runaway Bay caves and the phosphorus lagoon at Glistening Water might supply good locations.
I hope the sun and the sea will restore your health, as it has ours. We envy you the days ahead; drink a Red Stripe for us.
Don’t trouble to reply. When we are next in London or Jamaica, we will inquire whether you are nearby. Favete astrae.
Signed with the pen.
FROM LIEBERT
April 30th, 1962
My dear Fleming:
I have just returned to find the book with its abashing inscription.
Like most of us, I do not allow my pleasure at flattery to be diminished by the mere fact that it isn’t true. And I certainly greatly value the manifest kindness that prompted it.
I have also had the American edition, and am now reading the texts against each other to see what has been altered. I have found one typo and will write Viking about it and any others I find.
I hope the trip to Jamaica has restored your health. I am off to Italy this week, but only until the end of May. If after that you come Statesward, do let me know so we can meet. I have a Madeira solera 1808 that might tempt you; John Carter approved of it last Saturday, when we spoke much of you.
Liebert died in 1994 at the age of eighty-three, a man of many qualities. He was just three years younger than Fleming yet outlived him by another thirty. This says much for Yale, Jamaica and Madeira but may also have something to do with favete astrae – ‘Let the stars decide’.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Given that he had spent a formative period in the Austrian Tyrol, and with promptings from at least one of his readers, it was unsurprising that Fleming should choose the Alps as a setting for Bond’s next adventure. Maybe, too, his memory of the mountains had been jogged by a brief visit to Switzerland the previous Christmas where, among other things, he had been delighted by the exclusive Corviglia Club in St Moritz. He began researching the project that summer and, by the time he went to Goldeneye in January 1962, he had all the material he needed.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was one of Fleming’s most intriguing books, offering as it did the closest insight into Bond’s mercurial character since Casino Royale. Following his stylistic experiment with The Spy Who Loved Me he returned to tradition with an attempt by Bond’s old SPECTRE foe, Blofeld, to destroy Britain’s agricultural economy. Having surgically remodelled his features, Blofeld is posing as a millionaire research scientist based in Switzerland. From his mountain-top Alpine clinic, Piz Gloria, he uses hypnosis to cure farmers’ daughters of their allergies before sending them home with canisters of lethal pathogens. His weakness, however, is snobbery: he would like to assume the title Comte de Blauchamps, for which he needs approval from heraldic experts in London. Impersonating a member of the Royal College of Arms, Bond infiltrates his sanctum and successfully prevents the canisters reaching their destination. Returning with reinforcements he destroys Piz Gloria’s laboratories and very nearly kills Blofeld, too, but is defeated in a daredevil sled chase down an ice run.
The action was dramatic, and packed with all the sensation Fleming’s readers had come to expect. The most important element, however, was Bond’s relationship with Tracy, daughter of Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Union Corse, a criminal organisation whose power almost matched that of the Mafia. At the start of the book he rescues her from a suicide attempt, in return for which Draco uses his criminal network to help destroy Blofeld’s lair. A strong character who knows her own mind, she can drive a fast car well, has no concern for danger and is a rebel. Quite possibly, Bond considers, this is the woman for him. Fleming builds her up so tenderly as a match for Bond, and pours so much angst into Bond’s decision to exchange his ‘marriage’ to the Secret Service for a marriage in real life, that the reader expects 007’s career to end in a rosy sunset. So it comes as a shock when Tracy is killed by Blofeld in a drive-by shooting on the first day of their honeymoon.
For anybody, let alone someone in poor health, it was an extraordinary book. Fizzing with energy, it captured the excitement Fleming had experienced in the Alps as a youth – Telemark, Sprung-Christiana and all – and his descriptions of the Swiss mountains would have brought tears to the eyes of any Alpinist. As for Bond’s marriage, it made him fascinatingly human. Despite his image as a womaniser, Bond had teetered constantly on the edge of matrimony ever since Fleming first introduced him to the world. Now the moment had come, and it was no fault of Bond’s that it had failed. If Fleming had dallied with the idea of ending Bond’s career, Tracy’s murder ensured he would have to follow it through to the end.
His zest for life was reinforced at Goldeneye by a Canadian film crew that came to interview him about Gary Powers, the US pilot who had been brought down while spying on Russia. Then there was the filming of Dr No which took place at Rolling River in Jamaica, and where Fleming met its stars, Sean Connery and Ursula Andress.
On his return to Britain he was cast down by the poor reception of The Spy Who Loved Me, and by the ongoing deterioration of his marriage. The former he was able to shrug off, but the latter weighed heavily on him (and on Ann perhaps even more). He retreated with increasing frequency to the Royal St George’s golf course, where he amused himself by playing for unusual stakes: on one round he competed for a pair of pyjamas, which was then upped to include a monogram on the jacket. Adding further to the gaiety of the links he donated a golfing trophy to Eton College. His brother Peter had already established ‘The Peter Fleming Owl’ for the best-written item in the school’s Chronicle. Fleming’s contribution took the form of a silver chamber pot bearing the inscription ‘James Bond All Purpose Grand Challenge Vase’.1
In July, as marital tension mounted, he left on an unusual summer visit to Goldeneye, where he started another Bond short story, ‘Octopussy’. A throwback to the war, it features a retired commando officer, Major Dexter Smythe, living comfortably in Jamaica, his hobby being the study of marine life, in particular a favourite octopus. His peace is disturbed by Bond, who arrives with uncomfortable news. The intelligence services know that in the last stages of the war Smythe had befriended an Austrian ski instructor who knew where to find a hoard of Nazi gold. Having ascertained its location, Smythe had then killed him and taken the gold for himself. The choice Bond gives him is simple: face justice in Britain or choose his own fate. He has ten minutes to decide. Smythe swims out to sea and, having been stung by a deadly scorpion fish, allows his mask to be ripped off by his pet octopus.
Barely had Fleming got back than he was off to Japan, to research another Bond instalment. And then, in October came the film premiere of Dr No. It left him excited and weary but with spirit undimmed. In an address to students in Oxford that year he encapsulated his approach to writing: say whatever you want, research it properly, and write fast. Never look back, he said: ‘If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain.’ He cast a warning note: there wasn’t much money to be made from books; it was only when you made a film deal that you could sit pretty. But if you persevered, a writer’s life had its advantages: ‘You carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you. Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living [. . .] is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers, whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.’
In a foreword to a book titled The Seven Deadly Sins, published earlier that year, he dismissed the usual catalogue as part of everyday life and substituted his own: ‘Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy, Self-righteousness, Moral Cowardice and Malice’. He appended an Eighth Sin – ‘that of being a Bore’. This he was determined never to be.
TO MISS JOAN SAUNDERS, 113 Fulham Road, London, S.W.3.
Joan Saunders ran the Writers and Speakers Research Agency. This rather attractive concept allowed authors to call her whenever faced with a tricky question of fact. She would then depute members of her team to provide answers. Fleming had already used her for Thunderball and now he did so again.
5th September, 1961
My dear Joan,
Before I begin I don’t think you ever sent me a bill for putting me in touch with Wing Commander Dobson over my last book, and you are so unbusinesslike I am sure I am right. So do please send me a sensible bill because your help was quite invaluable.
I sent on to you Miss Ann Marlow and I gather you are giving her some help for some meagre fee. She is an extremely rich television producer in America and you really must charge people more!
Now, I have another problem for you.
Briefly, in my next book James Bond will foil a plot to bring England to her knees by the most direct form of economic pressure – the destruction of agricultural and livestock resources by the spreading of disease.
As you know, this form of “germ warfare” is in the arsenal of all the major powers, and I am sure much has been written on the subject outside classified sources if only I knew where to look for it.
Such diseases as anthrax, fowl pest, swine fever and foot and mouth disease, come to my mind, and there are doubtless other bacteria or pests such as the Colorado beetle for attacking crops and perhaps forests.
I think I can arrange the introduction of these various pests etc. into England, but what I need to know is which parts of the United Kingdom would be the best targets for which bacteria, etc.
So far as poultry and cattle are concerned obviously a good means to spread the disease would be to introduce the bacteria at the big horse and cattle shows (query Peterborough, Cambridge, Smithfield, Dairy Show) and poultry shows, if they have such things, and I would like to be instructed in such matters as the introduction of the diseases will be by human carriers and not by spraying from aircraft etc.
I realise that all this is very fanciful stuff, but with the help of expert advice I think I can make it more or less stand up, if I can get the ammunition right and the targets more or less credible.
Can you help me?
I also need to know whether there is a Corsican local dialect and where I can find a Corsican who can translate a few sentences of English into his native dialect.
Can you help me?
TO MRS. MALCOLM HORSLEY, L’Haute Ville, Calvi, Corsica
4th January, 1962
Dear Mrs. Horsley,
Your name has been given to me by Dr. Saunders of Writer’s and Speaker’s Research as being an expert on Corsica, and I wonder if you would do a little fairly simple research in connection with a passage that will appear in my next thriller.
I believe there is a Corsican dialect.
Could you please consult one of the locals and translate into Corsican the following conversation which takes place over the telephone between one shady Corsican and his headquarters in Corsica.
“This is the chief. Have we any news of
Smith? Where is he living now? You’re sure of
that? But no exact address? Good. That is all.”
This should be rendered in tough, slangy gangsterese.
Secondly, could you write me a brief essay, say 300 or 400 words, on the “Union Corse”, which I believe was, and probably still is, run on the lines of the Mafia, the Unione Siciliano, – giving me as many facts as you can possibly discover both about their operations and habits inside Corsica and abroad.
I daresay you may find it difficult to get hold of this information, unless you have a friend in the police. But I would be glad if you could turn out something sufficiently mystifying and horrific!
If you think you could manage this chore I would be very grateful if you could possibly bend your mind to it quickly and air mail the results to me here [Goldeneye] together with your suggestion for a generous fee.
I hope this won’t come as too much shock out of the blue, and I hope at any rate you will have some fun over the second question.
I do hope you can manage this.
P.S. Could you please also give me a good and villainous sounding christian and surname for my Corsican gangster.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
From Goldeneye
28th February, 1962
Thank you very much for your two letters & the excellent bit of showmanship by Tony [Colwell], also for dear Daniel’s amusing piece on Edwards. What a pity!
You continue to be splendidly obscure about the Joseph fiasco2 but perhaps you will explain when we meet. If you need money, why don’t you get it from people like me? I think it would be a fine idea for Caspar to have a stake in Capes!
Have just passed the 60,000 in my new opus. Quite tremendous bezants (look it up!) but at least JB is in from the first page to the last. Another 10,000 to go.
Fame is breathing down my neck. CBC flew a whole unit down to filmise me about Powers, the Tatler has visited again & of course the Dr No biz was a riot. By the way, Tony should have a talk with Saltzman sometime. Among other gimmicks he is turning out 5 million copies of a strip book on Dr No & I think you should climb on the band wagon.
No more for now as I have just had my hair cut for the first time in six weeks & am feeling rather light-headed! Back on the 20th.
Love to all on the Cape.
TO AUBREY FORSHAW, ESQ., Pan Books Ltd., 8 Headfort Place, London, S.W.1.
Forshaw, the head of Pan Books, was, like Fleming, a car buff. His advice was invaluable when it came to outfitting Bond with a suitable motor for the latest adventure.
28th March, 1962
My dear Aubrey,
I attach the passage in my new book which refers to Bond’s fitting of a supercharger to his Mark II Continental Bentley to which he had fitted in Thunderball the Mark IV engine with 9.5 compression. He had also designed for himself a two-seater convertible body, but that is neither here nor there.
Would you be terribly kind and re-write this passage as you think fit, but including as much of your famous expertise as you can without clogging up the prose?
Sorry to beg this service from you, but it was as a result of your instructions that Bond changed to this car and the idea of adding a supercharger amused me.
I am also not sure if the Continental has a red line at 5000 revs.
With more apologies.
“He leant forward and flicked down the red switch [the moan of the blower died away] and there was silence in the car as he motored along, easing his tense muscles. He wondered if the supercharger had damaged the engine. Against the solemn warnings of Rolls Royce, he had had fitted, by his pet expert at the Headquarters motor pool, a supercharger. Rolls Royce had said the cylinder head [camshaft bearings] wouldn’t take the extra compression [load] and, when he confessed to them what he had done, they regretfully but firmly withdrew their guarantees and washed their hands of their bastardised child. This was the first time he had notched 125 and the rev counter had been [hovered] dangerously over the red line at 5000 [4500]. But the temperature and oil were okay and there were no expensive noises. And by God it had been fun!”3
I don’t see the need for maker’s name, but if you feel it adds something, it should be Arnott supercharger controlled by a magnetic clutch. This has been done with a 4¼ engine.
FROM AUBREY FORSHAW
5th April, 1962
Dear Ian,
Extreme pressure following a long-weekend accounts for my delayed answer to your note regarding this Bond’s Bastard Bentley.
I feel a bit of a hit-and-run daddy if the car born in THUNDERBALL was sired by any remarks of mine. My own idea of a special toy was an R-type 1954 chassis with the latest series 2 engine – the Vee 8. The THUNDERBALL vehicle is using the chassis I would not have chosen – the S2 and an engine I’ve never heard of a Mark IV. But it’s all so very ‘special’ particularly with a 9.5:1 compression ratio, that nobody is likely to crib.
However, let’s get down to legitimising the bastard and meeting your wish to pour on more power by the casual flick of a dashboard switch.
I’ve got this planned and am entertaining the Rolls Tech. Expert next Thursday so that we can make this love-child a genetic possibility.
In your new copy you mention cylinder head (singular) so you have still the straight six engine – presumably 4.8 litres and I’m basing the engine treatment on this supposition although I’ll cover an alternative for the twin heads of a Vee 8.
You mustn’t add puff without lowering compression, particularly from your stated 9.5:1 – so the car should use 7.5:1 with a couple of Weber carbs, normally aspirated, which will give you lashings of docile power, but for le moment critique we will fit a by-pass to the manifolds, feeding from a Shorrocks supercharger the clutch engagement of which is effected by solenoid from your little switch. In fact, your bearings (big-end and main) are more likely to complain than are well-fitted cylinder heads but the proposition of a ‘special’ capable of, say, 140 or so is quite feasible, assuming a suitable back-axle ratio.
I imagine it is the B’s sheer size and weight under unfavourable circumstances that will allow the girl-friend to get away in a less potent, but more wiggle-worthy machine – this could easily be, but she’d better have something pretty good; not so quick of course, not so accelerative, but with a better look and roadability.
I hope you can await my further thoughts and we will then put you in a position to confute any criticisms – always supposing that “Headquarters motor pool” enjoys happy relations with the Exchequer.
11th April, 1962
My dear Aubrey,
Thank you a thousand times for the priceless gen which I am afraid I find myself quite incapable of working up into prose as I must obviously start again and get the whole thing right from the beginning.
Would you be an angel and just take that extract from the book and dictate to the secretary how it should run, using your own choice of the R-type 1954 chassis with the series 2 engine – the Vee 8.
I know this is greatly imposing on you, but if I try and translate your high grade stuff into English I shall only get it all wrong again.
Please don’t pay any attention to what I have actually written. What I beg you to do is to re-write the piece so that it is according to your specifications and technically possible.
Forgive all this labour I am asking of you and just put it down to the hazards of being my publisher.
Happy Easter!
FROM AUBREY FORSHAW
April 30th, 1962
Dear Ian,
I return your passage of motor mystique with the deathless prose intact but for detail additions which authenticate without inviting too many queries from the aficionados.
You may rest assured that Bond is now driving a Feasible Proposition (there have been stranger marques) the bits all being Bentley and susceptible of assembly into one car.
I am now off to the International Publishers Conference in Barcelona and shall not be back until third week in May. When I return I will furnish you with a kind of record card containing dimensions, ratios, revs. etc., so that questions to Headquarters Motor pool can be answered – but I’ll undertake to deal with any such questions if you so wish.
Only one of your main requirements proved a bit difficult, namely the introduction of the Vee-8 engine. So you have an
‘R’ type chassis (1955)
the big 6 engine 4.9 litres
an Arnott blower
a 13:40 back axle ratio
16 x 6.70 wheels (Dunlop RS/5 tyres)
which would give a theoretical 126–162 m.p.h.
at 4,500 revs (the red line). Actually
about your 125 m.p.h. Max revs in top
would take an endless road to achieve without
a blower – so your addition is justified, and
your acceleration quite something.
Keep up the good work.
TO AUBREY FORSHAW
1st May, 1962
A thousand thanks for your letter of April 30th and for your wonderful help over the Bentley.
At last we will get Bond into the right kind of vehicle and he will damn well have to stay there until you let him out of it.
It was indeed kind of you to take so much trouble.
TO ROBIN DE LA LANNE MIRRLEES, ESQ., Rouge Dragon, The College of Arms, London, E.C.4.
25th April, 1962
My dear Robin,
I heard so late of the tragedy of dear Frances and am so bad at writing letters of commiseration, that I didn’t write to you.
She was a dear person whom I came to like greatly and there is nothing I would rather have than some small memento of hers when you get around to sorting things out.
Now to the book. First of all many thanks about haemophilia, it was stupid of me to have got it wrong.
The book is a tremendous lark and while it has a bit of a rag at the expense of an invented Pursuivant called Griffon Or, Rouge Dragon then enters the story in fine style and plays a worthy part in tracking down the villain.
The text is now with the typist and should be ready in a couple of weeks or so. Then I would love for us to meet anywhere you suggest and slip you a copy sub rosa, which I would be most grateful if you would read for mistakes or improvements, making the freest use of your red ink.
You will find that your advices have been put to the most splendid use and the book is in fact dedicated to Rouge Dragon and a certain Hilary Bray, who, through you, makes a valuable contribution as a cover name for James Bond.
But please keep all this highly confidential and far away from the world of the College, who might prove stuffy about being dragged into a thriller, though they needn’t worry and come out of it all most fragrantly.
I will get in touch with you as soon as the typescript appears.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
9th May, 1962
Michael is coming to see me this evening about some drawings for the Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang series, so I am then going to deliver into his hands the gigantic volume, surely as long as the Koran, which I have just finished correcting.
Normally, as you know, I prefer you to see my oeuvres before anyone else in Capes, since it is always your verdict, and only yours, that I care about.
So please don’t think that this break in continuity is a slur upon you, in fact it is sparing you an extra few days from the annual labour.
Thank you for your sympathetic note to Annie about the reviews [of The Spy Who Loved Me]. It has certainly been an uncomfortable two or three weeks having to digest a second breakfast every morning of these hommany grits – well deserved though they may be.
Only Wolverhampton and Bristol, bless them, have been kind. There live obviously the intellectual elite of England!
I hope at least some of OHMSS will bring a wry smile to your careworn features, and of course I long for the sheets of green bumph.
Let us have lunch soon please. What about Wednesday, 23rd May at the Charing Cross?
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
10th May, 1962
My dear Ian,
I am so pleased to hear that the new oeuvre has been handed over & I shall seize it as soon as it comes within arm’s length. I think it a v.g. idea that we should lunch together at the Ch. Cross Hotel on Wednesday 23rd May. If you will ask Griffie to be kind enough to book a table, I will be in that room upstairs with all those armchairs at about 1 o’c. I hope by then I shall have read the new typescript.
I think you have had quite enough hominy (please note spelling) grits to be going on with, but, as my governess used to say, the higher one climbs, the thicker the clouds.
I hope you didn’t think me tiresomely carping about the intro to the Hugh Edwards book.4 It’s simply that I want to protect you from laying yourself open to any more impertinence from reviewers. I didn’t want them to say, “Look, he’s telling us that he can read,” or “Why does he tell us that about himself instead of sticking to the man & book he is introducing?” I was myself much interested in all you had to say, & I have a weakness for many neglected books & authors.
I am up to my clavicles in dung, but what are a dung beetle’s clavicles for, if not for upholding many forms of that commodity.
Vive Wolverhampton! Vive Bristol!
TO LEONARD RUSSELL, ESQ., 14 Albion Street, London, W.2.
14th May, 1962
My dear Leonard,
You are always doing kindnesses for me, would you please do me one more?
Phyllis Bottome will be eighty on the 31st May and she is ill and low in spirits, and I thought it would be terribly kind if you could put a little paragraph in Atticus about her.
Her real name is Mrs. Ernan Forbes Dennis, and their address is Little Greenly, 95, South End Road, Hampstead, N.W.3. Telephone No. Hampstead 0579; in case an Atticus runner could have a word with him on the telephone to get some notes – the number of books she has written; copies sold; the most popular, etc.
A possible point of interest is that when Ernan was Vice-Consul for the Tyrol he took a few boys and taught them German for the diplomatic. It was our first contact with a ‘famous writer’, and it may be that by a process of osmosis we imbibed some of Phyllis’s undoubted talent, because of the very few boys who stayed with them in Kitzbuhel three, myself, Ralph Arnold of Constables and Nigel Dennis have ended up successful writers, though in very different spheres.
So far as I am concerned I wrote my first story at Phyllis Bottome’s behest when I was about nineteen, and I remember my pleasure at her kindly criticisms of it.
I am afraid this is rather straw bricks, but it would be terribly kind if you could somehow knit together a paragraph about her and cheer her up.
Forgive this chore but I promise to repay with a book review if and when you find anything appropriate.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
24th May, 1962
My Dear Michael,
I am having my portrait painted – so is [racing driver] Graham Hill – by a man called Amherst Villiers who invented the supercharger on James Bond’s 4½ litre Bentley. He has been taking a course with Annigoni5 and we are obliged to sit for him out of friendship.
Now, he is a motor car and guided missile designer of absolutely top calibre and, in fact, designed the crankshaft for Graham Hill’s B.R.M. which has been winning lately. I put to him our problem about getting a good car drawn for Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and he is amused and has agreed to have a bash.
We have obviously got to get this car right before either Trog or Haro can do the subsequent illustrations, and once they have something to copy it shouldn’t be too difficult.
I guess Amherst will do a spiffing job and really make it look as if it will work. So I have written him the enclosed and sent copies of the stories, and we will see what happens.
TO AMHERST VILLIERS, ESQ., 48A Holland Street, London, W.8.
While sitting for Villiers, it occurred to Fleming that he might be able to assist with the illustrations for Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
24th May, 1962
My Dear Amherst,
Here are now the stories which it won’t take you long to read.
The point is that while Jonathan Cape’s have got one or two artists lined up for the figures, landscapes, etc., they can’t find anybody with enough technical know-how and imagination to draw a suitable Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
What I and Cape’s would very much like from you is a design for the cover to run right round the spine of the book for each story, again showing the car, but in the first adventure with its wings spread, in the second adventure with its wheels turned sideways so that it can motor across the Channel, and in the third adventure soaring up into the air with wings and perhaps some jet apparatus in the rear end.
Also on those centre spreads it would be nice to have one or two detailed little sketches of the dashboard, the radiator grill open with the fan belt extruded to provide a screw for air and water, and similar little imaginative details such as you might presumably add in the margin of any car for which you were doing a first rough design.
If you are kind enough to make the sketches, please make them as large as you like and then when we get down to actual book production Capes will talk to you about colour, sizes, etc., etc.
Although the guts of the car are supposedly antiquated, we would like to make it really snazzy looking to excite the imagination of children between about 7 and 10, so it can have every kind of entrail coming out of the side, air scoops, straps around the bonnet, etc. And, of course, the facia board will be crowded with knobs and switches, etc.
It is a long sleek sports car and I had in mind something between a pre-war Le Mans Mercedes and a 45 Renault. But you will surely come up with something more imaginative than this.
I think you can use up to three basic colours plus black and white. The chrome presents a problem, but these are only preliminary sketches and we can iron out these problems later.
It is terribly kind of you to suggest doing this and I am writing to Capes today telling them of the project.
See you next Wednesday at 3.30 for a further sitting in the dentist’s chair.
24th May, 1962
My dear William,
I hope you will agree that this paper, foisted on me by the film company, will bring Spring to Rustington!
A thousand thanks for lunch and for the splendid green sheets. Naturally I agree with the majority of your comments, and I am horrified to see how much inward groaning goes on in the book. I will go back to school on these L.G.F.s6 and see if I can’t spruce them up a degree or two.
But to hell with you and Money [Manet],7 I am going to go straight to Rothenstein8 and see if I am not right.
The crankshaft designer, who turns out to be a pupil of Annigoni, is making me look like a mixture between Nehru and Somerset Maugham. As you can imagine I am longing for Annie’s comments on the picture.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
25th May, 62
My dear Ian,
“O! O! 007!” I exclaimed when I saw your new writing paper. And what shall I say when I see your portrait?
About Manet & all that, it’s just that that paragraph slightly holds up the reader and the action so near the beginning. It makes (I think) the take-off less smooth. One begins (at least this one begins) worrying as to whether the seaside landscape you are describing really is in the least like the one painted by Boudin &c., in its human & incidental constituents. And also this sudden injection of art-history makes one wonder if there isn’t some clue to a later development that one ought to look for. And, apart from heraldic information (which, as you happily point out, is a lot of bezants) I don’t think there are any other allusions to art history &c., so this paragraph stands out too conspicuously. But you will think I am making a huge fuss about nothing & you may be groaning outwardly as well as inwardly.
I much enjoyed our Charing Cross lunch but of course missed you at your own table yesterday.
What is so good about your books is their sharp focus. Everything is clear, so makes a clear impression. I feel sure that OHMSS will rout the objectors.
TO MR. ROBERT KENNEDY, Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia
The previous year President J. F. Kennedy had publicly endorsed Fleming’s books. Now, in a reply to similar praise from his brother ‘Bobby’, Fleming reiterated his thanks.
20th June, 1962
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
Thank you very much for your charming note of June 1st, and I am delighted to take this opportunity to thank Kennedys everywhere for the electric effect their commendation has had on my sales in America.
My last book, The Spy Who Loved Me, has had an extremely mixed reception, due largely to the late appearance of James Bond. But I can now tell you that my next and longest to date, has James Bond in from the first page to the last, and all Kennedys will be receiving a copy around next Easter.
Incidentally, you may be amused to pass round the enclosed translation from Izvestia9 of May 29th last. I am most amused to learn that I have been selected by the Russians as part of America’s strong right hand!
Over here we are all watching with fascination your gallant attempts to harass American gangsterdom. If James Bond can be any help to you please let me know and I will have a word with M.
Again with my warmest thanks for your kindness in writing.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
31st July, 1962
Here is now the College of Arms final rendering of the true Bond coat of arms marked 1., and Rouge Dragon doesn’t think there will be any objection to using it since the line is extinct.
I have no idea how you and Dickie are going to turn this into a jacket, but I think your idea of the thumb and forefinger holding a pen coming up from the right hand bottom corner is a good one. And it strikes me that the vellum on which Dickie would be writing could be perhaps turned up at one corner with brass drawing pins used to hold down the other three corners.
On reflection, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to get the whole title in however small, as otherwise the whole thing is going to look a bit stark.
Anyway may I now leave the problems to you as I am feeling slightly submerged?
I enclose the first copy, marked 2, for comparison, but if you don’t want to use it could you please buzz it back.
Regarding the proofs, I have cut out all italics except the lines of Corsican dialogue and the names of newspapers, and I am sure this is the best formula to follow as otherwise we will have a forest of italics.
I have sorted out all the various problems and I don’t think much more remains to be done.
FROM MICHAEL HOWARD
As part of their promotional campaign for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Cape planned a limited edition of 250 copies. A handsome affair, it was quarter-bound in vellum, with a set of ski-tracks curving across the front board.
8th October, 1962
My dear Ian,
I have to confess to being astonished by that film of DR. NO.10 Judging only, I must admit, by the lamentable productions that have been made of most of my favourite thrillers, I had become convinced that it was really impossible to translate that kind of book into visual terms. Eon have certainly stacked the problem in the grand manner and, by pulling out all the stops, I rather think they have got away with it. It was a delight to be in that particular audience the other night, but up and down the country I should think the film will be lapped up. I do congratulate you on the magnificent billing you have secured in all the publicity and in the credits in the film itself. Are plans for distribution in the United States settled yet?
You remember mentioning in THE THRILLING CITIES the cover of Tiger Saito’s THIS IS JAPAN. Would this possibly make an illustration to the book and, if so, do you have a copy we could reproduce: or could you get hold of one?
I have had two more thoughts about the limited edition of O.H.M.S.S. First, how about a frontispiece, viz. a portrait of you? If you favour this notion, have you a particular choice of picture? Would Amherst Villiers’s portrait serve? Second, we plan to print at most 250 copies, of which only 150 would be nominally for sale, and I should expect that quite a few of them would be given away. Those actually sold would be priced at 3 guineas, but the revenue from them after trade discount won’t go far towards covering the cost of quite an expensive operation, particularly if we pay a full royalty on them. As this is really a publicity gimmick, would you settle for, say, ten free copies of the limited edition in lieu of any royalty on them?
I hope that you now have a chance to turn your attention to the blurb for THE THRILLING CITIES.
10th October, 1962
I am glad you liked the film, it certainly had wonderful reviews and seems to be doing good business. Apparently it is to open in the States in April.
I’m afraid I haven’t got a copy of Tiger Saito’s “This is Japan”, and I cannot find that I ever referred to its cover but merely to the fact that Tiger was its editor. I don’t think it would make a particularly interesting illustration, but as it looks as if I may have to go to Japan in November I will get hold of a copy of the current issue and also look back through previous covers to see if there is anything suitable for us.
Regarding the limited edition of OHMSS, I think Amherst Villiers’ portrait, which is just about finished, would suit you very well. But why not give him a ring and go and have a look at it. Incidentally, he is not very well off and I think should rate a generous fee.
I would be happy to accept ten free copies of the edition in lieu of royalty on them, but I don’t see why you have to give so many copies away instead of selling them and then at least at four guineas a go.
Incidentally, why not put up the price of OHMSS? I am sure you could get away with it.
I will have a bash at the blurb of “The Thrilling Cities” forthwith.
TO PERCY MUIR
Percy Muir was assisting in the curation of a monumental exhibition, ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’, due to be held at the British Museum the next year. As part of the show he wanted to include some volumes from Fleming’s collection of first editions.
10th October, 1962
My dear Percy,
This does indeed sound a magnificent affair that you are compering and naturally I will do anything I can to help.
Unfortunately all my books are at present housed at the Pantechnicon in large crates and I have no idea how you could find what you want without unpacking the whole lot.
The only hope is that we have built a small house not far from Faringdon and hope to get in some time after Christmas when the books will arrive and be installed in the shelves which have been prepared for them.
Meanwhile, have you got a copy of that rough catalogue you had done for me shortly after the war? If not I have a copy and could send it down to you.
I do wish we could meet soon as I haven’t seen you for years. Do please give me a ring the next time you are likely to be up and come to lunch.
I have initiated the Fleming three day week but am nearly always here on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays.
It was lovely to hear from you.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
7th November, 1962
I gather you are panicking a bit for a blurb for “The Thrilling Cities”.
To tell you the truth I simply cannot think of anything original to say about this book, and I do beg you to get one of your staff to write something suitable.
It may help to enclose copies of the draft prefaces I have written for the beginning and half way through, with the reservation that these are not final.
Sorry, but I can think of nothing in the way of a blurb except half a dozen boring clichés.
Off to Japan from November 14th to 21st researching for a new James Bond. My God, how I work for you all!
I shall be sending the corrected proof of ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ off to you in the next two or three days. But I would like to point out here how many of my corrections are due to literals and other errors of your printers.
This is the first time I have had sloppy proofs from Capes and I hope you will take the printers’ own errors into account in adjudicating the costs of corrections!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
13th November, 1962
I would be quite happy for the ‘The’ to be dropped from ‘Thrilling Cities’.
Incidentally, we must have a talk about pictures before Christmas and I have now corrected the proofs as best I can.
I have also had them corrected by a bright lad called Peter Garnham who works for ‘Queen’, but I am so fed up with going through the book that I would be very grateful if one of your minions could marry up the two versions, using his good sense.
Another small point. Since Amherst Villiers is likely to be off to America in the New Year it might be a good idea to get him to finalise, in your chosen colours, the drawing of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
O.H.M.S.S. wasn’t as bad as all that, but I am so used to getting really excellent proofs from your printers that I was only very slightly miffed.
Incidentally, Max Aitken of The Daily Express likes it very much and will almost certainly want to serialise it, straddling your publication date.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
30th November, 1962
My Dear Michael,
CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG
I have no objection to Haro Hodson if you think he can do the job.
Mightn’t it be an idea for you to pay Trog, say, a nominal ten guineas for the work he has already done and which might give Haro an idea or two.
But the truth of the matter is that I am now absolutely fed up with this whole series and have completely lost the mood.
I am tidying up Adventure Number 3, but heaven knows if and when I shall produce an adventure Number 4.
So would your machine now please take the whole problem over and cope with it as best they may?
I don’t mind what alterations are made to the text, but I will do my best to discover a more delectable fudge and send the recipe along.
Sorry to put all this firmly on your plate, but such free mind as I have is now engaged in trying to devise another James Bond.
P.S. Would be quite happy to come to some joint royalty arrangement with whoever you choose, a la Trog.
FROM MICHAEL HOWARD
14th December, 1962
My dear Ian,
Very many thanks indeed for letting me see OCTOPUSSY and Cyril Connolly’s parody [‘Bond Strikes Camp’]. I have shown them both to William, who will be writing to you about them before Christmas, and from the talk I had with him yesterday I think we both feel much the same about them.
I like your story very much indeed. I think it’s rather better than the best of the stories in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, but shares with one or two of them the disadvantage from the point of view of including it in a collection of Bond stories that Bond’s appearance is fairly immaterial and the part he plays a negligible one, so that Bond fans might well react as they did to THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and demand more of their hero. It’s rather like those alternate Simenons, the ones without Maigret: for my money they are often the better written of Simenon’s books, more varied and interesting and with better character drawing: nevertheless it is really for Maigret that I read Simenon and I can’t help slightly resenting the time he spends on the other books.
As to BOND STRIKES CAMP, this outrageous riot really deserves the maximum circulation and if the London magazine is really prepared to take the chance of printing it I think you should let them take it. It would become a collector’s piece within hours and the much wider distribution would add greatly to the publicity value for Bond.
I hear that DR. NO has already reached the top flight of the year’s most successful films.
FROM NOËL COWARD, Blue Harbour, Port Maria, Jamaica, W.I.
29th March, 1963
Mon Ever So Cher Commandant,
I really am very very ‘Proudfull’ of you. O.H.M.S.S. is, to my simple, unsophisticated mind, far and away the best you have done yet. In the first place there is much more genuine characterization than usual and I believed all of them. In the second place the ‘action’ parts although they go far, do not go too far and are terrifically exciting without straining the credibility to excess. In the third place it is really brilliantly constructed and all the Heraldic stuff and the discussion of biological warfare are very lucid as well as being most impressive. Whatever Mr Franklin may say I, for one, am extremely worried about the Great South African Land Snail even if he isn’t.
Of course as an accurate picture of daily life in the Alpine Set it may leave a little to be desired. All jolly joking aside it really is very very good indeed and I only finally put it down so that Coley could pick it up.
Another thing that made the book especially glorious for me was my discovery, on page 34 of a gratifying bit of careless raportage [sic]. In the game of Chemin de Fer dear boy, unlike Snakes and Ladders to which you are obviously more accustomed, there are certain immutable rules. Bond couldn’t possibly have lost to a One with a Buche of two Kings. The English lady must have asked for a card as she would hardly stand on a one. In that case Bond would have turned up his cards and also drawn one so he must have had a ‘Buche’ – to coin a phrase – of THREE court cards or tens. I hate to have to point these little errors out to you but you are getting a big boy now and in writing about the gaudy pleasures of the Upper Set, which I have adorned so triumphantly for more years than you, you must try to get things straight. Incidentally there is now only one mention of Fairy Tale in my lyrics so sucks to you.
My time here is drawing to a close and I hate the idea of it. Joyce, Hopie, Coley and I drove over Hardware Gap and stayed at Strawberry Hill which we loved. It was redolent of proudfull memories of you and the Ex Lady Rothermere. It was staggeringly beautiful but a bit nippy after dark.
Listen now. Ed Bigg, my Chicago doctor who really is the most sensible doctor I have ever encountered, came to visit with me on a holiday – vacation – with his wife. We had a long discussion about smoking which he is dead against (He gave it up himself some years ago and there is a little conscious virtue mixed up with this). Anyhow I told him that, for creative people who had the habit badly, it was a really dreadful deprivation to have to stop it. Then he told me that the clever Americans manufacture a cigarette with virtually no nicotine in it at all called SANO. You can get them King sized or ordinary. The King sized are better. They haven’t much taste but they most emphatically do the trick. I had two cartons sent from New York. Would you like me to bring you some on April 16th or better still cable to New York for some yourself. You may even be able to get them in London. Personally I never intend to smoke anything else. Of course they haven’t got the kick of Senior Service or any of our Virginian cigarettes but they’re very like Lucky Strikes or Philip Morris or any of the ordinary American brands. And you will soon get used to them. If you get the ordinary size smoke them with Aqua filters because they are not as tightly packed as the King size. Although I’ve been brave and heroic to cut down to five or six smokes a day it has been a bore and a strain, and to be able to smoke now without a sense of guilt is really a tremendous relief. Do have a bash. It is the demon Nicotine that is the trouble and buggers up the veins and arteries. I’ve been into the whole business with great care and am now as merry as a grig.
I shall be here until the 7th and then New York 404 East 55th street.
You were jolly sweet to send me the book and I would like to go on about it much more when I see you. I find that some dreary strangers are suffering ptomaine at Goldeneye and so I can’t use the beach. What a bore you are.
Love and kisses to you and your poor old Dutch.
[PS] I would have preferred ‘Pis du Chat’ to ‘Pis de Chat’ but one can’t have everything.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
23rd April, 1963
It is really ghastly, I have never made so many mistakes in a book in my life as in OHMSS.
I am not blaming anyone but myself, apart from one or two very minor literals.
Anyway, I am being deluged with letters from people ticking me off because Raymond Mortimer said how wonderfully accurate I was in my books!
Here now is a total list of all the corrections which should go into the next edition, and I am hastily sending a copy off to Ed Doctorow,11 who is editing the book in NAL, in the hope that he can check them all in time for the American edition, otherwise I shall get a fresh deluge of brickbats.
For your next edition would you please be very kind and see that all these corrections go in, and also make certain Pan has a list or, at any rate, the correct Cape edition from which to print.
So sorry for all this, and I have recently spent a couple of hours with one of the stupidest Japanese in existence trying to make sure that we won’t get Arthur Waley12 on our tail over the next book!
TO THE EDITOR, THE SUNDAY TIMES, Thomson House, Gray’s Inn Road, London, W.C.1.
2nd April, 1963
Sir,
I am being deluged with enquiries as to why James Bond should dress his hair with pink tooth-powder. This misunderstanding arises from Mr. Raymond Mortimer’s most generous review of my opuscula in which the late Mr. Trumper’s “Eucryl” appears instead of his “Eucris”. (In fact Bond uses nothing on his hair and the Eucris featured only in M. Draco’s spare-room bathroom.) And your rendering of Bond’s “Attenhofer Flex” ski-bindings as “Attenborough Fox” in Mr. Mortimer’s most kindly reference to my efforts to achieve accuracy has resulted in one scornful winter sportsman suggesting I take a refresher course at Zermatt.
Could it be, Sir, that a sub-cell of SPECTRE is building up in your literary department?
The winter of 1963 was the worst Britain had suffered for more than 150 years. In January, the snow rose twenty feet high, blocking railways, roads and waterways. Ice extended so many miles from the coast that people wondered if the English Channel would freeze over. In February conditions deteriorated further, with more snow and gale-force winds. At Oxford somebody drove a car across the Thames. And in Goldeneye, at a steady 80º Fahrenheit, Fleming was writing about Japan.
Fleming had been fascinated by Japan ever since he visited Tokyo in 1959 while researching Thrilling Cities. During that first trip he had met the redoubtable Australian journalist Richard Hughes – ‘Dikko’ to his friends – who guided him through the niceties of oriental culture with blasphemous gusto. Another contact had been the journalist Torao ‘Tiger’ Saito. Both men were there to greet him at Tokyo airport when he arrived in November 1962 to spend two weeks collating material for his new book. The result, over which Fleming was now toiling cheerfully in the Caribbean, was called You Only Live Twice.
Following the death of his wife Tracy, Bond is in decline: drinking, gambling and turning up late for work. As a last chance M equips him with a new number, 7777, and sends him to Japan on a diplomatic passport to effect an information exchange with ‘Tiger’ Tanaka, head of Japanese Intelligence. Instead, however, Bond finds himself on the trail of his nemesis Blofeld, now installed in a remote castle under the name Dr Guntram Shatterhand. Here, with his repellent assistant Irma Bunt, he tends a garden in which every flower, every bush, every ornamental pond, is deadly. Helium balloons surround the castle, warning people to keep away while at the same time advertising that here lies certain death. Month by month scores of people come to commit suicide. With the assistance of Tanaka and an Australian intelligence officer ‘Dikko’ Henderson, Bond is given a make-over as a mute coal miner from the north of the country and installed in a coastal village with the family of Kissy Suzuki, an actress turned pearl diver. With her help he infiltrates the castle and after several narrow escapes manages to kill both Blofeld and Irma Bunt before escaping on one of the helium balloons. Winged by a bullet from one of the guards he drops hundreds of feet into the sea. When rescued by Kissy Suzuki, it is as an amnesiac, with no recollection of his previous life. Settling down with her he works as a simple oarsman on her fishing boat. But at one point he sees the name Vladivostok in a newspaper. It stirs something inside him and he feels compelled to go there in search of his past. Behind him, though he does not know it, he leaves Kissy several months pregnant. Back in London he is categorised as ‘Missing Presumed Dead’ and is duly given an obituary in The Times.
While in Jamaica Fleming had a lapse in spirits. Pondering his ever weaker health, he wrote to Dikko Hughes that Bond had ‘had a good run, which is more than most of us these days. Everything seems a lot of trouble these days – too much trouble. Keep alive.’ When Hughes remonstrated, Fleming replied, ‘Dikko, I promise. Don’t worry. I’m not worrying any more. Down with death.’ Despondent or not, Fleming managed to pull it off once again. You Only Live Twice was, like its predecessor, a splendid book and with its vivid set pieces – including a torture chair set above a volcanic vent, which Bond subsequently blocked to destroy Blofeld’s castle – showed his imagination running at full throttle. The obituary, too, provided fans with their first full explanation of Bond’s origins. After the box-office success of Dr No he could not have poised 007’s latest adventure more perfectly.
The screen version of Dr No had boosted Fleming’s standing to such an extent that he and his creation had become household names: in June he was invited to appear on the prestigious radio programme Desert Island Discs; in Oxford a group of enthusiastic undergraduates had founded a James Bond Club; and across the Atlantic the Harvard Lampoon published a spoof Bond novel called Alligator which was so successful that it sold an astonishing 100,000 copies. Nor was there any sign of the acclaim abating, as, barely had the dust died down from Dr No, than Eon was on to the next one, From Russia with Love, which started filming in Istanbul that spring. Fleming, who flew there as an observer, was fêted with due reverence; but he must have reflected on the difference between this visit and his last. Back in 1955 he had been an intrepid reporter, roaming the darkened streets as all around him riots raged. Now he was a frail figure who struggled slowly over the cobbles, pausing every now and then to rest on a shooting stick.
In July came Percy Muir’s exhibition, ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’, or, to give its full subtitle, ‘A display of printing mechanisms and printed material to illustrate the history of western civilisation and the means of literary multiplication since the fifteenth century’. Fleming’s contribution amounted to forty-four volumes, the largest showing by any private collector, and one of which he was immensely proud. An even greater accolade came when he was invited to be a member of the Committee of Honour. In a telegram to Percy Muir he wrote, ‘A THOUSAND CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WONDERFUL CATALOGUE AND PARTICULARLY ON HAVING ELEVATED OUR COLLECTION TO THESE FANTASTICALLY PROUD HEIGHTS STOP I TRULY BLUSH WITH EMBARRASSED DELIGHT AND WITH WARM MEMORIES OF THOSE DAYS WHEN YOU TOOK ME BY THE HAND STOP GRUESS DICH GOTT IAN’.
What was more, his collection having languished for so many years in storage, he now had a library to put it in. That month he, Ann and Caspar moved into their new home, Sevenhampton Place, where one of Fleming’s first acts was to install a wall of shelves. Here he arranged his first editions, each in a black box stamped with the family crest of a goat’s head, and with labels colour-coded according to subject. Despite Ann’s valiant attempts to make it a home, Fleming was never entirely happy with the place. The surroundings were unkempt and overgrown, with a lake whose mists he said encouraged mushrooms on his clothes.
A bright spot in his life was a Studebaker Avanti – left-hand drive, spanking new and freshly delivered from America – which he had put through its paces earlier that year on a drive to Lausanne to interview Georges Simenon. But even this wasn’t enough to shake off a gathering sense of mortality. As Ann wrote, he was in a state of ‘permanent angry misery’, and it was perhaps his own gloom more than anything else that cast a pall over Sevenhampton.
Professionally, he was a model of diligence. Despite instituting what he proudly described as ‘the Fleming three-day week’, he continued to pepper C. D. Hamilton with article suggestions for the Sunday Times and even found time to knock out a Bond short story, ‘Property of a Lady’, for Sotheby’s house magazine The Ivory Hammer. The plot was simple. On finding an undercover spy in the department, M sends Bond after her paymaster. Her payment, it seems, is to be financed by a Fabergé egg, one of the few still held by the Soviets, which has been smuggled into the country and is due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. Bond scours the auction room and as the hammer falls at £155,000 spots the final bidder. Although it was perfectly well written, Fleming felt the piece wasn’t up to standard and refused to accept any money for it.
Celebrity was taking its toll. From Russia with Love premiered on 10 October 1963 and was so eagerly anticipated that people queued around Leicester Square to gain admission. But for Fleming it was an ordeal. He insisted his doctor be present in the cinema and having arranged an after-party at his London home, Victoria Square, retired early, leaving his guests to face tables heaped with caviar.
There was a light-hearted moment at the end of the month when Fleming received an irresistible invitation: to present awards at the Romantic Novelists’ Association annual dinner. But when it came to the speech he asked Evelyn Waugh to write it for him. This was the same Waugh who – himself approaching death – had visited the Flemings at Sevenhampton and written to a friend, ‘Old Thunderbird [. . .] wishes to end his life and is determined to have his final seizure on the golf course or at the card table. Ann will be disconsolate.’
Plomer, who had lived for several years in Japan during the 1920s, was happy to supply Fleming with tips and recommendations before he embarked on his research trip.
11th September, 1962
My dear Wm,
A thousand thanks for the Japanese gen and I have already got the excellent Mariani Book. Will get the Horned ones.
I have no idea how Bond in Japan will turn out, but I have in mind an absolutely daft story in which Blofeld meets his match. The only trouble with killing off one’s villains is that one has to invent new ones. However.
I was indeed rather low when I saw you, but this is largely because I am feeling tremendously stuck in an over mink-lined rut and I need to be booted off across the world in the old style.
However, I think I have the secret and I will report to you further in due course.
The main thing is to have your oaken shoulder available when necessary.
Anyway, the last thing I want to do is to heap more dung on the beetle’s back and correspondence on this subject is therefore closed with the reflection that if one prays for the boot one very often gets it from the wrong quarter in the wrong place, so I must be careful.
In December 1962 Fleming came across a newspaper cutting that read, ‘Mr. Ian Fleming won the Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal Challenge Trophy for the best collection of vegetables in the amateur class’. He wasted no time sticking it on a postcard, and with a stamp that bore the motto ‘National Productivity Year’, sent it to Plomer with the words, ‘So please treat me with more respect in 1963!’
From Goldeneye, 22nd February, 1963
My dear Wm,
End of term report. I have completed Opus XII save for 2 or 3 pages and am amazed that the miracle should have managed to repeat itself – the 65,000 odd words that is, & pretty odd some of them are! Since it is set in Japan, every day I have heard you chuckling wryly (I know! Stand in corner!) over my shoulder & God knows what Arthur Waley et al will have to say. Lafcadio Hernia1 – & you can say that again! But I think even you will glean some Japanese esoterica &, after all, when was it the last English novel about Japan was written? Just to give you an advance frisson, Bondo-san is about to pleasure Kissy Suzuki, the Ama girl, after she has stimulated his senses with toad’s sweat – a well-known Jap aphrodisiac, as of course you know. But you have to take a long hike through Japan before this & similar mayhem are portrayed & I fear that only the soundest addicts of Japoniserie will stay the course. It is called “You only live twice”, the first line of a haiku in the manner of Basho, 17th century itinerant poet whose works will be, I assume, on your bed-side table. Anyway, the Contemptible work is completed & will be submitted to honourable task-master shortly after my return.
Otherwise no news except far too much death & brooding bad conscience at not sharing the ghastly winter all our friends have been through. It must have been like this for those who were away during the blitz. I do hope you have breasted your way through without damage or too much dismay. Here it has been a shameful 80° throughout & perhaps the steadily best weather we have ever had. Haven’t you arrived at the age when you should winter abroad? Your bed is permanently turned down here & TLC awaits you always.
Just had a long letter from Michael so please pass on the Contemptible Book news to him & save me an extra chunk of reportage.
“Any message to William, Darling?”
“Just passionate love”.
Back March 17.
TO JOHN GOODWIN, ESQ., c/o Magdalen College, Oxford
Following an unfavourable review of Fleming’s books in the Times Literary Supplement John Goodwin, founding President of the Oxford University James Bond Club, sent a spirited rebuttal. Having dealt shortly with accusations of snobbery and sadism he concluded with a perceptive remark about Fleming’s competitors in the field: ‘One small point: if Mr. Deighton created his hero to be “as unlike Bond as possible” he should not be seen with garlic sausage and Normandy butter. Bond lunched off just such a combination en route to Geneva for an appointment with the delightful Mr. Goldfinger.’ Fleming, who counted the TLS as one of life’s necessities, undoubtedly read the letter. Nevertheless, Goodwin sent him a copy to be sure.
3rd April, 1963
Dear John Goodwin,
It was very nice to hear from you at last and thank you very much for springing so entertainingly to my defence in the TLS and also for being such a staunch supporter of James Bond at Oxford.
Naturally I should like to meet you all very much indeed, but I think this will need a good deal of careful planning and tight security work, or I shall end up dripping with stink bombs and the tyres of my Studebaker supercharged Avanti deflated.
If you are coming back through London why don’t you ring up and either come along here to my hide-out [Mitre Court] or come for a drink to 16 Victoria Square, and we would try and make a plan for a meeting which would amuse you and your fellow members.
Incidentally, I shudder to think how your Club will re-act to the April issue of the London magazine!2
I am much looking forward to meeting you and your Senior Member,3 though if I was not already aware of his eminence I would find his name very suspect! Are you quite sure you haven’t elected a double agent as your President?
With kindest regards.
Goodwin pointed out that it was a busy time of year academically, so a meeting might be difficult. At the same time, with some chutzpah, he asked if it might be possible to visit the set of From Russia with Love which was currently being filmed at Pinewood Studios.
5th May, 1963
Dear John Goodwin,
Many thanks for your letter of May 12th and I can appreciate the point of the “workers”.
I think the best solution might be for us all to meet on one of the outing days of my son Caspar at Summer Fields, and as soon as one is coming up I will write and tell you and see if it will fit in.
Naturally I would be delighted to meet you all and I am only sorry that our house at Sevenhampton won’t be habitable, I think, until July.
Anyway I will keep in touch.
Meanwhile I have stirred up the film producers and I think they will be happy to lay on anything you want so long as you keep in touch with them and find out how long they will be at Pinewood.
With best wishes for all of you who are preparing for their finals.
Thanks to Fleming’s intervention, Goodwin had the enviable experience of being collected outside his college by chauffeur-driven limousine and taken to the studio where he posed for photographs alongside Sean Connery and Daniele Bianchi.
Dear John Goodwin,
Thank you very much for your letter and I shall certainly contrive to come over and meet your Society during the next few weeks.
How about, for instance, for drinks on Friday November 1st or November 15th? Please let me know if either of these dates would be any good.
I am looking forward very much to meeting you all and, as soon as the curtains are up at Sevenhampton Place I hope you will hire a bomb-proof char-à-banc and all come over for a déjeuner sur l’herbe.
Despite Fleming’s cheerful outlook, the meeting never transpired.
TO P. MUIR, ESQ., Taylors, Takeley, Bishop’s Stortford, Herts.
In preparation for ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’, Percy Muir retrieved some of Fleming’s books from storage. He was deeply moved when he unearthed a first edition of The Communist Manifesto. As he wrote to Fleming, ‘I was delighted to see so many of the old friends again and to realize how well we had done all those years ago when we got this collection together. I really do not think that it would be possible to repeat at even something like ten times the price that they originally cost, which I need hardly say is a great cause of personal satisfaction to me.’
17th April, 1963
My dear Percy,
Thank you very much for your letter of April 10th and I enclose the card duly signed.
I am greatly impressed by the valuation, but I am not in the least surprised and I think one day we would be in a position to sell the whole collection for a great deal of money.
You certainly invested quite brilliantly and we were lucky to go into the market when we did and also when you were cruising round Europe so fruitfully.
TO C. D. HAMILTON, ESQ., The Sunday Times, Thomson House, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, London, W.C.1.
2nd May, 1963
My dear C.D.,
Here are one or two “bright” ideas.
1. I have just been down to Monte Carlo where I saw Graham Sutherland. He has spent the winter writing up a full account of the whole story of the Coventry Cathedral Tapestry together with very many sketches.
I mentioned that I thought this might interest you either for the Magazine or the colour supplement. And if you are interested his address is:
La Villa Blanche,
Route de Castellar,
Menton.
2. One of the exciting wartime stories that I think has not been told is the drama of the cross Channel battle between German and British coastal batteries. With photographs I think this would be very exciting.
This might be one of the long term projects you mentioned to me the other day and Antony Terry might be the man to do it plus David Devine to research the captured documents in the archives here.
3. I see I.C.I. in their Annual report refer to a sensational new heart drug. I don’t know if we can get anything out of them about this, but the Chairman I think said it was equivalent in importance to the discovery of insulin as a cure for diabetes.
4. Gastronomically the least rewarding stretch for any visitor to France is from London to Abbeville, but there are still some excellent restaurants tucked away on or just off this route, and it would be a great service to tourists to give them a gastronomic tour of this route. How about getting Cyril Connolly to do it? I can give him plenty of ideas.
5. As a “Mostly for Children” feature how about rare pebbles on the English beaches in time for the summer holidays? The Natural History Museum can provide the dope and there are some beautiful colour photographs in a book called, I think, “Pebbles on English Beaches”, published about three years ago. As an example, there are amethysts in Cornwall; Cornelians in Scotland; Amber at various places, and many other semi-precious stones.
Please don’t bother to acknowledge this miscellaneous haul.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
6th June, 1963
Wednesday
My dear Wm,
Thank you a thousand times for the charming green sheets & though I sense reservations it seems that you have swallowed your gruel with your usual good grace.
I note your various carps & will check & correct as instructed. Only one thing. If I start using italics won’t there be too many of them in the text? I thought Capes were inclined to be allergic to them. Would you ask Michael what his feeling is.
But what the hell am I going to do with Bond now? I am feeling horribly lethargic about him and very inclined to leave him hanging on his cliff in Vladivostok. You must give me a powerful kick in the pants when we next meet at the CX [Charing Cross Hotel].
Just off to lunch with Allen Dulles! Perhaps he will inspire me. Ever seen him? I doubt his powers to enthuse.
Whether or not Allen Dulles was of inspiration he clearly had the power to enthuse. As Victor Weybright4 reported on 11 June: ‘You were a hero at the ABA [American Booksellers Association] not only because of your formidable exhibit but because Allen Dulles repeated a half dozen times in the course of his speech how much he wishes the CIA had a half dozen James Bonds! It brought down applause from the rafters by the booksellers who were present.’ Fleming replied that he was delighted to hear ‘that my Agent 008 spoke up so staunchly on my behalf’.
FROM MICHAEL HOWARD
10th June, 1963
My dear Ian,
As I am temporarily marooned in the country by a ludicrous accumulation of medical misfortunes, I’m afraid this letter will go to you unsigned. But I want to let you know that William, who spent the weekend with us, brought the MS of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which both Pat and I read instantly and simultaneously, each fighting for the next chapter.
No wonder you were a little mysterious in your monitory announcements that there would be some strange surprises in the new story. This makes a most brilliant diversion for Bond after the Tracy episode. It takes an entirely new tack; but that should upset none of the addicts, who get their full measure of 7777 (will the new number mean changing the trademark?), and I congratulate you most heartily on making such a skilful break from formulae. One novelty I notice with amusement is the almost total absence of branded goods this time. Is this because you decline to boost Japanese exports?
You told me Victor Weybright had commented that the start is rather slow. That strikes me as a superficial criticism: it is the whole approach to the story which sets the pace, and we find that one’s interest and attention are impelled from page one to the end with all the usual irresistibility, or more. Except for the motorcyclist, and the climactic encounter with Blofeld, strong-arm stuff gives way to a concentrated course in Oriental culture, methods and attitudes to living and dying which will be unfamiliar and fascinating to your readers, few of whom would come across it otherwise. It will be unexpected in this context, but not unwelcome. Into snow, yes, I know it has happened. But something to soften the impact with the sea would be a help to the incredulous; and couldn’t the balloon very easily be penetrated by one of those bullets and so subside less precipitously than Bond’s free fall?
Apart from this, and a general suggestion about the very ending which I’d like to talk over with you when possible, I have no specific criticism to offer. But I have sent off the MS to the office to be read by all the usual sharp-eyed detail-hawks, and will present a summary of findings in due course.
For now, our warmest thanks and appreciation for the twelfth instalment of this astounding saga. It would be less than justice to say you’ve done it again – you’ve done so much more!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
11th June, 1963
My dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your most heart-warming letter which gave me immense pleasure as I had feared that you all might jib at the amount of travelogue in the book.
But I also privately feel that it makes a good change from the usual formula, and I am glad that you feel the interest of the background made up for having to wait for the action for so long.
I was also doubtful about the 500 feet and we can easily cut it down.
Please ring me as soon as possible and discuss the ending because I have some doubt about it – not the least of which is that I have no idea how to get him from Vladivostok back into his early life, if I have the energy and inventiveness to pursue his career further.
We should have great fun with Dickie Chopping over the jacket. My first thoughts are in the direction of a vast white chrysanthemum being chopped in half by a very ornately-bladed scimitar but perhaps this time we might let Chopping read the typescript and see if he comes up with an idea of his own.
Anyway, thank you again for most encouraging letter and I do hope your medical misfortunes are miraculously cured as a reward for your kind words.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
1st August, 1963
My dear Michael,
“You Only Live Twice”
I am getting on with the corrections and I think, with luck, you should have the finished article by the end of next week. But I would like to point out mildly that you have been sitting on the book for some two months and now expect me to do this rush job.
Another time wouldn’t it be better for you to do the rush job and me to do the sitting?
I don’t agree with you or William about the obituary and I would like it to stet. As for the Times masthead, I will try and get their permission to use it and I’m sure I shall have no difficulty. The main thing is that the whole obituary idea is a bit of a lark to which I am much attached.
TO C. D. HAMILTON
7th August, 1963
My dear C.D.,
I promised to let you have a note about my idea for a series called “Latter Day Adventurers”, but I put off writing in the hope that I could think of more names.
Unfortunately I can’t and all I can suggest are the following:-
1. The two Texas oil men who are the only experts in the world I think at putting out oil fires. They charge gigantic fees and are called in by all the great oil companies. They recently put out the great fire in the Sahara oil fields. Any oil company will give you the details.
2. There was a scheme afoot a year or two ago to salvage the Titanic. I don’t know who the people concerned are but Elaine Greene does.
3. How about the Swiss guide who has just done the first solo climb of the Eiger north wall?
Sorry for this meagre list but I am sure the brains of the Sunday Times will be able to think up some more.
Off to Simenon on Wednesday and back in the first week of September.
TO AMHERST VILLIERS, ESQ., 547 Erskine Drive, Pacific Palisades, California
Villiers, although he was primarily an engineer, was also involved in rocketry and had been exploring an attempt to reach Mars with the aid of the wartime German rocket scientist Werner von Braun.
16th October, 1963
My dear Amherst,
It was lovely to hear from you and I am glad at least to have your new address at last. I wanted to write to you several times in the last few months but had no idea where you were.
Your news is very exciting, but I am much more interested in your and Charles work on the Bentley than yours on the Mars project, which I regard as a great waste of money!
The Avanti is doing all right mechanically, but there are a lot of small bugs in the coachwork and fittings and owing to bad paintwork it is having to be resprayed at Studebaker’s expense. Also the windscreen has cracked. But it is certainly a good car and I shall live with it at any rate for another year.
The house [Sevenhampton] is more or less finished and we are installed and my life consists of cutting nettles and scraping mushrooms off my suits as a result of the proximity of the lake.
What about your London house, and who have you let it to?
When my book was published, the whole of England was plastered with reproductions of your portrait, and the doom-fraught eyes you gave me gazed out of practically every bookshop in the land. It is now down at the new house waiting to be suitably hung, probably next to a Sidney Nolan of a giant baboon!5
If I can find some excuse to come out to the West Coast I shall at once get in touch with you, but at the moment I am deeply involved in preparing for a maddening copyright case [about Thunderball] which is coming up on November 19th and is going to be a stupendous nuisance.
The first night of “From Russia with Love” was a majestic success and the queues formed all day round and round Leicester Square where it is showing at the Odeon. The whole film is a tremendous lark and I gather it will be coming to America before Christmas. So tell Nita [Villiers’ wife] to watch the papers and drag you off to it when it appears in your locality.
The cartoon in the New Yorker will certainly have done no harm to my publicity in the States and Jock Whitney was kind enough to buy the original from the New Yorker and send it to me.
Not much other news except that I miss you both very much and would like to have you both back here as soon as possible, even if it means that I have to submit to another portrait.
Much love to Nita and a sharp pinch for Charles [their son].
Salud!
FROM K. W. PURDY, ESQ., Ridgefield Road, Wilton, Connecticut
The writer Ken Purdy had interviewed Fleming earlier in the year for an article commissioned by Playboy. To mark the occasion he sent him as a memento his own Randall hunting knife. This remarkable object had a seven-inch blade, an ebony and ivory handle (the ebony being, as Purdy pointed out, impossibly slippery when covered in blood) and had seen hard service during two African safaris. It was capable of severing the head of a rhino, and to his certain knowledge had killed at least two men. Purdy being a motor enthusiast, his courier for this grisly gift was the champion racing driver Stirling Moss. ‘I must tell you that Stirling is basically very shy, and if he tries to get out of having lunch, or tries to send you the knife, please do insist. I don’t think you’ll have to do, because I have told him I want the knife put into your hand. Of course he almost never makes any appearance of shyness. He is a master at concealing his feelings, and as complicated a personality as I have known. As lovable, too.’ Whether or not the lunch took place is unrecorded.
9th October, 1963
My dear Ken,
I have just got back from abroad to find your letters of September 22nd and 29th and, to deal first with that of the 29th, I am totally overcome by your generosity.
Naturally I would love to have the knife and I was most interested by your account of Randall. Please don’t forget to send me his catalogue and any other literature he puts out. He sounds a fascinating man.
The knife itself will have a proud place on my walls, though I doubt if it will be put to any sterner use than cleaning my fingernails, but it’s a wonderful gift and I am indeed most grateful.
Stirling seems to forget that we know each other,6 and of course if he gets in touch I will give him a hot lunch or some similar celebration to mark the handing over.
But now to get back to business. I’m afraid I can’t help you over the book, not at any rate until next year. The books are in storage and the catalogue is missing, and although I was the second biggest contributor after King’s College, Cambridge at the recent Ipex International Printing Exhibition at the British Museum, I have mislaid the catalogue of my collection and to help you with your piece, in the foreseeable future, would be a major enterprise.
When you get back to England I will explain all this in more detail, but, for the time being, please put the idea, which is certainly a good one, in cold storage.
I am sure Playboy will leave your piece alone, unlike the Herald Tribune who badgered me for something on the transatlantic telephone for their new magazine, and then cut it to ribbons.
This is a terrible fault in American editors, both in periodicals and book publishing, and I entirely sympathise with your firm stand against having your golden words turned to lead, which seems to be their purpose. What is the object of getting an original writer to write an original piece and then taking all the originality out of it? God knows.
Again with a thousand thanks for your generosity and come over here again soon.
TO C. D. HAMILTON
16th October, 1963
My dear C.D.,
Please see the attached.
My own feeling is that we could do well with a sophisticated diary from Paris and that Sonia Orwell7 would do it well.
If you remember she tried it for us some years ago, but I don’t think she ever really got into her stride and she is a much more mature person today than she was then and much more firmly established in Paris.
The paper goes ahead splendidly and I am only slightly worried that the colour section has, by the nature of things, to contain so much art and archaeology. I will try and scratch my head for some alternative ideas, but I still think my suggestion of the great jewellers of the world would be a strong runner.
Sorry I didn’t see more of you on Thursday night [at the film premiere], but I was absolutely exhausted and crept to bed pretty early. Hope to see you at lunch with Roy next Wednesday.
TO MRS. SONIA ORWELL, 38, rue des Saints Pères, Paris, 7e
16th October, 1963
My dear Sonia,
It was lovely to see you again and now to hear from you.
Personally I think you have much to offer The Sunday Times on the lines of the old Mitford monthly diary, but all this must rest with my good friend C.D. Hamilton, the editor.
So I am sending your letter on to him with a warm recommendation and I expect in due course you will be hearing either from him or from Frank Giles.
But you should remember that recently Stephen Coulter has been writing an occasional diary and I am not sure if they will wish to disturb this arrangement.
Anyway, best of luck, and it was lovely to see you again.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
22nd October, 1963
My dear Michael,
Griffie has passed on to me your letter of October 21st and many thanks for the round figure.
Regarding Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, I really hate the idea of having to do a blurb for it as I’ve forgotten all about the series after so much time. So could you ask one of your chaps to do a draft that I can scribble on? When will the pictures be ready, by the way?
You don’t say what you think of Dickie Chopping’s picture [for You Only Live Twice] and I am longing to hear from you about it.
Many thanks for the mock-up, which I return. This is exactly as I saw it but you might perhaps consider dropping the “Obituary” as it more or less repeats the chapter head.
Some lines have been dropped from the text, but that presumably doesn’t matter.
Sorry I didn’t get around to seeing more of you both the other night [at the premiere], but I was absolutely dead beat with grinning inanely at people, and how we got seventy people into our small house I simply cannot imagine. It mildly caught fire the following week and I am not in the least surprised!
Let’s meet soon and have a tour d’horizon.
TO RICHARD CHOPPING
There had been some confusion over the copyright in Chopping’s illustrations. For a long while Fleming had thought he owned the rights, having commissioned them and, to a large degree, designed them. But as Chopping pointed out to Michael Howard, he had never assigned the copyright in any of his works.
5th November, 1963
My dear Dickie,
First of all a thousand congratulations on the new jacket. It is quite in your topmost class and Anne loves it also. You and I really are a wonderful team.
Now I am delighted that you have raised this question of copyright which had completely escaped my attention. Naturally the copyright in all the jackets remains with you though the originals are my property.
I had assumed you were being paid a copyright fee for reproductions particularly in America, but I have now talked to Michael and find that this is not so. So I have asked Michael to have the accounts gone through to see what American monies have been paid to me for the use of your jackets and to re-credit this to you instead of me.
I am so sorry this hasn’t been done before, but quite honestly both Michael and I forgot all about it. Anyway, it should come as a pleasant Christmas present!
You are quite right to have raised all this and I am delighted we shall at last get our accounts straight.
Yes, please do get the scroll a bit more scrolly if you can.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
5th December, 1963
My dear Michael,
“You Only Live Twice”
We seem to be having the most tremendous arguments about what is a “tanka” and what is a “haiku”, and I can’t understand why somebody can’t look it up in a dictionary and find the correct answer.
But at the present moment you have certainly got it wrong by changing my “syllables” for “letters”.
If you will, as I have, consult Professor Blyth, Volume 4, 1952, you will find that “the haiku is the traditional Japanese verse of 17 syllables”. [. . .]
Regarding the mention on Page 16, line 7, of “tanka of thirty-one syllables”, which seems to have been missed in the general argumentation, I think this should also stet unless someone of high authority on either side of the Atlantic shouts me down.
I am sending copies of this to Phyllis Jackson, Victor Weybright and Playboy, and I hope we have now heard the end of Japanese poesy.
‘I don’t want yachts, race-horses or a Rolls Royce,’ Fleming told journalist René MacColl in February 1964. ‘I want my family and my friends and good health and to have a small treadmill with a temperature of 80 degrees in the shade and in the sea to come to every year for two months.
‘And to be able to work there and look at the flowers and fish, and somehow to give pleasure, whether innocent or illicit, to people in their millions. Well you can’t ask for more.’
It was a wistful vision of a future that Fleming knew was unlikely to materialise. By the start of the year he was in serious decline, and although Jamaica cheered him up as always, the end was written on his face. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to interview him at Goldeneye he spoke with intelligence and clarity but looked appallingly unwell. So tired and drooping were his features that it was hard to believe he was only fifty-five: he might have been a good ten years older. Nevertheless, he summoned enough energy to write what he had decided would be the last Bond novel.
The Man With the Golden Gun saw 007 transported once again to Jamaica. Having left Japan, where Fleming last stranded him, he reaches Vladivostok only to be brainwashed by SMERSH. When he returns, with murder in mind, the Secret Service foils his attempt to assassinate M with a poison-gas pistol. After intensive de-programming he is given one last chance: a do-or-die mission to kill the sharpest gunman in the business, Francisco Scaramanga. A ruthless character, Scaramanga does a nasty trade in drugs, prostitution and gambling, has murdered several British agents, and is cooperating with the Soviets to disrupt the Caribbean sugar trade. Naturally, he has all the attributes of a true Bond villain: he wields a gold-plated Colt 45 that fires silver-plated bullets of solid gold; and he has three nipples.
Using the pseudonym Mark Hazard, Bond wangles his way into Scaramanga’s confidence as a personal assistant. When his cover is blown, his employer devises a colourful death on a tourist train. But Bond manages to shoot his way out of trouble, and, having killed a carriage-load of Scaramanga’s associates, pursues Scaramanga himself through the jungle, where they meet in a final, deadly duel.
When Fleming sent the manuscript to Howard and Plomer, he was fairly confident that it worked – or could work, once he had polished it up. But the usual process of refinement proved beyond him. That Easter he played a game of golf in the rain, drove home in wet clothes and caught a cold which developed into pleurisy. On further examination it was found he had blood clots in the lung. He spent a long time in hospital and then in June was sent to recuperate, once again, in Hove. Visitors were discouraged lest they raise his blood pressure, but the few who were allowed found him sitting quietly at a window, cigarette in hand and staring out to sea.
Fleming’s outlook was not improved by the death of his mother, who died on 27 July 1964. Recognising that he was the most fragile of her brood, she had always been a support. But now she was gone, and with her went what remained of his spirit. Her funeral was held at Nettlebed, the Fleming heartland, with a wake at his brother Peter’s house, Merrimoles. Everybody noticed how ill he looked, and, when he asked for a glass of gin, Peter’s housekeeper remonstrated that this wasn’t what the doctors recommended. ‘Fuck the doctors,’ came his reply.
The shadows were gathering. When Michael Howard last saw him, ‘on a dark and thundery afternoon a few weeks before his death, he told me suddenly that he knew how hostile I had been to his first book. It was generous of him never to have challenged me about it earlier.’ This wasn’t the first act of generosity. Despite receiving grander offers from other publishers he had stuck with Cape, and from being an annoying upstart he had risen to become the mainstay of an increasingly moribund publishing house. By Howard’s admission, his books were by now the only thing that kept Cape in profit.
In the following weeks Fleming smoked and drank his life to a strangely symmetrical conclusion. He had moved into a house in Kent at the start of his Bond career, and now that it was over it was to Kent that he returned once again. That August he and Ann motored down to Sandwich where Fleming was due to be elected captain of the Royal St George’s golf club. After dinner on 11 August he suffered a heart attack. The following morning, on his son Caspar’s twelfth birthday, he died.
A memorial service was organised on 15 September by his sister Amaryllis at St Bartholomew’s Church, Smithfield, a spot she chose not only for its central location but because it was said to be the oldest church in London – and with its dense and massive interior it certainly looked the part. Anticipating crowds, Amaryllis had arranged for police cordons, but in the event they were not needed. She played a Bach Sarabande on her cello, and William Plomer, Fleming’s friend, ‘gentle reader’ and editorial companion, gave the address. Meanwhile, if they had failed to appear at the service, the wider public had their own memorial in the form of Bond. The Man With the Golden Gun was published in 1965,1 and the next year Cape produced Octopussy and The Living Daylights containing the two stories they had to hand, plus ‘Property of a Lady’.
Yet, as William Plomer remarked amidst the massive pillars of St Bart’s, this was only one aspect of the man. His envoi was heartfelt: ‘Let us remember him as he was on top of the world, with his foot on the accelerator, laughing at absurdities, enjoying discoveries, absorbed in his many interests and plans, fascinated and amused by places and people and facts and fantasies, an entertainer of millions, and for us a friend never to be forgotten.’
TO ALAN WHICKER, ESQ., The British Broadcasting Corporation, Lime Grove Studios, London W. 12, England
The journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker wrote in the erroneous belief that an approach had already been made, to enquire if Fleming might like to be the subject of a 50-minute episode in his investigative TV series, ‘Whicker’s World’. As an enticement he added that, ‘I have interviewed Paul Getty; Baron and Baroness Thyssen; and have considered in depth the lives of such diverse groups as the Indians of the Guatemala and the Quorn [a British fox hunt].’ Understanding that Fleming was currently in Jamaica, Whicker proposed he bring his film crew there in April. He received a stony reply.
23rd January, 1964
Dear Mr. Whicker,
Thank you very much for your letter of the 16th, but, if you will forgive me, I am not greatly impressed by being equated with any of your previous victims!
Moreover, I do not greatly seek publicity and I am daunted by the idea of working away for several days for the benefit of the BBC; apparently without payment.
And I leave here on March 16th.
Wouldn’t you rather do the Battersea Dogs Home and forget about me?
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
From Goldeneye, 2nd March, 1964
My dear Wm,
Here is my end, nearly, of term report as usual.
I have somehow managed to write a, nearly, book. Not long, about the same as ‘The Spy who loved me’. But it is nevertheless a miracle – in my opinion – because I felt empty as a Jamaican gourd when I left. It is called ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’, which I like & is set, once again, in Jamaica. I’ve no idea what it is like, but then one never does. I am not enthusiastic, but then I have lived with this joke, under your lash!, for so long, that the zest is seeping out through my Dr. Scholls. Anyway, I am proud not to have failed you, whatever your verdict! Perhaps I am getting spoiled by success. You must lecture me about this when I get back. Incidentally, & for your ears only, there is a big take-over bid for Glidrose underway.2 A huge City company! Golly, what you started at the Ivy 13 years ago!
Annie sits & reads Keats & Quennell & moans about the ‘Tristes Tropiques’ but gets sleek. She sends her warmest love, as do eye.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
From Goldeneye, 3rd March, 1964
Dear Michael,
One sudden, brilliant notion.
I am surrounded by books of reference here – about birds, fish, shells, tropical shrubs, trees, plants, the stars, etc. etc. – but every guest says “what does ganja look like?” (marihuana)
Why not do a cool, well-illustrated book on the “narcotic flora of the world”? Expensive. Definitive. With medical effects, etc. I would certainly underwrite it. You can’t miss. Get cracking before Weidenpuss or Thames & Hudson do it. A £5 job.
I have spoken!
Thanks for your gen. Sorry about Monday but after the flight & signing all those books we will be in purdah. Anyway, why promote each other?
Now, get off the [launch] pad!
Cape did, in fact, investigate the possibility. But their enquiries were half-hearted and extended little further than the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew from whom they received a prim and slight disapproving list of plants in which the only curiosity – and one that Fleming would have enjoyed – was that lettuce (reputedly) had mild narcotic properties. But by then he was dead and they dropped it.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
‘57th Birthday’, 28th March, 19643
My Dear Michael,
Warmest thanks for your messages and the Googarty [sic].4 He was in fact a great friend of my mother tho. she only gets a mention. He contributed to my first publication “The Wyvern”, a one-time-only mag I produced at Eton containing my first piece of fiction – a shameless crib of Michael Arlen! But I made £90 out of my venture as a publisher which is more than many can say.
Out this weekend & then to Vic. Square for a week where I promise to finish correcting my book. Then to the country for a while.
I say, Cape’s are in the news with their books these days! Many congratulations to you all.
Got some sweet peas from Andre Deutsch!!! Humpf!
Salud,
Ian
P.S. Happy B-day to you too.
TO VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, ESQ., The New American Library, 501 Madison Avenue, New York, 22
My Dear Victor,
I have had your comments on the title of my next book, “The Man With The Golden Gun.”
I had thought of Algren’s “The Man With The Golden Arm”, but am I not right in thinking there is no copyright in titles? And, in any case, Algren’s was in such a different vein of literature.
And was there not a man called Apuleius who wrote “The Man With The Golden Ass”! However, I have two alternative titles “Goldenrod” or “Number 3½ Love Lane”, to fall back on in case of emergency.
But heaven knows when I am going to get around to correcting the typescript and doing a certain amount of rewriting.
I am absolutely deluged with junk from which I simply don’t seem to be able to free up existence. So please be excessively patient this year.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
While laid up with pleurisy in the King Edward VII Hospital, known as Sister Agnes, Fleming wrote to congratulate Plomer on the recently published diaries of Richard Rumbold which had given him, as editor, an extraordinary amount of trouble. Fleming also made clear that he was finished with Bond.
Chez la Soeur Agnes, 10th May, 1964, Saturday
My dear Wm,
Alas I am ‘gisant parterre’ here for the past 10 days with another 2 weeks to go – pleurisy. I thought only aunts got it, but no one will say how ill I am – the usual mumbo-jumbo – and in fact I feel totally ‘remis’ though not yet up to correcting my stupid book – or rather the last 3rd of it, but I shall get down to it next week and then you & I will plan whether to publish in 1965 or give it another year’s working over so that we can go out with a bang instead of a whimper.
Your fine opus arrived just in time & saw me over the first 3 days. Oddly enough, on my first night, the night nurse exclaimed when she saw the picture on the jacket. She had been R[umbold]’s nurse at Midhurst in ? 1956. She had much liked him but said he was terribly ‘mixed up’ (indeed!) and his looks had gone (who’s wouldn’t have?) She remembered Hilda well (what a saint!) Odd coincidence.
I remember well, at the Charing X, was it 3 years ago? you telling me that this shower had emptied itself on your head – bales & cases full of letters & papers, & how I commiserated. Well, now time has passed & an infinity of labour (which you don’t mention, of course, in your excellent introduction), and the work is done & the memorial stands. What a wonderful & good achievement! I read every word & shall now always remember this man I never knew OR heard of. Echoes of Denton Welch5 – perhaps because of the introspection & Ceylon. What a monster that father was! One of the great ogres as you bring out in a few lines. Wish I had read ‘My Father’s Son’. And Ronnie Knox – really! Did this foul deed come in E[velyn] W[augh]’s biography? I bet not. Of course I adored your occasional asides & intrusions – rather like a Zen master with his stick! I would have liked a photograph of HOW he was at the end but that might have been unkind. Interesting his admiration for Paul Bowles whom I think a cold-hearted bastard but I can see that his compactness and discipline would have impressed R.
Anyway, enough of these maunderings. I must have my “sensitive areas” rubbed (bottom in hospitalese!) Thank you for the spiffing P.C. I am better without visitors but we will gnaw a string of spaghetti when I get out.
1,000nd congratulations on a beautifully accomplished task.
FROM SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Maugham, aged eighty-eight and nearing the end of his life, wrote a sad note to thank Fleming for his latest, You Only Live Twice.
My dear Ian,
Thank you for sending me your new book. I read it, as with all the others, with great delight and excitement. It was very sweet of you to think of me; I was touched and much pleased.
Forgive me for not having acknowledged it before now but I have been very seedy and distraught. I have just returned from Venice, but with the realisation that my travelling days are over – it is a great grief to me.
I hope we meet before too long. I think of you with great affection and should like to see you once more.
TO SOMERSET MAUGHAM, ESQ., C.H., Villa Mauresque, St. Jean, Cap Ferrat
13th May, 1964
My dear Willie,
A thousand thanks for your charming but rather triste letter of May 7th. Cease at once being “seedy and distraught”. Move about as much as you can, even if it’s only short distances, and don’t forget that today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish!
I have been seedy but without being much distraught, pleurisy and shut up in Sister Agnes for two or three weeks.
I shall be about again in a fortnight or so and I am going to try and persuade Annie that we might fly down to Nice and invite ourselves to you for a week-end, if you will have us. I would see that Annie did not exhaust you with her chatter and, as you know, I am as quiet as a mouse. But we both long to see you, particularly as you missed your London visit last year.
If you think this would be a good idea please scribble Annie a note and command her to your presence. She is your slave and will do anything you tell her to.
Now please don’t treat yourself like a piece of Venetian glass, it is not your style at all and you have always had the courage and fortitude of ten.
With all my affection,
Dictated by Mr. Fleming and signed in his absence
TO AUBREY FORSHAW, ESQ., Pan Books Ltd., 8 Headfort Place, London, S.W.1.
Aubrey Forshaw of Pan Books wrote to invite Fleming to a party where he was to receive an award for having sold one million copies of Casino Royale.
20th May, 1964
My dear Aubrey,
I am so sorry that I missed our lunch and, alas, I’m afraid it may be another couple of weeks or so before I shall be fit to take part in this splendid beano you are arranging for me.
Griffie will let you know just as soon as I am back in circulation.
What the devil do these Oscars consist of? I assume they are at least 18 carat and the whole way through, unlike the Hollywood Oscars which are made of the basest of metals!
Anyway, it really is wonderful what you have managed to do with my books, and it certainly is a far cry from the day when you and Cape gingerly handled “Casino Royale” with a pair of tongs and gaze averted!
I don’t think much of Harry Saltzman’s new jacket for “Goldfinger”. The golden girl looks like a man and there is far too much jazz about the film. Why the hell should we advertise Saltzman and Broccoli on one of my books? And on the back I see that Sean Connery gets at least twice the size type as the author.
Seriously, although Saltzman is a splendid salesman, do please keep a sharp eye on this tendency of his to use my books for advertising his films.
Longing to see you as soon as possible.
Dictated by Ian Fleming & signed in his absence.
P.S. By the way, Griffie just tells me you have a different cover in mind once the film is out of the way. She might have said so earlier!
Forshaw replied: ‘Our PAN is 9 3∕4’’ high – a replica of a 2nd Century statue owned by the British Museum. It is of bronze, as is the original, but is plated with matt 18 ct. gold to prevent tarnishing. He stands on a 4” Mahogany plinth bearing a plate engraved with your name, the title of the book and the fact that the book has sold a million copies in our series.
‘Poor man you are now due to receive eight – i.e. all titles except “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY”. Within two or three months this too will reach the million and will be an all time record-holder, short stories being notoriously difficult to sell in any numbers.’ He further pointed out: ‘Saltzman’s films have done an enormous amount to spread the cult.’
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
20th May, 1964
My dear Wm,
Thank you for warming peecard & spiffing letter. I am satisfied with your reviews [of Plomer’s book on Richard Rumbold] except for that pretentious booby Francis King. He reminds me a bit of Grigson6 in the way they PECK and denigrate. I would like to have read great accolades for you, really great ones, but few people can know how much dung had to be shifted by how staunch a beetle. I remember so vividly your throw-away phrases in the Charing X and my immediate understanding of what you had taken on. Odd!
Don’t do it again! Write for fun now.
Have just been condemned to another week or so here – but by the best mechanic in England – Stuart Bedford. I could have told him so before he said it. One knows one’s old vintage car by now. Reading voraciously but I find I can now only read books which approximate to the truth. Odd stories just aren’t good enough. That’s most of the reason I shy away from Bond. Not good enough after reading ‘Diary of a Black Sheep’ by Meinertzhagen7 & even Francis Chichester8 with all its omissions. But in due course I will hack away & you will be honest with me. I don’t like short-weighting my readers, myself or you.
Just finished Post’s “Heart of the Hunter”. Liked first third but got bogged down in Praying Mantis. You must bring me up to date with him one day. Also Deighton’s “Funeral in Berlin” in proof. Amusing cracks but I simply can’t be bothered with his kitchen sink writing & all this Nescafe. Reminds me of Bratby. I think Capes should send him to Tahiti or somewhere & get him to ‘tell a story’. He excuses his ignorance of life with his footnotes & that won’t stand up for long – nice chap though he is.
Please tell Michael to send me some books – any I.Q. but good ones!
Sorry for the long waffle but I’ve just had the extra sentence & Annie has a smart dinner party & I wanted to communicate.
Gruss aus Beaumontstrasse
P.S. Please read the Amis M.S. & put him right where you can.9 You blew the whistle. You’ve seen the whole game! No reply please.
TO WILLIAM PLOMER
June 1964
Another 10 days, Brighton
My dear Wm,
You have calmed my temperature & blood pressure, reduced the albumen in my urine & sent my spirits soaring.
But I would still like to tinker with the book [The Man with the Golden Gun] & skip a year. We will discuss, but bless you as usual.
15th June, 1964
Dear Leonard,
Forgive the typing and the signature, but I am still not firing on all cylinders.
I will certainly see that you have an early look at “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang”, but there is so much text that, apart from the brilliance of [John] Burningham’s illustrations, I think you may have difficulty in finding room for it.
I wrote the three books three years ago when I got stuck in hospital and someone sent me Squirrel Nutkin which, apart from the illustrations, I thought was most terrible bilge – particularly the idiotic riddles.
Laid low again, I am now thinking of a musical called “Fizz-an-Chips”, but I haven’t got further than the title.
I’m afraid I entirely agree with your criticism of my critique of Norman Lewis’s book, but I was not nearly as well up on the subject of the Mafia as you – strangely – appear to be. And though I never see him I am devoted to Norman and am sorry that he always just fails to come off.
But you are absolutely right, and it just shows that you must tell Jack never again to ask me to do reviews for him. My eye is absolutely out!
But be a good chap and lend me this definitive work in the “New York Review of Books” which I have never heard of. I promise it will come back to you safely.
Anyway it was lovely to hear from you and I now see that the only way to get more than a short paragraph from you is to offend your critical senses!
Salud.
Dictated by Ian Fleming and signed in his absence
TO DENIS HAMILTON, 25 Roebuck House, Stag Place, London, S.W.1.
15th June, 1964
My dear C.D.,
Forgive the typing and the signature but I am still not running on all cylinders.
It was lovely to get your note, but I am sorry you have been playing the fool in the garden. You must know that all forms of gardening are tantamount to suicide for the normal sedentary male. For heaven’s sake leave the whole business alone, it is an absolute death trap.
Alas, next week won’t work as with any luck I’m going to be allowed down to Brighton to play ring-a-roses with the Mods and Rockers.
So please let us make it the week after and I will get in touch.
You are a wonderful chap to take my broadsides in such good grace, but I have always felt that we have so much talent on the paper that just doesn’t do its weekly stint and is not, from time to time, given the limelight of the leader page.
There are some tremendous names there, often with axes to grind, off their usual beat and I feel it would be a great accolade for many of them to get on the leader page – and a stimulus and a challenge, for the matter of that.
But to draw them out of their shells might need something like a round robin letter or series of small luncheon parties.
But we will hack away at each other in a few days time, and in the meantime, for heavens sake keep away from that blasted garden.
TO PERCY MUIR, ESQ., Elkin Matthews Ltd., Takeley, Bishop’s Stortford, Essex
22nd June, 1964
Dear Mr. Muir,
Thank you for your letter of June 19th. Alas, I’m afraid Mr. Fleming has been quite ill. He had a cold, played golf and got very wet, the cold turned to influenza and the influenza to pleurisy. All this of course has proved to be a strain on his heart. He was in Sister Agnes hospital for some weeks, then at home for two weeks, and last Wednesday he went to Brighton. I expected him back in London tomorrow, but I’ve just heard that he is not so well and will have to stay another ten days or so.
As you can imagine he is very bored and now he is only allowed to go out every other day. It’s all very worrying. However, I know he would like to hear from you so long as you ask him not to reply. He gets exhausted very quickly and sends all his letters to the office, and I know he feels it is rather impolite not answering them personally.
I thought the Book Fair excellent, but the attendance was terribly poor.
Mr. Fleming’s address is The Dudley Hotel, Hove, Sussex, so please write and cheer him up, he needs it.
Yours Sincerely,
Secretary to Ian Fleming
Although Fleming died in 1964, Agent 007 did not. The Bond novels continued to sell in their millions – initially thanks to Pan Books, whose paperback covers were reinvented so often and so inventively that they became almost as iconic as Chopping’s original designs. If the literary establishment had once looked down upon Fleming as a sensationalist, his contemporaries would now have given their eye teeth to achieve even a smidgeon of his fame. When Kingsley Amis’s The James Bond Dossier came out in 1965 Evelyn Waugh wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford, ‘Ian Fleming is being posthumously canonised by the intelligentsia. Very rum.’ More importantly, perhaps, his books acted as a touchstone for a new breed of thriller writer.
Fleming’s literary estate was managed at first by Ann, who guarded his reputation until her death in 1981, and by his brother Peter along with the agent Peter Janson-Smith. Caspar Fleming led a troubled life, which included a fascination for guns, drugs and Ancient Egypt before committing suicide in 1975. To safeguard the copyright in James Bond, Glidrose commissioned Kingsley Amis to write a continuation Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which came out in 1968, following which several other authors have since assumed the Bond mantle.
The grip Bond held on the world’s imagination was enhanced beyond measure by his career on screen. Producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman took a leap in the dark when they bought the film rights in 1961 (appropriately, they named their company EON: ‘Everything Or Nothing’) but their perseverance paid dividends. Fleming’s credo had always been that if you wanted to make proper money from writing you had to get your books made into films. And he was quite right.
The first three Bond films – Dr No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger – were produced while Fleming was still alive, though he lived to see only the first two. They followed, more or less faithfully, the novels – among the highlights were 007’s game of golf with Goldfinger and his duel with Rosa Klebb and her poison-bladed shoes in From Russia with Love. Thereafter, Bond took wing, flying in a variety of directions yet always uplifted by a glamour and sense of excitement that reflected Fleming’s original vision. The result, managed by the same family-run company, headed now by Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, is a massive entertainment industry that shows no sign of diminishing.
At the time of writing, Fleming’s books have sold more than 100 million copies (excluding translations) and it has been estimated that one in five of the world’s population has seen a Bond film. All this from a man who in 1953 offered to flip a coin with his publisher over who should pay for a few extra promotional copies of Casino Royale.