Nightmare Among the Mighty (Sunday Times, June 30, 1957)
By Ian Fleming
Every sport has its own nightmare — the dropped baton, the goal scored against your own side, running out your captain when he has scored ninety-nine; and, in your dreams, they all have the same ghastly background—the packed stands, the serried ranks of spectators, the incredulous hush and then the deep condemnatory groan.
In golf the two-foot putt missed on the eighteenth green is quickly over, and you are at once awake, sweating and whimpering. This terror must be common to even the greatest in the game, but for the week-end golfer, there is a far longer, more horrible nightmare—partnership with a world champion over a course black with the crowds.
Last week-end I endured this nightmare, thirty-six holes of it, and I live, but only just, to tell the tale.
It came about like this. Three weeks ago a friend said he wanted me to play in the Bowmaker Invitation Amateur/Professional Tournament at the Berkshire. “It’s great fun,” he said. “All the best professionals take two amateurs each, and you play a threesome against bogey. Each team puts in three cards—the professional’s for the best scratch score and the professional plus each amateur for the lowest better ball score. The amateur plays off full handicap, and if he makes good use of his strokes he and his pro can get a better ball score around 60. You can pick up when you’ve played too many. They have film stars and such like to amuse the crowds. Come on.”
It sounded fun. I said “Yes,” and forgot about it.
* * *
I forgot about it until I got the draw. I was to play with Peter Thomson, three times Open champion, and Alec Shepperson, handicap plus 1, a Walker Cup probable. I was to be on the first tee of the Red Course at 2.15 last Sunday.
That was Tuesday the eighteenth. On the Wednesday, Peter Thomson, fresh from a fine performance in the American Open, equalled the course record of Sand Moor with a 65 in the Yorkshire Evening News tournament. He followed this with a 67, 64 and 68. He won the tournament by fifteen strokes and broke a handful of records. The golfing world gasped.
Apart from praying that the biggest thunderstorm in living memory would deluge the home counties on the following Sunday and Monday (it was a two-day contest ), there was really nothing I could do about It. I am a nine handicap week-end golfer with a short, flat swing that has been likened to a housemaid sweeping under a bed. It is a fast swing with reserves of fantastic acceleration in moments of stress.
The only reason I am nine is that I obstinately try to play down to it rather than take life more easily off twelve, which I should be. I have never had a golf lesson, except from my grandmother at the age of about fifteen, and my only equipment for the game is a natural “eye” and strong forearms. Against these virtues it should be said that I remember to keep my head down only on one shot in three and that, on occasional shots, “everything moves except the ball.”
The greatest weakness of my essentially immaculate game is that I am quite unable to “repeat” my swing. Even on the putting green, my stance and stroke are at the mercy of the moment’s whim. The fact that I have played golf for some thirty years with occasional success and great pleasure is due to enjoying the company, the exercise and the zest of competition. In short, I am the quintessential amateur.
* * *
The virtues of amateurishness are all right in a friendly game, perhaps sharpened by a gamble, in the privacy of one’s home course. There the quick, sharp dunch into a bunker is a matter for hilarity only mildly tinged with bitterness. But how, I wondered feverishly as the dreadful day approached, would my insouciance stand up playing before vast crowds, with the greatest, or at any rate the second greatest, golfer in the world?
But why worry? It’s only a game. The ball won’t move. Just walk up and hit it. These and other specious exhortations were mouthed at me through wolfish grins by my friends. The worst you can do is maim a few spectators, perhaps even kill one. But the club will be insured. Have a double kümmel before you start. Take an Oblivon.
Steeled by the relish of my friends, I assumed a nonchalant mask. I looked to my equipment. The head of my driver (circa 1930, one of the earliest, surely, of the steel shafts and known around Sandwich as “Excalibur”) was loose. I had it fixed. My double-faced chipper (Tom Morris, 1935), a beloved but temperamental club, was rebound. I bought two pairs of expensive socks in pale blue. I reread the red ink passages in Armour’s How To Play Your Best Golf All The Time, watched Peter Thomson’s unearthly progress through the Yorkshire Evening News tournament and waited queasily for H- (for Horror) Day.
* * *
H-Day dawned bright and clear. No earthquakes. No tornadoes. No thunderstorms. I drove at an even pace to the Berkshire, parked my car among the hundreds, and proceeded to the seventh fairway of the Blue Course, which a number of young gods were bisecting with arrow-straight drives and iron shots using mounds of practice balls.
I retired to an inconspicuous corner with my caddie, six balls and a No.3 iron. It took me about twenty minutes, in my usual ratio of one good shot in three, to lose four of the balls in the woods.
Then came lunch and the unwelcome news that the matches were running over an hour late. I wandered out among the dreadful trappings of my nightmare—the marquees, the huge scoreboard ablaze with the most famous names in professional and amateur golf, and already showing the results of the early starters and, in the background, the loudspeaker giving the position on the near-by 17th tee.
Henry Cotton passed me, his face a mask of concentration, and Locke, majestic, indomitable. Henry Longhurst tossed me a few phrases of gleeful commiseration. And then there were Peter Thomson and Alec Shepperson, and I was explaining who I was and apologising in advance for the dreadful things that they would shortly be witnessing.
* * *
For the first time I felt a ray of comfort. All golfers have their problems. Shepperson was a candidate for the Walker Cup team and he knew the names would be announced the next day and that the selectors were on the course. Thomson knew that every spectator would expect him to go round in level threes. We commiserated with one another over the swelling crowds and in due course there we were standing on the first tee.
The starter's voice rang out — unnecessarily loudly. Thomson drove 250 yards down the centre of the fairway.
“Mr. Iarn Fleming.”
I wiped my hands on the seat of my trousers and stepped forward. Half-conscious, I teed up and gave a practice swing, listening with half my mind for the hiss of astonishment. The crowd was too well bred. I addressed the ball and promptly knocked it off its peg. I put it on again.
Then there was a moment when the world stood still, a brief glimpse of the ball through a mist of tears, a more or less articulated swirl of motion and the blessed ball was well airborne and on its way with a slight draw to come to rest in the rough fifty yards behind Thomson’s.
Shepperson hit a beauty and we were off and away, with the crowd streaming after us. One of my chief tortures, easily foreseen, was that I should always be playing first of the trio. I hacked the ball out of the shallow heather and got it 100 yards on its way down the fairway. Thomson pushed his to the right of the green. Shepperson fluffed with a 4 wood, and there I was having to hit mine again.
***
I had a stroke at all the odd holes. Now it was vital that I should hit the simplest of simple shots 150 yards on to the green. I took out my blaster, with which I thought I would be safest. There was a respectful hush. Head down, you fool! Slow back! BOING!!! The ball, hit off the sole, whizzed along the ground, bumbled up the green and stopped within three yards of the pin.
Muttering something about “Dundee run-up” I strode after it, and, to cut a long story short, both Thomson and Shepperson got fives and all I had to do was to get down in two putts to win a net 4 for Thomson and our better ball. I putted, or rather twitched, the ball a yard past, missing the hole by three inches. Then, with a thumping heart, stroked, or more accurately topped, the ball into the hole amid heartfelt applause from the agonized crowd.
I will pass over the second hole where I hit a No. 7 over the green and picked up and where Thomson got an immaculate 3.
Another stroke at the 3rd. An adequate drive. A fluffed spoon and a smothered 4 iron which again rattled up on the green. Again I somehow got my net 4 to Thomson’s 5. I had “improved” twice for Thomson, but by the foulest means, and there was no question of my golf having settled down.
***
I forget what happened at the 4th, but at the par three 5th, having been advised by Thomson to take a 7 Instead of an 8, I at last hit the ball in the middle of the bat and got a net two, which I followed up with another net two, also well played, at the 7th. Again at the 9th, but this time again by foul means, I scrambled a net four. I had helped Peter Thomson five times in nine holes!
Those treacherous crocodiles my friends, who had come to gloat at my discomfiture, changed their tune. Now they edged up and whispered that my handicap would have to be reduced at Sandwich. I brushed them aside. The sun was shining, the course was beautiful. What fun it was playing with the Open champion!
Alas, while by dunch, scuffle and fluff I somehow played the next nine holes. I was no further help to Peter Thomson and all I can remember of the inward half is the most glorious three I have ever seen, by Shepperson, at the bogey five 15th, and an appalling shank by myself at the 17th. It was with a No. 8, off a downhill lie, and the air positively quivered with the horrible clang as the ball sped at right angles through the spectators’ legs into the deep rough.
And then the round was over, with a 72 for Peter Thomson and net 66s for Alec Shepperson and myself. No earthly good, but at least I hadn’t played Thomson’s ball by mistake, or done an air shot or killed a spectator. It was in a mood of euphoria that I returned to London.
***
Monday was not so good, and I did many terrible things that even now make me shudder, but it had rained very heavily and there were fewer witnesses. Thomson did a 69 and Shepperson, who by this time had been nominated for the Walker Cup, and I, repeated our 66s, which meant that at least I had been able to help Thomson on three holes.
And now the dreadful glory of the occasion is fading and this weekend I shall be playing either a new kind of golf, tempered to the finest steel by its visit to the blast furnace, or, more probably, wilted by the fierce flame.
Alas, when my friends or my grandchildren ask me how Peter Thomson played this shot or Alec Shepperson that, I shall be unable to tell them. I shall have many memories of the two men—of Peter Thomson, justly renowned for a bearing as fine as his golf, and of the modest, charming Shepperson—but of the champion’s golf I shall recall nothing but the immortal words of Leonard Crawley in last Monday’s Daily Telegraph:
“Though Peter Thomson was assisted five times by Ian Fleming, the champion had evidently spent much of his force at Leeds last week.”
Introducing Jamaica (Preface to Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica)
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica has now been my second home for eighteen years. Since 1946 I have been coming here, as regularly as clockwork, from January 15 to March 15 and, each year when the time comes to leave, I say my goodbye with a lump in the throat. In this long span of time everything has changed and yet nothing. Jamaica has grown from a child into an adult, she has flirted with Federation and then broken off the engagement, she has gained her Independence and Membership of the United Nations, bauxite and tourism have changed her economy, emigration to the United Kingdom, with all its problems, brings around £7,000,000 back into the island every year, the West Indian cricketers have become the darlings of the Commonwealth and a Jamaican girl has been chosen Miss World.
But the Doctor’s Wind continues to blow in from the sea during the day and the Undertaker’s Wind blows the stale air out again at night, and the news in The Daily Gleaner, the "Country Newsbits", is just the same. A family at Maggotty has been wiped out by "vomiting sickness" (the paper still will not add the medical diagnosis of "eating unripe ackee"), — and Cornelius Brown has "mashed" Agatha Brown with his cutlass and has been sentenced to prison and twelve strokes of the tamarind switch. And the people are just the same, always laughing and bawling each other out, singing the old banana songs as they load the fruit into the ships, getting drunk on rum when the ship has sailed, sneaking an illicit whiff of ganja, or an equally illicit visit to the obeahman when they are ill or in trouble, driving motor cars like lunatics, behaving like zanies at the cricket matches and the races, making the night hideous with the "Sound System" on pay night, and all the while moving gracefully and lazily through the day and fearing the "rolling calf" at night.
And yet, against this background of "plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose" my own life has been turned upside down at, or perhaps even by, the small house named ‘Goldeneye’ I built eighteen years ago on the north shore, and by my life in Jamaica. In 1952, I got married here, in the Registry Office in my neighbouring Port Maria. Noel Coward and his secretary Cole Leslie were the witnesses and Noel tied the shoe on to the back of his own car by mistake.
Encouraged by marriage, or as an antidote to this dangerous transmogrification after forty-three years of bachelorhood, I sat down at the red bullet-wood desk where I am now typing this, and, for better or for worse, wrote the first of twelve best-selling thrillers that have sold around twenty million copies and been translated into twenty-three languages. I wrote every one of them at this desk with the jalousies closed around me so that I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint. (I have interrupted my sticky thirteenth to write these words.)
The books feature a man called James Bond. Here is another Jamaican link. I was looking for a name for my hero — nothing like Peregrine Carruthers or "Standfast" Maltravers — and I found it, on the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic. (Only a couple of weeks ago, I met him, the real James Bond, and Mrs Bond, for the first time. They arrived out of the blue and couldn't have been nicer about my theft of the family name. It helped at the customs, they said!) Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it. Noel Coward has written much of his later music and prose here and other still more famous writers, let alone painters, have been stimulated by Jamaica. I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here. There is certainly enough native talent to support the theory.
And my life has been changed in other ways. I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property and that has added a new dimension to my view of the world. And, a vital postgraduate study, I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people — two very different lessons I would never have absorbed if my life had continued in its pre-Jamaican metropolitan rut. But, above all, Jamaica has provided a wonderful annual escape from the cold and grime of winters in England, into blazing sunshine, natural beauty and the most healthy life I could wish to live.
My house, Goldeneye, has also lived through many changes. The thirty or so acres in which it stands were a barren donkey’s racecourse when I built it. Now the land is a jungle of tall trees and tropical shrubs and we could live on my citrus and coconuts and the fish from the sea. Couples have spent their honeymoons here, stricken friends have regained their health, painters and writers — Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, Lucian Freud, Graham Greene, Robert Harling, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rosamund Lehmann, Peter Quennell, Alan Ross, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh — have stayed and worked here, and a British Prime Minister and his wife, Sir Anthony and Lady Eden, were here for three weeks during his convalescence in the winter of 1956, after Suez. (The Jamaican Government turned my little gazebo on the western corner of the property into a direct teleprinter link with Number 10 Downing Street. The police guards cut ‘God Bless Sir Anthony and Lady Eden’ into the bark of my cedar trees. The detective, sleeping in the back room, shot at the bush rats, beloved by my wife, with his revolver, but the two trees, of a species still wrapped in mystery, which the Edens planted, have flourished mightily.)
But this is name-dropping. Why should this modest house, with wooden jalousies and no glass in the windows, with three bedrooms with shower baths and lavatories that often hiss like vipers or ullulate like stricken bloodhounds, with its modest staff of local help, headed by Violet, my incomparable housekeeper for all these years, have attracted all these famous people to its meagre bosom come rain (which can often fall, as it does in all corners of the world) or shine which it always will in my memory? Noel Coward provides a comment. He is given to hyperbole. In 1948, from March 22 to May 31, he stayed at Goldeneye, at, he claims, an exorbitant rent. He wrote in the visitor's book, and foolishly signed them, the following words: "The happiest two months I have ever spent." He then went off and, as close to me as he could get, built a house (what am I saying? four houses) and — to hell with the charms of Bermuda and Switzerland! — comes here every year. But, before he left Goldeneye, he wrote the ode which I now reprint, not for its merit, which is small, but purely to fill up space.
NOEL COWARD MEMORIAL ODE
Alas! I cannot adequately praise
The dignity, the virtue and the grace
Of this most virile and imposing place
Wherein I passed so many airless days.
Alas! Were I to write ’till crack of doom
No typewriter, no pencil, nib, nor quill
Could ever recapitulate the chill
And arid vastness of the living-room.
Alas! I cannot accurately find
Words to express the hardness of the seat
Which, when I cheerfully sat down to eat
Seared with such cunning into my behind.
Alas! However much I raved and roared
No rhetoric, no witty diatribe
Could ever, even partially, describe
The impact of the spare-room bed — and board.
Alas! I am not someone who exclaims
With rapture over ancient equine prints.
Ah no, dear Ian, I can only wince
At all those horses framed in all those frames.
Alas! My sensitivity rebels,
Not at loose shutters; not at plagues of ants,
Nor other "sub-let" bludgeonings of chance
But, at those hordes of ageing faded shells.
Alas! If only common-sense could teach
The stubborn heart to heed the crafty brain
You would, before you let your house again
Remove the barracudas from the beach.
But still my dear Commander, I admit,
No matter how I criticize and grouse,
That I was strangely happy in your house
In fact I’m very very fond of it.
Signed "Noel", February 1949
(Note that it took the man nine months to dream up this insulting doggerel!)
Well, I am still devoted to the monster (misprint for "Master") and the rivalry between our houses (he refers to mine as "Goldeneye, Nose and Throat") has continued all these fifteen years (he wanted to build a swimming bath — his beach is lousy — and asked his "attorney" what strength of pump he would need to keep the water clean. The attorney replied "Hit depend, Mister Cowhard, how much soap you use"). But the point is clear. It is not the rude comforts of my house that appeal nor, I think, entirely my wife, who is as honey to a hummingbird. It is the friendly embrace of Jamaica and of the Jamaican way of life, and the fact, as the advertisements put it, that Jamaica is no place like home. To illustrate what the country is made of and what it has to offer, and as an hors d’oeuvre to the more nourishing fare that follows, I will reprint here my very first impressions of Jamaica, a mood piece which I wrote for Cyril Connolly’s famous Horizon magazine in December, 1947, and specifically for the lively series, entitled "Where Shall John Go?" which was aimed at readers who wished to flee the drabness of postwar Britain. I have made a very few alterations in the light of my experience of Jamaica since it was first written. But these few alterations are only of facts; the mood remains unaltered.
Well, there you are — the great part of the first article I ever wrote, the writing of which perhaps gave me confidence one day to write a book. There is little that I would alter today. Many facts have dated. The mosquitoes have been almost entirely eradicated, the political background has changed, although those perennial duellists, Sir Alexander Bustamente and Mr Norman Manley, are still at it, and the University has been built, but I would alter nothing of the "mood" of the piece except to add the caveat that some of the many new hotels charge exorbitantly and that shrimp cocktails and steak have followed the almighty dollar into the island.
To write any more would be only to repeat myself and to hold you from the wonderful team of Jamaican writers whom my friend Morris Cargill has assembled to make this the first comprehensive book ever to have been written on Jamaica.
Ian Fleming
Goldeneye
February 1964
As you can see from the date, this one of Fleming's last writings--probably his second to last. For greater context, make sure to read the invaluable Goldeneye. Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica, by Matthew Parker.
The Case of the Painfully Pulled Leg (San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1963)
By Ian Fleming
Some Caen. Some Caen’t.
No harm in starting off with a really bad joke. Master, or rather Past-master Caen has several times exercised his lamentable sense of humor at my and James Bond’s expense and I am glad of this opportunity to strike back.
But a valid truism lies behind the execrable pun. To the uninitiated, it looks easy enough to be a columnist. What could be more simple than to sit down at the typewriter and ramble on about the passing scene—the human comedy?
After all, Boswell was no genius. He just wrote down what he saw and what he thought—commonplace stuff. He was no Shakespeare, no Shelley—a competent reporter with ink in his veins.
Ah, but that's the point! You must have ink in your veins. You really must love writing and communicating in order to sit down and write around 1000 words a day in such a fashion that people will read them. And that is what a daily columnist has to do.
Every day, come hangover, come flu, come lack of inspiration, come ailing wife or bawling children, he must go confidently and with seeming omniscience on stage and show himself to the public in naked black and white.
No excuses! You are a columnist, and by God you’ve got to fill your column to the satisfaction of your readers and, though this may be rare, to your own.
I know these things because I once wrote a column myself. I did it for three years and chucked it about five years ago when James Bond came to my rescue.
I was Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times (the real one. Not yours!) and I thought that its gossip column, which went, and still goes, by the pompous name of “Atticus,” was so bad that I would have a bash at it in between coping with the future of the world and the marital tangles of my foreign correspondents.
I renamed the column “People and Things” by Atticus, because I am interested in Things, and got into business. It went down all right, though I received more kicks than ha’pence from an editor whose sense of humor differed from mine, and the from readers who appeared only interested in writing in when I made a mistake, and to this day I am proud of two paragraphs of undying merit from that long stint.
The first, through a careful study of the psychology of the drinking American, correctly forecast the winning Miss Rheingold for that year (You see how right the editor was. Perhaps .007 per cent of Sunday Times readers had even heard of Rheingold beer).
The second, revealing the existence of a Grimsby troglodyte who smoked kippers as they should be smoked, brought in 4,700 letters (A record for the paper) and incidentally made a fortune for the old man.
Is there a common denominator between my modest achievement and Herb
Caen’s majestic record? What’s all this about Fleming anyway? We want to hear about Herb. Patience! Pazienza! Geduld!
Yes, there is a common denominator. Every columnist, and Herb Caen is a shining example, must be interested in everything, even in those matters which are outside his readers’ ken, and he must communicate his enthusiasms to the reader, and secondly, he must have some vague social purpose—a desire to help and instruct his readers and if possible right an occasional wrong (rescue the kipper merchant for instance).
But above all, whether exposing a peccant mayor or police chief (a favorite sport in the United States, I believe) or just writing about the smog, he must at all costs avoid being a bore.
For half a generation, and from the evidence of this anniversary accolade, Herb Caen, writing for perhaps the most wide-awake community in the United States, somehow has managed, day in, day out, to avoid being a bore. For what it is worth, we have not, in Great Britain, got one journalist with anything like the same record.
And, in conclusion, I will tell you something else which is even more to his credit, and something which may be news to you. Some time ago, amongst my cuttings (clippings), I received a column by Herb Caen which affectionately but devastatingly sent up James Bond, pulling the author's leg almost out of its socket.
A saboteur in the pay of SMERSH, I surmised, and tucked the author's name away in my “unfinished business” file.
When next in New York, I asked one of the hamlet’s most famous editors about this fellow Caen.
“He's one of America’s greatest columnists,” he said. “We’d all like to get him. Trouble is, nothing on earth will drag him away from San Francisco.”
Well, feed your captive well. He’s good for another 25 years at the coal face. Note: Caen actually spent 34 more years at the coal face, before his death in 1997. He was one of Fleming's early American fans and helped popularize the books in his column from January 28, 1962, titled "The Thin Cruel Smile."
Well, you can imagine how excited I got recently when I read that President Kennedy’s favorite author of secret service thrillers is Britain’s Ian Fleming. In the twinkling of a trice, I felt closer to the lonely young man in the White House—perhaps even a step along the road toward solving the mystery of those hooded, opaque eyes (Mr. Fleming writes like that)...
Mr. Fleming, whose books sell in the millions, is the creator of James Bond, the classiest British secret service agent ever to purr down the pike in a Bentley convertible with two inch exhausts. Bond's exploits and sexploits are explored (all right, and sexplored!) in a series of adventures with such compelling titles as Moonraker, Goldfinger, Doctor No and From Russia, With Love, to name only a few...
Mr. Fleming is a Mickey Spillane who went to Eton—snobbish, sadistic and inventive, with a fine eye for detail. Hence his James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead in anything so obvious as a trenchcoat; when Bond is caught dying (but soon to make a miraculous recovery), you can be sure he will be wearing something from Savile Row, tastefully old.
After this article, Caen and Fleming met in London. Their lunch was immortalized in Caen's May 16, 1963 column "Conversation at Scott's." Excerpts below:
“Do you know any good villains?” he inquired, flicking an ash off his blue suit (no pocket handkerchief). “Villains are the hardest for me. I was rather fond of Rosa Klebb, but, of course, I had to kill her off. Same with ‘Doctor No.’” I mentioned Blofeld, the evil fellow with the syphilitic nose who almost finishes Bond in his newest book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but Mr. Fleming merely shook his head over his lamb chops (pink in the middle).
“I kill off Blofeld in the next book, which I just finished,” he said regretfully. “An excruciating death. And as for Bond, I’ve got him in such a devil of a pickle I don’t know how I’m EVER going to get him out. Poor James.”
In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the dashing Bond, who averages three affairs and an equal number of killings per book, marries a fine girl named Tracy. As they are starting out on their honeymoon in a white Lancia, the unspeakable Blofeld, in a red Maserati, races past and fires at them. At the end of the book, the Lancia has crashed into a field, “and Bond put his arm around her shoulders, across which the dark patches had begun to flower.”
“I hate to ask this,” I said, mindful of previous miraculous recoveries, “but is Tracy REALLY dead?”
Mr. Fleming poured himself a splash of vin ordinaire from a carafe and nodded sorrowfully. “Of course,” he replied. “Blood oozing out the back—sure sign. Too bad, but I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.”
He glanced at the stainless steel Rolex on his left wrist. “Really must go,” he apologized. “Catching a plane for Istanbul, where they’re filming From Russia, With Love. The first picture made from one of my books—Dr. No—has just been released here. Tremendous success. Made all its costs back right away, and I’m happy to say I have a small piece of the action. Sean Connery will play James Bond again—don’t you think he’s a fine Bond?”
We agreed. We had seen a preview of Dr. No, and Connery seemed almost as good as the real thing. Mr. Fleming struggled into a luminous blue raincoat and led the way out of Scott’s into the gray London afternoon. As we searched for a cab, he pointed to a second-story corner window of the restaurant. “See that window?” he asked. When James is in London he always lunches there, at the corner table. That’s so he can look down and watch the pretty girls walking past.”
Caen later devoted an entire column to Fleming's death. In "Farewell to Double Nought Seven" (August 16, 1964), he wrote:
I saw Ian Fleming for the first and last time in London, a little over a year ago. His penultimate book, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was about to be published and the word was already around that in it, James Bond, the avowed bachelor, had married La Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo, otherwise known as Tracy. “That's true,” smiled Fleming over lunch at Scott’s, “but of course I had to kill her off at the end. Nasty death, on their honeymoon. It wouldn't do at all for James to be married, you understand—a wife would just be in the way. I may have to kill off Bond one of these days, too—before he kills me. Plots are getting harder and harder to come up with.”
...I didn't realize how closely he identified with Bond till we got around to a discussion of the movie versions of his books (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and next, Goldfinger). When we agreed that the actor who portrayed M., Bond's chief, was miscast, I suggested “You should play M.—you're about the same age, aren't you?”
Immediately, he looked hurt, and I clammed up. Obviously, he felt he had nothing in common with the aging sea dog who headed the British Secret Service. He gave me a long, cold, ironical look that would have done justice to James Bond.
...Spy critics poked fun at Bond's modus operandi...They snickered at Fleming’s penchant for ticking off Bond’s clothing, smoking and drinking habits by brand name, never letting him forget that he misspelled Bond's favorite champagne...Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don't they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults...it’s hard to fault a writer who could invent such lovely names as Pussy Galore, Tiffany Case, Sable Basilisk and Emilio Largo. And when James slipped into his faultless evening clothes, patted the .25 Beretta in its chamois holster, filled his gun metal cigarette case with 50 Morlands and got behind the wheel of his Mark II Continental Bentley, with the two-inch pipes bubbling in his wake, we knew we were off to high adventure. For James Bond was licensed to kill. And last week, he killed the man who loved him best—and, in the process, himself. If he were still around, he would have read the news with a cold, ironical smile, creasing the vertical scar in his right cheek.
Caen also wrote about the San Francisco world premiere of A View to a Kill, which he hated: "With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Mayor and the police and fire departments, San Francisco is made to look like a loony-bin in the newest and possibly last James Bond film, A View to a Kill, an awkward movie with an awkward title. As I recall, author Ian Fleming’s original title for the flimsy short story on which this $30-million bombo is shakily based was With a View to a Kill [sic], which scans a little more smoothly. It wasn't Fleming at his best but the movie it inspired may be James Bondage at its worst."
Have you murdered anyone lately? All right. How do you know you haven’t?
Watching the Halford-Hewitt Tournament the other day, I remembered my first visit to Deal twenty-five years ago and the murder, or at least culpable homicide, in which I participated.
My accomplices and I, tenderloins in golf and life, stood on the first tee. Halfway down the fairway, moving slowly and hitting the ball erratically, were two elderly gentlemen. One of the caddies said: “You’ll never get through them. That’s Captain Smith and Colonel Jones. They never let anyone through.”
For five holes, despite first courteous requests, then unheeded shouts of “Fore!” and finally mild bombardment, we could only creep forward like angry snails. Finally, at No. 6, Colonel Jones sliced into the shingle and there they both were, scrabbling for their one sphere amidst a million others—but still not waving us through. We played that hole as if it was a fast hockey match, calling sarcastic “Thank you, sirs” as we sprinted past.
When, later, we came out from luncheon for our second round, we expressed the fervent hope that we would not find the Colonel and the Captain ahead of us again.
“No, you won’t that,” said my caddie.
“Why not?”
“Colonel Jones is dead!”
“Good heavens, what happened?”
“He was that mad after this morning, sir, when he finished his round he got into his car and drove off like crazy. When he got to the sharp turn on to the esplanade he stamped on the accelerator by mistake for the brake and went over into the sea.”
As certainly as if with a gun, we had slain Colonel Jones.
To be serious, people, just as unwittingly, are killing their neighbours every day all over the world—by an act of bad driving, after which, perhaps far behind, there is the distant crash of a collision; by blowing germs into people’s faces; by bathing and mountain-climbing “accidents” for which, however remotely, they were the indirect cause. And then there is the slow homicide, by cruelty, neglect, hate, lack of charity.
To go back to the beginning, how do you know you haven’t?
True and Blue
I have no connection with the company (except, that is, for using their products for the past thirty years) so I can’t be accused of payola if I reveal that Gillettes have a splendid new razor blade—the Extra-Blue—coming on the market in a few days’ time. Indeed I almost severed relations with them recently when I found them responsible for squandering some of my small stock of virtue.
All those years, after shaving, I had meticulously washed my razor and carefully cleaned the blade, sneering at the unkempt razors in other people’s bathrooms. Not long ago, I began frequently to cut myself shaving. Reluctantly, because I hate the noise they make, I consulted my chemist about electric razors. He asked me if I had recently changed houses—as in fact I had—and suggested that probably the water in the new house was much harder than in my old. (This turned out to be the solution.) He also asked suspiciously if I cleaned the razor blade after use.
“Of course,” I said proudly.
“Well, you shouldn’t. You blunt the blade. You should just rinse the razor under the tap.”
I was, and still am, aghast at the oceans of virtuous diligence I have wasted because this vital piece of intelligence (confirmed by Gillettes) was excluded from my education. A few printed words by the bewhiskered patriarch on those packets would have saved me thirty years of doing dutifully, laboriously, the right thing—and being utterly wrong!
No Medals
A murrain on the Governor and Company of the Bank of England for slaughtering our pound notes—and so soon after slaying our beautiful fivers. A murrain also on the Big Five, to whom I understand the new design was submitted, and a murrain re-doubled on the Treasury, who lord it over the Bank when it suits them but now publicly disown responsibility for the Bank’s vandalism.
I personally believe that it is nothing but an act of self-aggrandisement by the Bank of England. Not only has she given herself a type several points larger, but she has managed to get her own name on the new notes something like 300 times instead of only twice on the old bit of lettuce.
Only two aspects of the new design commend themselves—the smaller size of the note, slightly more commensurate with its purchasing power, and the “how-dare-you!” expression on the face of Her Majesty the Queen.
Scrambled Ego
I write thrillers whose “hero” is a secret agent called James Bond. Not long ago I was invited to play golf for an Old Etonian side against the school. My young opponent was called Ian Bond. Amused by the coincidence, I asked him if he had ever heard of a man called James Bond. “Oh yes,” he said politely. “That's my uncle. He lives in Essex.”
The Fourth of June. By David Benedictus. (Blond. 18s.)
I don’t think the old music-hall gag is inappropriate. In this brilliant first novel Mr Benedictus has swallowed his public school life and regurgitated it because some of its bones stuck in his throat.
It was inevitable that before long we should have an angry young Old Etonian, and Etonians, wincing as they will beneath the author’s lash, will at least admit that the cane is being wielded by a supremely talented hand.
Perhaps The Fourth of June should have been reviewed by one of the author's own generation. The last book on Eton I read, apart from the scintillating fragments by Connolly and Orwell, was One of Us, a romantic novel in verse by Gilbert Frankau, some thirty years ago. To older generations of Etonians, Mr Benedictus’s bubbling, steaming brew of adolescent life, peppered with the á la mode four-letter words, will be almost unrecognisable. But only almost, because beneath the author’s vicious brush-strokes the ancient brickwork, the remembered totems and taboos come through, often with exquisite brilliance.
Briefly, the story is of Scarfe, a grammar-school boy bent and finally broken by the snobbery, sadism and sexuality (hetero-, homo-, and auto-) which, in the Benedictan view, are the devils in the machine of an Eton education, and this theme, for a man with as sharp a pen as the author’s, is, of course, a natural.
Knowing nothing of the strains and stresses suffered by the modern Scarfes beneath the weight of Eton and its customs, it is difficult for an older Etonian not to argue that in his day the psychologically halt and lame boys also went to the wall, and he might complain, I think legitimately, that the author has outstripped the bounds of truth in laying Scarfe’s downfall to the three S’s mentioned above.
I cannot, for instance, swallow the Bishop with his militant religiosity combined with voyeurism. I do not believe in the sadism of Defries, Captain of the House, in the strangulation of the hero’s pet bird, nor in the pusillanimity and downright venality of the housemaster and the headmaster (in a foreword Mr Benedictus makes plain what is obviously true, that none of his characters have any relation to any living person) when faced with blackmail by a boy’s mother who finally pays off the housemaster with her body.
These, and many other incidents, however brilliantly described—an elder boy who hires out his younger brother is a sharp and disagreeable case in point—are sheer caricature, and to give poor Scarfe festering wounds which sent him to the sanatorium after being tanned by the Captain of the House as a punishment for a breach of the rules, which both culprits could have explained, is, to this former target of cane and birch, incredible.
And was it really necessary to be so much involved in the angry swim as to need to direct a harsh side-kick at Royalty?
But these are criticisms of a reader who was fascinated by one of the most brilliant first novels since the war, written with rapier wit, acute observation and a perceptive eye for each of the lesser characters. The style is sharp and professional (though Mr Benedictus will kindly write out “éminences grises”—page 21—a hundred times) and the whole devastating package is embellished by the Jacket of the Year.
We shall hear more of Mr. Benedictus, so I informed myself about him. He is 23, the son of the managing director of a famous London store, and he was Captain of his House at Eton. Then came Balliol and the State University of Iowa to learn play-writing . He is now with the B.B.C.
Which of these institutions will bend next to the harsh block?
The reason Ian Fleming reviewed this novel apparently was its "Jacket of the Year," by none other than Richard Chopping, Fleming's favorite book cover artist:
My crude guess is that Chopping asked Fleming to review The Fourth of June as a favor, and though Fleming hated the novel's portrait of Eton and said so, he sweetened his review with some blurbable praise ("one of the most brilliant first novels since the war").
Interested potential readers should be informed that the most recent reprint of the book dispenses with Chopping's cover. Speaking only for myself, I've never been crazy about Chopping's trompe-l'œil book covers, even for the Bond novels.
I have various qualifications for writing an introduction to this series of distinguished and highly entertaining essays.
First of all, I invented the idea of the series when, a couple of years ago, I was still a member of the Editorial Board of the London Sunday Times. This Board meets every Tuesday to comment on the issue of the previous Sunday, discuss the plans for the next issue and put forward longer-term projects.
It is quite a small Board of seven or eight heads of departments—I was Foreign Manager at the time—together with the Editor and the Proprietor, Mr. Roy Thomson, and we are all good friends, though at this weekly meeting, beneath the surface of our friendliness, lurk all the deadly sins with the exception of gluttony and lust. Each one of us has pride in our department of the paper; many of us are covetous of the editorial chair; most are envious of the bright ideas put forward by others; anger comes to the surface at what we regard as unmerited criticism, and sloth, certainly in my case, lurks in the wings.
The same pattern is probably followed at all executive meetings in all branches of business. When someone else puts up a bright idea, however useful or profitable it may be to the business concerned, traces at least of Envy, Anger and Covetousness will be roused in his colleagues. Yet, on the occasion when I put forward this particular "bright" idea for the future, I seem to remember nothing but approbation and a genial nodding of heads.
The project was outside my own sphere of action on the paper and I heard nothing more of it until I had left the Sunday Times to concentrate on writing thrillers centered round a member of the British Secret Service called James Bond. So I cannot describe what troubles the Literary Editor ran into in his endeavours to marry the Seven Deadly Sins to seven appropriate authors. So far as I can recall, the marriages I myself had suggested were closely followed, except that I had suggested Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge to write on the theme of Anger on the grounds that he is such an extremely angry man. In the event, as you will see, Mr W.H. Auden was the brilliant choice.
My next claim to introduce these essays was my suggestion to Mr. Lawrence Hughes, a friend of mine and a Director of William Morrow & Co., that he should publish them in a book. Usually when one makes brilliant suggestions to a publisher, a dull glaze comes-over his eyes and nothing happens. But in this case Larry Hughes was enthusiastic and, despite all kinds of copyright problems, energetically pursued my suggestion and gathered these seven famous English authors together between hard covers—no mean feat if you know anything about copyright and literary agents.
So you might think I could justifiably allow myself a modest indulgence in the deadly sin of Pride. You would be mistaken. I have read and re-read these essays with pleasure and profit, but their moral impact upon me has been uncomfortable. To be precise and truthful, the critical examination of these famous sins by some of the keenest brains of today has led me to the dreadful conclusion that in fact all these ancient sins, compared with the sins of today, are in fact very close to virtues.
To run through the list. I have always admired the Pride of Dame Edith Sitwell, the pride which, with her proudful brothers, has carried this remarkable literary family through battles of opinion and taste reaching back to my youth.
The Covetousness of Cyril Connolly, which he takes off so brilliantly in his piece of fiction, is one of his most endearing qualities and he would be a smaller and less interesting man without it.
The Gluttony for life, food, drink and women of Patrick Leigh-Fermor are the essence of his tremendous zest for everything. Lust? If Christopher Sykes is lustful, may he, and I for the matter of that, long remain so.
Envy has its ugly sides, but if I, as a second son amongst four, had not been envious of my older brother and his achievements I would not have wished all my life to try and emulate him. As for Anger, surely we all need more rather than less of it to combat the indifference, the "I'm all right, Jack" attitudes, of today.
Of all the seven, only Sloth in its extreme form of accidia, which is a form of spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy, so brilliantly examined by Evelyn Waugh, has my wholehearted condemnation, perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its face.
How drab and empty life would be without these sins, and what dull dogs we all would be without a healthy trace of many of them in our make up! And has not the depiction of these sins and their consequences been the yeast in most great fiction and drama? Could Shakespeare, Voltaire, Balzac, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy have written their masterpieces if humanity had been innocent of these sins? It is almost as if Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt and Van Gogh had been required to paint without using the primary colours.
The truth, of course, is that generally speaking these Seven Deadly Sins were enumerated by monks for monks, and one can easily see how mischievous and harmful they could be within a monastery.
We do not live in a monastery, but in a great pulsating ant heap, and this brings me back to the moral confusion into which I have been thrown by these essays and which amounts to feeling that there are other and deadlier sins which I would like to see examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this.
I have made a list of these Seven Deadlier Sins which every reader will no doubt wish to amend, and these are my seven: Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy, Self-righteousness, Moral Cowardice and Malice. If I were to put these modern seven into the scales against the ancient seven I cannot but feel that the weight of the former would bring the brass tray crashing down.
But is this loose thinking? Could it perhaps be argued that if we are free of the ancient seven we shall not fall victim to their modern progeny? I personally do not think so, but it would need better brains than mine and a keener sense of theological morality than I possess to pursue the argument. As a man in the street, I can only express my belief that being possessed of the ancient seven deadly sins one can still go to heaven, whereas to be afflicted by the modern variations can only be a passport to hell.
And by the same token, what about the Seven Deadly Virtues?
What about the anal-eroticism which the psychologists tell us lies at the base of Frugality? How much is Charity worth when it springs from self-interest? Is political acumen a virtue as practised by the Communists? What hell Sociability can be! Where is the line to be drawn between Deference and, not to use a more vulgar, hyphenated word, Sycophancy? Neatness in excess becomes pathological, so does Cleanliness. How often is Chastity a cloak for frigidity?
But I have held you for too long from these wonderful, and each in its different way exciting, essays and I must at all costs avoid that deadliest of all sins, ancient or modern, a sin which is surely more durable than any of those I have enumerated—that of being a Bore.
Fleming hoped his Seven Deadlier sins would be "examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this." 57 years later he got his wish...sort of.
At my suggestion, the website Artistic Licence Renewed has run a series of article on Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins, to examine how they apply to the Bond books and whether Fleming or Bond were guilty of them. It would have been impossible to assemble "authors of equal calibre" (especially since I was part of the new team), but the results are a worthy examples of literary criticism, in my obviously biased view.
The last three sins were written by me. I had originally intended to write only "Malice," but had to pinch-hit after some authors became unable to work on the project. "Snobbery" was began by the editor of Artistic Licence Renewed, who deserves co-credit but is too modest to give it to himself.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about the Fleming's Deadlier Sins. If you think we've missed any examples of them, please say so!
Introduction (to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards, 1963)
By Ian Fleming
An essential item in my ‘Desert Island’ library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me each Friday by a well-trained albatross. If forced to produce some reason for my affection for the journal, I would lamely say that I am nearly always interested by its front page article, by the letters, although there are not enough of them, and, being myself a book collector, by its back page of bibliophily. But, less lamely, I would praise the anonymity of its writers and reviewers which surely lies at the root of the unshackled verdicts that are, sometimes to the point of splendidly savage denunciation, to be found in the T.L.S.
Not long ago I was flying over the Nevada Desert on my way from Los Angeles to Chicago. It was one leg of a lunatic journey round the world in thirty days writing about its thrilling cities for the Sunday Times. My mail had caught up with me at Los Angeles and it included two issues of The Times Literary Supplement. In contrast with the mushy infant food of the American newspapers and magazines that had been my daily fare since arriving in America, I cannot describe the thrill of excitement with which I read a particularly devastating review of Miss Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed: I remember that the slashing broadside made me almost lightheaded with pleasure.
All this is to explain the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book which would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April 14th, 1961, and some of which, by permission, I now reprint.
OUT OF PRINT
It is cheering when a book of real quality seems to break through a barrier of indifference and bad luck. Ten years ago Mr. Christopher Burney wrote a short work called Solitary Confinement which is one of the classics both of the last war and of that long process of imprisonment, brutality and sudden death in which the war itself was only one extra acute and well publicized stage. The publisher went out of business, the book out of print. The public soon forgot it in favour of the simpler and more immediate, but also more trivial jottings of Anne Frank. Yesterday it was reissued in a new edition by another publisher (Macmillan, 173 pp., 13s. 6d.), and here it is once more...
But how often are books raised from the dead in this way? Nowadays a work of fiction or autobiography or any other non-specialized, non-utilitarian type of literature has only a short time in which to sell or die—sometimes as little as three months. Less than ever, it seems, can publishers afford to keep unprofitable works in print, and in the restless search for new titles it is most uncommon for a publisher, as here, to turn to a more or less unsuccessful work of the past. Why the backward look should be so short-sighted it is difficult to say…Probably everyone has his own mental list of similarly neglected works which he is always pressing on his friends. What happens then? He lends his out-of-print copy; somehow it disappears; he cannot replace it; and within a few months he too has half forgotten what the book was like.
And yet it may be that a book of this kind has merely been published before its time. To take an example from across the page, the English translation of Brecht’s Threepenny Novel was being remaindered in 1939; today it is published by Penguins as a modern foreign classic. Similarly Mr. Beckett’s Murphy, one of a remarkable batch of novels issued by Routledge in the 1930s, quickly dropped into the same limbo, where only word of mouth kept a few worn copies in circulation…
Does this then mean that merit will win through in the end ? It is not at all certain that it will, and for every sleeping beauty that is awakened by a publisher’s kiss there are others that slumber on. Admittedly kisses of this sort are not encouraged by the fact that reprints are so seldom reviewed. But it is a pity if every generation in turn has to treat the more difficult and original works of the past as undiscovered territory. We stagnate if we do not absorb them into our literature and evaluate them; we waste time and energy repeating the same experiments only to arrive, twenty or thirty years too late, at much the same point…
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among ‘lost’ books, this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it—if I would write an introduction. I will not discuss here my mixed reactions to this suggestion, but one thing was clear the rebirth of this book now lay, rightly or wrongly, with me. I had only to say "Fly again, little bird", and it would fly. So, of course, I accepted and asked Capes for any material they had about the book and the author. The result was extremely meagre, but among the yellowing scraps, mostly ecstatic reviews, there was one treasure—an introduction by James Agate to the author’s next book Helen Between Cupids. I cannot remember much of this or any other of Hugh Edwards’s books, but what Agate has to say about All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is so apt to the theme of what I now write that, risking the criticism that all my words are other people’s, I must repeat here some of what Mr. Agate had to say twenty-five years ago.
I am not going to pretend that Mr. Hugh Edwards’s All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is the one good story which the readers of today have missed; I can think of half a dozen in the last three or four years over which public apathy began to silt even on the morning of publication. But I also know that on the day when Mr. Stanyhurst appeared we, meaning the Daily Express and me, came out pretty strong. We said: "The word 'masterpiece; is over-used, and one is wise to be shy of it. But I will maintain that here is probably a little masterpiece and certainly a tour de force. So far as my reading goes, it is the best long story or short novel since Conrad."
I did more than review Mr. Edwards's book; I even went to the length of buying a copy or two and sending them to friends. Taking advantage of the fact that I was in communication about something else, I sent a copy to Mr. Max Beerbohm, although I have never set eyes on him. I wrote: "It has been on my mind for some time that I have never answered your last critical and appreciative letter. To repair this I have sent you a novel published this week which has delighted me greatly. I do not know anybody except you who could have written it, and very few other people who are entitled to read it. I know nothing of the author except that he writes and writes and writes. There is no arrière pensée behind this gift except the desire to while away one of your evenings." Max—who has no superior in the art of living, and this includes refraining from unnecessary correspondence—made no allusion to the book for another eighteen months, when, taking advantage of the fact that he was in communication with me about something else, he said he had read it twice, on each occasion with the liveliest pleasure. And surely if agreement is reached by two doctors of letters as dissimilar as the exquisite Max and the burly me, it can matter little who differs? But that’s the whole point! I shouldn’t mind if people differed. What I do mind is that they just don’t take any notice.
The rest of the introduction to Helen need not concern us. Suffice it to say that, despite rave reviews when All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s was first published in 1933, and despite Mr. Agate's powerful reminder in 1935, it took more than four years for the modest edition of fifteen hundred to be sold. The author earned £31.3s. and the publisher barely covered his costs, having rashly spent over £50 on advertising.
In 1937 the book was reset and republished in the "New Library" edition at 2s. 6d. (Edwards was in good company here. "The New Library" included Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and O’Flaherty’s The Informer) and this edition of a further three thousand sold out in seven years, earning £43.17s.9d. for the author. Edwards’s total reward for his "little masterpiece" thus amounted to just under £7 a year over eleven years, to which was later to be added a modest windfall of ten guineas when the little book was published in a Services paperback edition by Guild Books in 1943...
Hugh Edwards died in 1952 at the age of 74. At first I could find out nothing about him except, from his elderly sister, the widow of an Admiral, the following bare bones. He was born in Gibraltar in 1878 of a Naval family, was educated privately and then at Sandhurst whence he joined the West India Regiment and saw service mostly in the West Indies and West Africa. After twelve years in the army, he was invalided out and retired to his sister’s cottage in East Prawle in Devon. A forlorn attempt to render service in the First World War resulted only in a brief spell as an officer of the garrison of Cork. His health proved quite unequal to military duty and he returned to seclusion.
Encouraged by the success of former contributions to his regimental magazine (for which, incidentally, he had designed the cover) he had set about writing professionally, but it was some twenty years before Capes accepted his first novel, Sangoree. This was followed by the present book, then by Crack of Doom (Jonathan Cape, 1934), Helen Between Cupids (Jonathan Cape, 1935), and Macaroni (Geoffrey Bles, 1938). After that, silence! Hobbies: painting, polo, bridge and chess.
With these scraps of biography my researches had come to a full stop when, by chance, Commander and Mrs. E. J. King-Bull heard of my interest in Edwards and swam into my ken.
Commander E. J. King-Bull (who is, incidentally, a descendant of the character said to be the original ‘John Bull’ of old England) is a well-known writer and producer for the B.B.C. and has, with his wife, close connections with members of the Edwards family, notably the Leonards who, as children, sat at the feet of Hugh Edwards and listened to their uncle’s stories.
King-Bull was a great admirer of Edwards and, enjoying All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s as much as I do, turned the book into a radio play and persuaded the B.B.C. to allow him to produce it in the Third Programme in 1950. The play was conceived as a tribute not only to the memory of Hugh Edwards but also to the memory of King-Bull’s friend, the late Captain R. F. Leonard, D.S.C., R.N., from whom King-Bull had heard so much about Edwards. The play was a tremendous success, and was broadcast four times.
From what King-Bull told me it is clear that a whole book could be written about Hugh Edwards, but I have insufficient space here to do more than mortar together a few of the loose stones I have already put on display.
Having been at Sandhurst myself, and being thus able to imagine the regimental snobbery that must have permeated the place around about 1900, I was surprised that Edwards had joined the West India Regiment. But apparently about that time his parents lost most of their money and he had to accept a commission in an unfashionable regiment to protect his shallow purse. He was rewarded by seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendor—a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons— were to inspire all he wrote, culminating in the Kingston earthquake which features in his Crack of Doom. To Hugh Edwards the cataclysm may well have seemed to presage the vanishing of the only era in which he was to live any other than a kind of ghostly existence.
It was the custom in those days for one battalion of the regiment to alternate between the Caribbean and Sierra Leone, and it was while exploring the hinterland of Sierra Leone that Edwards contracted blackwater fever, as a result of which he was invalided out of the army with a meagre pension.
With this, and with his sister to keep house, he retired to the tiny fisherman's cottage in
East Prawle in which he lived the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books. It was at about this time that he inherited from a relative, who had been in his day a West Indian planter, a stack of old documents and diaries of the eighteenth century in which Edwards immersed himself to that extent of total rapport that emerges almost supernaturally in the story from which I am holding you.
It is interesting, perhaps, that he should have been stationed for a while at Cork, that fair Atlantic seaport which, in the heyday of eighteenth-century trade, had had long associations with the West Indies, and which forms part of the back-cloth to more than one of the novels.
At Prawle he lived the remote life of his imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of illustrated nonsense rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the holidays. One catches a glimpse of the man from the fact that, as I am told, he began the draft of an autobiography, never to see the light of day, by addressing in affectionate gallantry a bevy of his charming nieces and their friends.
In his Edwardian youth he had been, by all accounts, a young blade of tremendous dash and virility and with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for these things, and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the background of high life to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s are sentimental memories of the young rake-hell he had once been.
Perhaps also the poignancies of this story, which so pierce the heart, are in part tears shed for his brief youth. But these and other secrets of this strange and in some curious sense ghostly figure have gone to his grave with him and will, I fancy, never be disturbed.
I, at any rate, have come to the end of my brief researches into the story of the man who wrote All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s and it is now time for him to speak in his own strange and beautiful words.
Note: I read All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s several years ago and must confess that it didn't make much of an impression on me. But you can decide its merits for yourself, since the book is available for free online at the Internet Archive.
A Malignant Growth in the Fabric of Society (Sunday Times, June 7, 1964)
The Honoured Society by Norman Lewis (Collins 30s)
By Ian Fleming
The Mafia, the Chinese Tongs and the assassination Apparat of the Soviet K.G.B., great grandspawn of the TCHECKA, are the only deeply evil phantoms of the past that still haunt the world. I have left out America gangsterdorm, for all its many-sided horror, because it is a mere stripling in the sudden-and-slow-death markets and only gained its “official quotation” in this century (unless we count the rough house “Tweed Mob” of the 1870s which, I dare say, was pretty bad news in Keystone Cop days ). The others have been buying and selling murder almost since markets in other world commodities—wheat, bullion, insurance—organised themselves (for greater efficiency) into cooperative groups.
The secrets of the Mafia were bound to be cracked first. Its cohesion was, paradoxically, too tightly knit, its family ties too incestuously woven, its geographical boundaries, though it tried with some success to extend them to the United States, too confined. It had not got the vast backgrounds of China or Russia into which to disappear when the heat, momentarily, was on. The Mafia’s fate was in danger when it began eating itself, stealing its own funds, betraying itself. The phase will no doubt pass.
Norman Lewis is not writing the Mafia’s obituary, only an interim appendix to one secret chapter of contemporary history. “Cosa nostra”—that chummy password from the dripping shrubberies of some schoolboys’ gangland—will continue to be “Our Thing” so long as Sicily stays harsh and poor and its tough people bite back at the world like cornered hounds. But I admit that, in my life-time, I never expected a writer to tell me with quiet, unjournalistic authority what the Mafia is, how it operates, with names and dates, and what it has been up to since the war.
To give a synopsis of the book daunts me. The families, the politicians, local and national, the tortuous double role of the police—of everybody down to A.M.G.O.T. officials—cannot be summarised. Even the foursquare figure of Giuliano, the famous bandit, grows further sides—six, eight, ten—as you tread among the crosses and double-crosses of which he was now the architect and now the pawn. But what interested me as a writer of crime fiction was how in the name of heaven Norman Lewis was able to open this grim and closely guarded safe deposit and get away with the contents. And, since so many of the host who will read this book will ask the same question, here is what I have elicited from him and his publishers.
Norman Lewis served throughout the Hitler war in the Intelligence Corps in the Mediterranean area. He is bilingual in Italian and his first marriage was to a Sicilian from an aristocratic Palermo family who, as automatically as any Lampedusa character, was privy to the secrets of the Mafia. From this and other more secret sources he was able to proceed to the detective work which has occupied him for the past two years. It was then only a question of putting the story down in the exciting narrative style Norman Lewis’s many admirers are accustomed to, and one’s only disappointment is that he didn’t spend another year in America expanding on his over-brief references to the overseas, and particularly American, operations of the Mafia and the links between its empire and its Sicilian motherland.
As I have suggested earlier, Norman Lewis is not greatly impressed by the recent clean-up and the “exile” of Genco Russo. Many Mafiosi have put up the shutters or even pulled out, just as happened to the London gangs who rapidly dispersed into temporary retirement when the heat generated by the Great Mail Robbery was at its height. Unless marina falls from heaven on Sicily, it will be “business as usual” within a matter of months and every Sicilian will once again be in that business at least up to his elbows. Note: A week after this review's publication, Fleming wrote the following to his Sunday Times editor Leonard Russell:
"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."
Fleming's review was published little more than months before his death, which makes it the last article or literary work Fleming ever wrote. And so this thread comes to an end.
The end of the thread?!!?
Well hopefully you will find some more Fleming rarities in the future Revelator, and please post them here when you do.
I've sure been enjoying all these articles. Titles I've seen mentioned in the Fleming bios but never thought I'd get a chance to read myself.
The end of the thread?!!?
Well hopefully you will find some more Fleming rarities in the future Revelator, and please post them here when you do.
I've sure been enjoying all these articles.
I'm delighted you've been enjoying them! I would very much like to find more of Fleming's literary journalism, but I have the feeling there isn't much unnoticed work left to discover. What's left in my collection are some of Fleming's travel and treasure-hunting articles, but those are too long for online reading, especially on a message board. There are also one or two interviews with Fleming that have yet to be tracked down, including one for the New York Herald-Tribune. Whatever I find I will be sure to post here.
Note:When I started this thread I decided against posting "How to Write a Thriller" because it was easily found on many other websites. But I recently acquired scans of the original article from *Show* magazine and realized most of the online versions are slightly abridged. Here is the most complete available text of the article. Because of limitations on post length I will post it in two parts.
How to Write a Thriller
President Kennedy’s favorite fiction writer, the creator of secret agent James Bond, offers his recipe for best-selling suspense.
by Ian Fleming (Show: The Magazine of the Arts, August 1962)
"The only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money.”
In this disarming memoir the British journalist who, in a dozen thrillers, has given the world a hugely successful combination of E. Phillips Oppenheim and Mickey Spillane, discusses some problems of his craft. He also shows how they cause him to be keenly aware of the world around him, and “this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.”
The craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. In this age of higher education, writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.
I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are not designed to find favor with the Homintern. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds.
I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semifriendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport. “I bet you call yourself an Author,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists and then again there are writers and painters.”
This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, whilst stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman from the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money.
I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money. I say unashamedly because writing for money was once a respectable profession. Balzac did it, and so did Dickens. In fact, when Dickens found that reading his works aloud brought in more money than writing, he more or less gave up writing. Walter Scott may have enjoyed writing to begin with, but subsequently he only turned out books to satisfy his creditors. Trollope wrote for money as strenuously and impersonally as if he were working at the coalface. And then of course there was that man, what was his name again? who obviously hadn’t the smallest idea he was writing as well as he was. He wrote for his supper in the troubadour fashion. When he became famous and “got into the money,” so to speak, he blew it all on having a coat of arms designed for himself and buying the biggest house in, where was it now? Stratford-on-Avon, and then had to sit down and churn out some reams of blank verse to pay for it.
All this is heresy, and of course there is a big difference between being respectably married to a rich muse and being a literary prostitute, but I would like to make the point that where fame is the spur for some, money is for others.
I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature,” whose practitioners have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.
All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose-style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative. But these qualities will not make a bestseller. There is only one recipe, for a bestseller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.
If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have this quality. You simply have to turn over the page.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. That is why I said that your prose must be simple and unmannered. You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages.
There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader. He must never have to ask himself “Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?” Above all, and this goes for so many thrillers and detective stories, there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects on, what he might have done or what he proposes to do next. There must be no wads of space-filling prose. By all means, set the Scene or enumerate the heroine’s measurements as lovingly as you wish but, in doing so, each word must tell, and interest, or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.
I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him furiously and shouting “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, “Goldfinger,” three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.
Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narrative, what are we to put in the book—what are the ingredients of a thriller?
Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses—a absolutely anything. In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of. Personally I am not a gourmet and I abhor wine-and-foodmanship. My own favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of “Live and Let Die,” James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proofreader at my English publishers, Jonathan Cape, suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for James Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say, “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.
This business of meals may seem a small thing to worry about, but in fact it is a part of all successful writing, which consists of writing interesting words rather than dull ones. Leaving out the economic factor, that is, the actual price of the food, it is surely more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by homemade trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque), you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinners; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
You may well say that all this is nonsense, and so it would be if your target was the reader’s intellect rather than his senses. However good the cottage pie and the trifle, eating them in one’s imagination, as the reader will, is a banal experience, and banality is the enemy of the English thriller writer. What I endeavor to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.
I have not thought this theme out very carefully, nor have I reread any of my books to see if it stands up to close examination, but I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places round the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of James Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, “pleasures” the reader and takes him out of his dull surroundings into a warmer, more colorful, more luxurious, world. In a fashion which I suppose nowadays would be described as “subliminal,” this predisposes him favorably towards the book.
At this stage, let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavoring to analyze the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me, and if there is a strong streak of hedonism in my books it is there not by guile but because it comes out through the tip of my ballpoint pen.
All right, now we have style and pace and plenty of pleasure. What other ingredients must we add?
In my case, though not in the cases of such masters as Ambler, Hammett and Simenon, my plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from West to East Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb’s frogman exploit to examine the hull of the Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets; the Gouzenko case in Canada that led to the arrest of Fuchs; The Man Who Never Was—the corpse with the false invasion plans that we left for the Gestapo to find on the Spanish Coast. This is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate. Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4 1/2-litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these small details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.
Again I repeat that this technique is not, or certainly was not until I came to write about it, guileful. I am interested in things and in their exact description. I see no point in changing the name of the Ritz to the Grand Hotel Majestic, or the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to a Hirondelle. The technique crept into my first book, “Casino Royale.’’ I realized that the plot was fantastic and I wondered how I could anchor it to the ground so that it wouldn’t take off completely. I did so by piling on the verisimilitude of the background and of the incidental situations, and the combination seemed to work.
By the same token, I rarely write about places I have not seen. In “Live and Let Die,” for instance, the descriptions—of Idlewild, Harlem, an American express train, St.Petersburg in Florida,the underwater terrain of off-shore Jamaica—are technically accurate. I know these places. They have great romance and excitement for me, and I try to communicate these feelings to the reader.
Well, I seem to be getting on very well with picking my books to pieces, so we might as well pick still deeper. People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.”
I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, “Casino Royale,” there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other was of blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a high explosive bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which the two assassins could escape. One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smokescreen before throwing the bomb. In fact, of course, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the identical method used in the Russian attempt on von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgars and they were blown to nothing while von Papen and Frau von Papen, walking from their house to the Embassy, were only knocked down and bruised by the blast.
As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident: I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence—Admiral Godfrey—in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence before America came into the war. We were taking the Southern Atlantic route, and our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop. We had talks there with our Intelligence people and they described how Lisbon and the neighboring Estoril were crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants, we were told, gambled every night in the casino at Estoril. I immediately suggested to the D.N.I. that he and I should have a look at these people. We went and there were the three men, whose descriptions we had, playing at the high *Chemin de Fer* table. The D.N.I. didn’t know the game. I explained it to him and then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service. It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had some £50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out. A humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief’s estimation.
It was this true incident which is the kernel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre.
Finally, the torture scene. There were many tortures used in the war by the Germans, but the worst were devised by the Moroccan-French. What I described in “Casino Royale” was a greatly watered-down version of one of these French-Moroccan tortures known as *Passer à la Mandoline* [stretching a mandolin string between the testes], which was practiced on several of our agents.
So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one and, if I had time, I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some such real happenings as I have described. [End of first part]
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
A house is being demolished in the suburbs of Oxford, a Victorian villa, let us say. In the cellars, the demolition team unearths a tiny theater with a small stage and a dozen seats. Everything is upholstered in faded red velvet. There are signs of recent use. What was this little theater for? What went on there? Immediately our imagination takes off and is sent orbiting like a Sputnik in the sinister realms of black magic, Aleister Crowley, Cinemas Bleus, murdered virgins and the rest. What about that Cambodian student at Balliol? They say he eats live mice dipped in honey. Things with a capital T have been disappearing from the operating theater of the hospital. What has happened to Brunella McNought, the pretty young physicist “à la cuisse hospitalière" as the French put it so gracefully, at Lady Margaret Hall? She hasn’t been seen for weeks...and, so on and so forth. You see! We are almost there. All we need is a caricature of you for the hero, the four fried eggs, the hot-buttered toast and the large cup of black coffee and “The Blonde with a Bomb in Her Bustle” is on the bookstalls.
Haying assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathize with you. I, too, am lazy. Probably rather lazier than you. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well-chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
In my case one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work, whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so that I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these two months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef. But by the sixth year I had exhausted all the possibilities inherent in these activities, I had ironed out the problem of taking on a rather difficult job as Foreign Manager to The Sunday Times of London at the end of the war, and I was about to get married—a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidgets. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 year as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can strongly recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.
So far as the physical act of writing is concerned, the method I have devised is this: I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine and—I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything, and I never look back at what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. 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.
By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be, and is, in my case, in around six weeks. I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is finished I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting short passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape, and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a more or less fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a salutary dig at the author’s vanity to realize how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the jeweled words which it has taken him so many months to try and arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labors, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and 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, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, 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.
yes, more @Revelator content! welcome back old chum, thanks for this and the info on the new Fleming biography you gave us elsewhere.
I appreciate the upgrade on How to Write a Thriller. I checked the version I have saved to my harddrive and its preface states it was cobbled together from various incomplete and contradictory sources, definitely that was a placeholder til something more complete came along. So was it published in a few different places in slightly different forms each time?
This essay is another one of those items that should be compiled into an official book of appendices to Fleming's Bond canon, along with the abandoned short stories, his notebook of plot ideas, various film and teevee proposals etc. I know he wrote a lot that is long out of print, but there is a subset that is specifically Bond related that if complied would make for a good Volume 15.
"How to Write a Thriller" was indeed reprinted by several other publications, usually with cuts and edits. As far as I know, the Show magazine version is the original and most complete one. The article was based on Fleming's Oxford University student lecture “The Art, or Craft, of Writing Thrillers,” delivered in May 1962.
Along with most of Fleming's journalism, "How to Write a Thriller" is collected in Talk of the Devil, one of the rarest and most expensive Fleming books around. It was published in 2008 but only as part of the Queen Anne Press edition of The Complete Works of Ian Fleming. The cheapest edition of this set goes for £2,000. If I ever win the lottery...
Ian Fleming on the film Our Man in Havana (The Third Programme, BBC, Jan. 7, 1959)
It is very sad that they are even knocking the Secret Service these days. Sad, I mean, for those who have thrilled since their childhood to the glorious myth and sad for all the world of writers and actors whose livelihood depends on the Great Stone Face, perhaps with a black patch over one eye, that can be written about and acted but for security’s sake never properly described.
Already most of the Secret Service cliches have died. In the old days it was apparently possible to get hold of a beautiful girl with a basic training in architecture and ballistics and get her into bed with the enemy general who, between transports, would give her full details of the fortress that was the strong point in his country’s defence. And there was that great prize of the code book purloined by the embassy valet, and the people in mackintoshes followed by other people in mackintoshes, the conversations among the potted palms and champagne buckets overheard by mustachioed waiters, and the assassinations—right down to William Le Queux’s explosive cigar between the lips of the English Foreign Secretary—all these splendid situations are so rusty that no amount of oil can cure the squeaks and rattles of steam-age spy-manship.
Nowadays, and for so long as war is a threat, the spy is a ticking seismograph on top of the Jungfrau measuring distant atomic explosions on the other side of the world, or instruments carried in aircraft that measure the uranium or plutonium content of the atmosphere, and these things have about as much romance as a dentist’s drill.
Except in very small contexts, the number of tanks, the number of soldiers, the design even of a hydrogen bomb, are hardly worth the powder of a Secret Service. The big people have all the big weapons and the small people have them not. Details of the weapons are unimportant. They are known. They’ll destroy the world. There is only one thing to know, a sure thing, and that knowledge itself is only vital for perhaps a quarter of an hour during which preventive or retaliatory measures can be mounted—where, exactly when, to a millionth of a second, is whose finger going to press a button?
These things being so, and they are so, any book or play or film about the Secret Service must be either incredible or farcical. Personally, I am sufficiently in love with the myth to write basically incredible stories and to keep, without any difficulty for I am in love with the myth, a straight face. Graham Greene in his book had a more ruthless approach and a modern one. He took the splendid Secret Service myth of centuries and kicked it hilariously downstairs.
Briefly, Our Man in Havana is a vacuum cleaner salesman called Wormold (a typical “reluctant hero” name) eking out a living in Havana in company with his daughter, in the book an adorable nymphet, on whom, since his wife left him, Wormold lavishes his love and his spare money. Alec Guinness is totally Wormold, as he is totally all his acting parts, but Miss Jo Morrow as his daughter, endowed with only half the appropriate co-efficient of nymphetry, seems more like a mistress.
Wormold, because of the cash that will help to push his daughter on in Havana Society, is half-willingly impressed into the Secret Service by Noel Coward, who plays the pin-stripe “Steady on, old man” Secret Service agent to hilarious perfection.
Alec Guiness soon finds that he can get by in the Secret Service with a lot of half-baked mumbo-jumbo. He uses names drawn at random from the membership list of the local country club and reinforces them with drawings on secret weapons copied from his vacuum cleaner catalogue.
This splendid situation, that is almost too close to the truth for those who served in wartime intelligence to find funny, should proceed horribly from farce to real terror but somehow it doesn’t quite come through. The photography is magnificent—the sleazy and acutely observed Cuban scene [is] dotted with harsh-looking Cuban police and dominated by the vast personality of Burl Ives. (The trouble with Ives is that he always has the ability to act anyone else off the screen. Here he plays the agent of an unspecified power as Emil Jannings would have played him.)
Miss Maureen O’Hara, the Secret Service agent sent out from London headquarters to help Wormold—does Wormold marry her in the end? I couldn’t make [it] out—is as desriable as I would wish her to be, and Mr. Ernie Kovacs as the Chief of Police has all the villainy of understatement and, because he has been solidly cast, holds the narrative sequence more or less together. There is of course not enough of Sir Ralph Richardson, the Chief of the Secret Service and head of the tragical farce that Graham Greene has made of our favourite myth.
For the rest, it need only be said that if the Secret Service had to be kicked downstairs, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Sir Ralph Richardson should have been able to do it. In fact this film, which is somehow made extraordinarily incomprehensible, is largely carried, despite the great names, by Mr. Ernie Kovacs, Mr. Burl Ives, and Miss Maureen O’Hara, in that order.
I’m afraid I don’t understand Sir Carol Reed. He directs individual scenes brilliantly but so often it seems to me he loses narrative sequences. In short this to me was a brilliant book that has somehow lost its point, and it was a very good one, as a film.
Comments
Felix drives a "Studillac", a Studebaker with a Cadillac engine, in DAF.
By Ian Fleming
Every sport has its own nightmare — the dropped baton, the goal scored against your own side, running out your captain when he has scored ninety-nine; and, in your dreams, they all have the same ghastly background—the packed stands, the serried ranks of spectators, the incredulous hush and then the deep condemnatory groan.
In golf the two-foot putt missed on the eighteenth green is quickly over, and you are at once awake, sweating and whimpering. This terror must be common to even the greatest in the game, but for the week-end golfer, there is a far longer, more horrible nightmare—partnership with a world champion over a course black with the crowds.
Last week-end I endured this nightmare, thirty-six holes of it, and I live, but only just, to tell the tale.
It came about like this. Three weeks ago a friend said he wanted me to play in the Bowmaker Invitation Amateur/Professional Tournament at the Berkshire. “It’s great fun,” he said. “All the best professionals take two amateurs each, and you play a threesome against bogey. Each team puts in three cards—the professional’s for the best scratch score and the professional plus each amateur for the lowest better ball score. The amateur plays off full handicap, and if he makes good use of his strokes he and his pro can get a better ball score around 60. You can pick up when you’ve played too many. They have film stars and such like to amuse the crowds. Come on.”
It sounded fun. I said “Yes,” and forgot about it.
* * *
I forgot about it until I got the draw. I was to play with Peter Thomson, three times Open champion, and Alec Shepperson, handicap plus 1, a Walker Cup probable. I was to be on the first tee of the Red Course at 2.15 last Sunday.
That was Tuesday the eighteenth. On the Wednesday, Peter Thomson, fresh from a fine performance in the American Open, equalled the course record of Sand Moor with a 65 in the Yorkshire Evening News tournament. He followed this with a 67, 64 and 68. He won the tournament by fifteen strokes and broke a handful of records. The golfing world gasped.
Apart from praying that the biggest thunderstorm in living memory would deluge the home counties on the following Sunday and Monday (it was a two-day contest ), there was really nothing I could do about It. I am a nine handicap week-end golfer with a short, flat swing that has been likened to a housemaid sweeping under a bed. It is a fast swing with reserves of fantastic acceleration in moments of stress.
The only reason I am nine is that I obstinately try to play down to it rather than take life more easily off twelve, which I should be. I have never had a golf lesson, except from my grandmother at the age of about fifteen, and my only equipment for the game is a natural “eye” and strong forearms. Against these virtues it should be said that I remember to keep my head down only on one shot in three and that, on occasional shots, “everything moves except the ball.”
The greatest weakness of my essentially immaculate game is that I am quite unable to “repeat” my swing. Even on the putting green, my stance and stroke are at the mercy of the moment’s whim. The fact that I have played golf for some thirty years with occasional success and great pleasure is due to enjoying the company, the exercise and the zest of competition. In short, I am the quintessential amateur.
* * *
The virtues of amateurishness are all right in a friendly game, perhaps sharpened by a gamble, in the privacy of one’s home course. There the quick, sharp dunch into a bunker is a matter for hilarity only mildly tinged with bitterness. But how, I wondered feverishly as the dreadful day approached, would my insouciance stand up playing before vast crowds, with the greatest, or at any rate the second greatest, golfer in the world?
But why worry? It’s only a game. The ball won’t move. Just walk up and hit it. These and other specious exhortations were mouthed at me through wolfish grins by my friends. The worst you can do is maim a few spectators, perhaps even kill one. But the club will be insured. Have a double kümmel before you start. Take an Oblivon.
Steeled by the relish of my friends, I assumed a nonchalant mask. I looked to my equipment. The head of my driver (circa 1930, one of the earliest, surely, of the steel shafts and known around Sandwich as “Excalibur”) was loose. I had it fixed. My double-faced chipper (Tom Morris, 1935), a beloved but temperamental club, was rebound. I bought two pairs of expensive socks in pale blue. I reread the red ink passages in Armour’s How To Play Your Best Golf All The Time, watched Peter Thomson’s unearthly progress through the Yorkshire Evening News tournament and waited queasily for H- (for Horror) Day.
* * *
H-Day dawned bright and clear. No earthquakes. No tornadoes. No thunderstorms. I drove at an even pace to the Berkshire, parked my car among the hundreds, and proceeded to the seventh fairway of the Blue Course, which a number of young gods were bisecting with arrow-straight drives and iron shots using mounds of practice balls.
I retired to an inconspicuous corner with my caddie, six balls and a No.3 iron. It took me about twenty minutes, in my usual ratio of one good shot in three, to lose four of the balls in the woods.
Then came lunch and the unwelcome news that the matches were running over an hour late. I wandered out among the dreadful trappings of my nightmare—the marquees, the huge scoreboard ablaze with the most famous names in professional and amateur golf, and already showing the results of the early starters and, in the background, the loudspeaker giving the position on the near-by 17th tee.
Henry Cotton passed me, his face a mask of concentration, and Locke, majestic, indomitable. Henry Longhurst tossed me a few phrases of gleeful commiseration. And then there were Peter Thomson and Alec Shepperson, and I was explaining who I was and apologising in advance for the dreadful things that they would shortly be witnessing.
* * *
For the first time I felt a ray of comfort. All golfers have their problems. Shepperson was a candidate for the Walker Cup team and he knew the names would be announced the next day and that the selectors were on the course. Thomson knew that every spectator would expect him to go round in level threes. We commiserated with one another over the swelling crowds and in due course there we were standing on the first tee.
The starter's voice rang out — unnecessarily loudly. Thomson drove 250 yards down the centre of the fairway.
“Mr. Iarn Fleming.”
I wiped my hands on the seat of my trousers and stepped forward. Half-conscious, I teed up and gave a practice swing, listening with half my mind for the hiss of astonishment. The crowd was too well bred. I addressed the ball and promptly knocked it off its peg. I put it on again.
Then there was a moment when the world stood still, a brief glimpse of the ball through a mist of tears, a more or less articulated swirl of motion and the blessed ball was well airborne and on its way with a slight draw to come to rest in the rough fifty yards behind Thomson’s.
Shepperson hit a beauty and we were off and away, with the crowd streaming after us. One of my chief tortures, easily foreseen, was that I should always be playing first of the trio. I hacked the ball out of the shallow heather and got it 100 yards on its way down the fairway. Thomson pushed his to the right of the green. Shepperson fluffed with a 4 wood, and there I was having to hit mine again.
***
I had a stroke at all the odd holes. Now it was vital that I should hit the simplest of simple shots 150 yards on to the green. I took out my blaster, with which I thought I would be safest. There was a respectful hush. Head down, you fool! Slow back! BOING!!! The ball, hit off the sole, whizzed along the ground, bumbled up the green and stopped within three yards of the pin.
Muttering something about “Dundee run-up” I strode after it, and, to cut a long story short, both Thomson and Shepperson got fives and all I had to do was to get down in two putts to win a net 4 for Thomson and our better ball. I putted, or rather twitched, the ball a yard past, missing the hole by three inches. Then, with a thumping heart, stroked, or more accurately topped, the ball into the hole amid heartfelt applause from the agonized crowd.
I will pass over the second hole where I hit a No. 7 over the green and picked up and where Thomson got an immaculate 3.
Another stroke at the 3rd. An adequate drive. A fluffed spoon and a smothered 4 iron which again rattled up on the green. Again I somehow got my net 4 to Thomson’s 5. I had “improved” twice for Thomson, but by the foulest means, and there was no question of my golf having settled down.
***
I forget what happened at the 4th, but at the par three 5th, having been advised by Thomson to take a 7 Instead of an 8, I at last hit the ball in the middle of the bat and got a net two, which I followed up with another net two, also well played, at the 7th. Again at the 9th, but this time again by foul means, I scrambled a net four. I had helped Peter Thomson five times in nine holes!
Those treacherous crocodiles my friends, who had come to gloat at my discomfiture, changed their tune. Now they edged up and whispered that my handicap would have to be reduced at Sandwich. I brushed them aside. The sun was shining, the course was beautiful. What fun it was playing with the Open champion!
Alas, while by dunch, scuffle and fluff I somehow played the next nine holes. I was no further help to Peter Thomson and all I can remember of the inward half is the most glorious three I have ever seen, by Shepperson, at the bogey five 15th, and an appalling shank by myself at the 17th. It was with a No. 8, off a downhill lie, and the air positively quivered with the horrible clang as the ball sped at right angles through the spectators’ legs into the deep rough.
And then the round was over, with a 72 for Peter Thomson and net 66s for Alec Shepperson and myself. No earthly good, but at least I hadn’t played Thomson’s ball by mistake, or done an air shot or killed a spectator. It was in a mood of euphoria that I returned to London.
***
Monday was not so good, and I did many terrible things that even now make me shudder, but it had rained very heavily and there were fewer witnesses. Thomson did a 69 and Shepperson, who by this time had been nominated for the Walker Cup, and I, repeated our 66s, which meant that at least I had been able to help Thomson on three holes.
And now the dreadful glory of the occasion is fading and this weekend I shall be playing either a new kind of golf, tempered to the finest steel by its visit to the blast furnace, or, more probably, wilted by the fierce flame.
Alas, when my friends or my grandchildren ask me how Peter Thomson played this shot or Alec Shepperson that, I shall be unable to tell them. I shall have many memories of the two men—of Peter Thomson, justly renowned for a bearing as fine as his golf, and of the modest, charming Shepperson—but of the champion’s golf I shall recall nothing but the immortal words of Leonard Crawley in last Monday’s Daily Telegraph:
“Though Peter Thomson was assisted five times by Ian Fleming, the champion had evidently spent much of his force at Leeds last week.”
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica has now been my second home for eighteen years. Since 1946 I have been coming here, as regularly as clockwork, from January 15 to March 15 and, each year when the time comes to leave, I say my goodbye with a lump in the throat. In this long span of time everything has changed and yet nothing. Jamaica has grown from a child into an adult, she has flirted with Federation and then broken off the engagement, she has gained her Independence and Membership of the United Nations, bauxite and tourism have changed her economy, emigration to the United Kingdom, with all its problems, brings around £7,000,000 back into the island every year, the West Indian cricketers have become the darlings of the Commonwealth and a Jamaican girl has been chosen Miss World.
But the Doctor’s Wind continues to blow in from the sea during the day and the Undertaker’s Wind blows the stale air out again at night, and the news in The Daily Gleaner, the "Country Newsbits", is just the same. A family at Maggotty has been wiped out by "vomiting sickness" (the paper still will not add the medical diagnosis of "eating unripe ackee"), — and Cornelius Brown has "mashed" Agatha Brown with his cutlass and has been sentenced to prison and twelve strokes of the tamarind switch. And the people are just the same, always laughing and bawling each other out, singing the old banana songs as they load the fruit into the ships, getting drunk on rum when the ship has sailed, sneaking an illicit whiff of ganja, or an equally illicit visit to the obeahman when they are ill or in trouble, driving motor cars like lunatics, behaving like zanies at the cricket matches and the races, making the night hideous with the "Sound System" on pay night, and all the while moving gracefully and lazily through the day and fearing the "rolling calf" at night.
And yet, against this background of "plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose" my own life has been turned upside down at, or perhaps even by, the small house named ‘Goldeneye’ I built eighteen years ago on the north shore, and by my life in Jamaica. In 1952, I got married here, in the Registry Office in my neighbouring Port Maria. Noel Coward and his secretary Cole Leslie were the witnesses and Noel tied the shoe on to the back of his own car by mistake.
Encouraged by marriage, or as an antidote to this dangerous transmogrification after forty-three years of bachelorhood, I sat down at the red bullet-wood desk where I am now typing this, and, for better or for worse, wrote the first of twelve best-selling thrillers that have sold around twenty million copies and been translated into twenty-three languages. I wrote every one of them at this desk with the jalousies closed around me so that I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint. (I have interrupted my sticky thirteenth to write these words.)
The books feature a man called James Bond. Here is another Jamaican link. I was looking for a name for my hero — nothing like Peregrine Carruthers or "Standfast" Maltravers — and I found it, on the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic. (Only a couple of weeks ago, I met him, the real James Bond, and Mrs Bond, for the first time. They arrived out of the blue and couldn't have been nicer about my theft of the family name. It helped at the customs, they said!) Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it. Noel Coward has written much of his later music and prose here and other still more famous writers, let alone painters, have been stimulated by Jamaica. I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here. There is certainly enough native talent to support the theory.
And my life has been changed in other ways. I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property and that has added a new dimension to my view of the world. And, a vital postgraduate study, I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people — two very different lessons I would never have absorbed if my life had continued in its pre-Jamaican metropolitan rut. But, above all, Jamaica has provided a wonderful annual escape from the cold and grime of winters in England, into blazing sunshine, natural beauty and the most healthy life I could wish to live.
My house, Goldeneye, has also lived through many changes. The thirty or so acres in which it stands were a barren donkey’s racecourse when I built it. Now the land is a jungle of tall trees and tropical shrubs and we could live on my citrus and coconuts and the fish from the sea. Couples have spent their honeymoons here, stricken friends have regained their health, painters and writers — Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, Lucian Freud, Graham Greene, Robert Harling, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rosamund Lehmann, Peter Quennell, Alan Ross, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh — have stayed and worked here, and a British Prime Minister and his wife, Sir Anthony and Lady Eden, were here for three weeks during his convalescence in the winter of 1956, after Suez. (The Jamaican Government turned my little gazebo on the western corner of the property into a direct teleprinter link with Number 10 Downing Street. The police guards cut ‘God Bless Sir Anthony and Lady Eden’ into the bark of my cedar trees. The detective, sleeping in the back room, shot at the bush rats, beloved by my wife, with his revolver, but the two trees, of a species still wrapped in mystery, which the Edens planted, have flourished mightily.)
But this is name-dropping. Why should this modest house, with wooden jalousies and no glass in the windows, with three bedrooms with shower baths and lavatories that often hiss like vipers or ullulate like stricken bloodhounds, with its modest staff of local help, headed by Violet, my incomparable housekeeper for all these years, have attracted all these famous people to its meagre bosom come rain (which can often fall, as it does in all corners of the world) or shine which it always will in my memory? Noel Coward provides a comment. He is given to hyperbole. In 1948, from March 22 to May 31, he stayed at Goldeneye, at, he claims, an exorbitant rent. He wrote in the visitor's book, and foolishly signed them, the following words: "The happiest two months I have ever spent." He then went off and, as close to me as he could get, built a house (what am I saying? four houses) and — to hell with the charms of Bermuda and Switzerland! — comes here every year. But, before he left Goldeneye, he wrote the ode which I now reprint, not for its merit, which is small, but purely to fill up space.
NOEL COWARD MEMORIAL ODE
Alas! I cannot adequately praise
The dignity, the virtue and the grace
Of this most virile and imposing place
Wherein I passed so many airless days.
Alas! Were I to write ’till crack of doom
No typewriter, no pencil, nib, nor quill
Could ever recapitulate the chill
And arid vastness of the living-room.
Alas! I cannot accurately find
Words to express the hardness of the seat
Which, when I cheerfully sat down to eat
Seared with such cunning into my behind.
Alas! However much I raved and roared
No rhetoric, no witty diatribe
Could ever, even partially, describe
The impact of the spare-room bed — and board.
Alas! I am not someone who exclaims
With rapture over ancient equine prints.
Ah no, dear Ian, I can only wince
At all those horses framed in all those frames.
Alas! My sensitivity rebels,
Not at loose shutters; not at plagues of ants,
Nor other "sub-let" bludgeonings of chance
But, at those hordes of ageing faded shells.
Alas! If only common-sense could teach
The stubborn heart to heed the crafty brain
You would, before you let your house again
Remove the barracudas from the beach.
But still my dear Commander, I admit,
No matter how I criticize and grouse,
That I was strangely happy in your house
In fact I’m very very fond of it.
Signed "Noel", February 1949
(Note that it took the man nine months to dream up this insulting doggerel!)
Well, I am still devoted to the monster (misprint for "Master") and the rivalry between our houses (he refers to mine as "Goldeneye, Nose and Throat") has continued all these fifteen years (he wanted to build a swimming bath — his beach is lousy — and asked his "attorney" what strength of pump he would need to keep the water clean. The attorney replied "Hit depend, Mister Cowhard, how much soap you use"). But the point is clear. It is not the rude comforts of my house that appeal nor, I think, entirely my wife, who is as honey to a hummingbird. It is the friendly embrace of Jamaica and of the Jamaican way of life, and the fact, as the advertisements put it, that Jamaica is no place like home. To illustrate what the country is made of and what it has to offer, and as an hors d’oeuvre to the more nourishing fare that follows, I will reprint here my very first impressions of Jamaica, a mood piece which I wrote for Cyril Connolly’s famous Horizon magazine in December, 1947, and specifically for the lively series, entitled "Where Shall John Go?" which was aimed at readers who wished to flee the drabness of postwar Britain. I have made a very few alterations in the light of my experience of Jamaica since it was first written. But these few alterations are only of facts; the mood remains unaltered.
[Article omitted for reason of length and because it is already online]
Well, there you are — the great part of the first article I ever wrote, the writing of which perhaps gave me confidence one day to write a book. There is little that I would alter today. Many facts have dated. The mosquitoes have been almost entirely eradicated, the political background has changed, although those perennial duellists, Sir Alexander Bustamente and Mr Norman Manley, are still at it, and the University has been built, but I would alter nothing of the "mood" of the piece except to add the caveat that some of the many new hotels charge exorbitantly and that shrimp cocktails and steak have followed the almighty dollar into the island.
To write any more would be only to repeat myself and to hold you from the wonderful team of Jamaican writers whom my friend Morris Cargill has assembled to make this the first comprehensive book ever to have been written on Jamaica.
Ian Fleming
Goldeneye
February 1964
As you can see from the date, this one of Fleming's last writings--probably his second to last. For greater context, make sure to read the invaluable Goldeneye. Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica, by Matthew Parker.
By Ian Fleming
Some Caen. Some Caen’t.
No harm in starting off with a really bad joke. Master, or rather Past-master Caen has several times exercised his lamentable sense of humor at my and James Bond’s expense and I am glad of this opportunity to strike back.
But a valid truism lies behind the execrable pun. To the uninitiated, it looks easy enough to be a columnist. What could be more simple than to sit down at the typewriter and ramble on about the passing scene—the human comedy?
After all, Boswell was no genius. He just wrote down what he saw and what he thought—commonplace stuff. He was no Shakespeare, no Shelley—a competent reporter with ink in his veins.
Ah, but that's the point! You must have ink in your veins. You really must love writing and communicating in order to sit down and write around 1000 words a day in such a fashion that people will read them. And that is what a daily columnist has to do.
Every day, come hangover, come flu, come lack of inspiration, come ailing wife or bawling children, he must go confidently and with seeming omniscience on stage and show himself to the public in naked black and white.
No excuses! You are a columnist, and by God you’ve got to fill your column to the satisfaction of your readers and, though this may be rare, to your own.
I know these things because I once wrote a column myself. I did it for three years and chucked it about five years ago when James Bond came to my rescue.
I was Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times (the real one. Not yours!) and I thought that its gossip column, which went, and still goes, by the pompous name of “Atticus,” was so bad that I would have a bash at it in between coping with the future of the world and the marital tangles of my foreign correspondents.
I renamed the column “People and Things” by Atticus, because I am interested in Things, and got into business. It went down all right, though I received more kicks than ha’pence from an editor whose sense of humor differed from mine, and the from readers who appeared only interested in writing in when I made a mistake, and to this day I am proud of two paragraphs of undying merit from that long stint.
The first, through a careful study of the psychology of the drinking American, correctly forecast the winning Miss Rheingold for that year (You see how right the editor was. Perhaps .007 per cent of Sunday Times readers had even heard of Rheingold beer).
The second, revealing the existence of a Grimsby troglodyte who smoked kippers as they should be smoked, brought in 4,700 letters (A record for the paper) and incidentally made a fortune for the old man.
Is there a common denominator between my modest achievement and Herb
Caen’s majestic record? What’s all this about Fleming anyway? We want to hear about Herb. Patience! Pazienza! Geduld!
Yes, there is a common denominator. Every columnist, and Herb Caen is a shining example, must be interested in everything, even in those matters which are outside his readers’ ken, and he must communicate his enthusiasms to the reader, and secondly, he must have some vague social purpose—a desire to help and instruct his readers and if possible right an occasional wrong (rescue the kipper merchant for instance).
But above all, whether exposing a peccant mayor or police chief (a favorite sport in the United States, I believe) or just writing about the smog, he must at all costs avoid being a bore.
For half a generation, and from the evidence of this anniversary accolade, Herb Caen, writing for perhaps the most wide-awake community in the United States, somehow has managed, day in, day out, to avoid being a bore. For what it is worth, we have not, in Great Britain, got one journalist with anything like the same record.
And, in conclusion, I will tell you something else which is even more to his credit, and something which may be news to you. Some time ago, amongst my cuttings (clippings), I received a column by Herb Caen which affectionately but devastatingly sent up James Bond, pulling the author's leg almost out of its socket.
A saboteur in the pay of SMERSH, I surmised, and tucked the author's name away in my “unfinished business” file.
When next in New York, I asked one of the hamlet’s most famous editors about this fellow Caen.
“He's one of America’s greatest columnists,” he said. “We’d all like to get him. Trouble is, nothing on earth will drag him away from San Francisco.”
Well, feed your captive well. He’s good for another 25 years at the coal face.
Note: Caen actually spent 34 more years at the coal face, before his death in 1997. He was one of Fleming's early American fans and helped popularize the books in his column from January 28, 1962, titled "The Thin Cruel Smile."
After this article, Caen and Fleming met in London. Their lunch was immortalized in Caen's May 16, 1963 column "Conversation at Scott's." Excerpts below:
Caen later devoted an entire column to Fleming's death. In "Farewell to Double Nought Seven" (August 16, 1964), he wrote:
Caen also wrote about the San Francisco world premiere of A View to a Kill, which he hated: "With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Mayor and the police and fire departments, San Francisco is made to look like a loony-bin in the newest and possibly last James Bond film, A View to a Kill, an awkward movie with an awkward title. As I recall, author Ian Fleming’s original title for the flimsy short story on which this $30-million bombo is shakily based was With a View to a Kill [sic], which scans a little more smoothly. It wasn't Fleming at his best but the movie it inspired may be James Bondage at its worst."
By Ian Fleming
Have you murdered anyone lately? All right. How do you know you haven’t?
Watching the Halford-Hewitt Tournament the other day, I remembered my first visit to Deal twenty-five years ago and the murder, or at least culpable homicide, in which I participated.
My accomplices and I, tenderloins in golf and life, stood on the first tee. Halfway down the fairway, moving slowly and hitting the ball erratically, were two elderly gentlemen. One of the caddies said: “You’ll never get through them. That’s Captain Smith and Colonel Jones. They never let anyone through.”
For five holes, despite first courteous requests, then unheeded shouts of “Fore!” and finally mild bombardment, we could only creep forward like angry snails. Finally, at No. 6, Colonel Jones sliced into the shingle and there they both were, scrabbling for their one sphere amidst a million others—but still not waving us through. We played that hole as if it was a fast hockey match, calling sarcastic “Thank you, sirs” as we sprinted past.
When, later, we came out from luncheon for our second round, we expressed the fervent hope that we would not find the Colonel and the Captain ahead of us again.
“No, you won’t that,” said my caddie.
“Why not?”
“Colonel Jones is dead!”
“Good heavens, what happened?”
“He was that mad after this morning, sir, when he finished his round he got into his car and drove off like crazy. When he got to the sharp turn on to the esplanade he stamped on the accelerator by mistake for the brake and went over into the sea.”
As certainly as if with a gun, we had slain Colonel Jones.
To be serious, people, just as unwittingly, are killing their neighbours every day all over the world—by an act of bad driving, after which, perhaps far behind, there is the distant crash of a collision; by blowing germs into people’s faces; by bathing and mountain-climbing “accidents” for which, however remotely, they were the indirect cause. And then there is the slow homicide, by cruelty, neglect, hate, lack of charity.
To go back to the beginning, how do you know you haven’t?
True and Blue
I have no connection with the company (except, that is, for using their products for the past thirty years) so I can’t be accused of payola if I reveal that Gillettes have a splendid new razor blade—the Extra-Blue—coming on the market in a few days’ time. Indeed I almost severed relations with them recently when I found them responsible for squandering some of my small stock of virtue.
All those years, after shaving, I had meticulously washed my razor and carefully cleaned the blade, sneering at the unkempt razors in other people’s bathrooms. Not long ago, I began frequently to cut myself shaving. Reluctantly, because I hate the noise they make, I consulted my chemist about electric razors. He asked me if I had recently changed houses—as in fact I had—and suggested that probably the water in the new house was much harder than in my old. (This turned out to be the solution.) He also asked suspiciously if I cleaned the razor blade after use.
“Of course,” I said proudly.
“Well, you shouldn’t. You blunt the blade. You should just rinse the razor under the tap.”
I was, and still am, aghast at the oceans of virtuous diligence I have wasted because this vital piece of intelligence (confirmed by Gillettes) was excluded from my education. A few printed words by the bewhiskered patriarch on those packets would have saved me thirty years of doing dutifully, laboriously, the right thing—and being utterly wrong!
No Medals
A murrain on the Governor and Company of the Bank of England for slaughtering our pound notes—and so soon after slaying our beautiful fivers. A murrain also on the Big Five, to whom I understand the new design was submitted, and a murrain re-doubled on the Treasury, who lord it over the Bank when it suits them but now publicly disown responsibility for the Bank’s vandalism.
I personally believe that it is nothing but an act of self-aggrandisement by the Bank of England. Not only has she given herself a type several points larger, but she has managed to get her own name on the new notes something like 300 times instead of only twice on the old bit of lettuce.
Only two aspects of the new design commend themselves—the smaller size of the note, slightly more commensurate with its purchasing power, and the “how-dare-you!” expression on the face of Her Majesty the Queen.
Scrambled Ego
I write thrillers whose “hero” is a secret agent called James Bond. Not long ago I was invited to play golf for an Old Etonian side against the school. My young opponent was called Ian Bond. Amused by the coincidence, I asked him if he had ever heard of a man called James Bond. “Oh yes,” he said politely. “That's my uncle. He lives in Essex.”
By Ian Fleming
The Fourth of June. By David Benedictus. (Blond. 18s.)
I don’t think the old music-hall gag is inappropriate. In this brilliant first novel Mr Benedictus has swallowed his public school life and regurgitated it because some of its bones stuck in his throat.
It was inevitable that before long we should have an angry young Old Etonian, and Etonians, wincing as they will beneath the author’s lash, will at least admit that the cane is being wielded by a supremely talented hand.
Perhaps The Fourth of June should have been reviewed by one of the author's own generation. The last book on Eton I read, apart from the scintillating fragments by Connolly and Orwell, was One of Us, a romantic novel in verse by Gilbert Frankau, some thirty years ago. To older generations of Etonians, Mr Benedictus’s bubbling, steaming brew of adolescent life, peppered with the á la mode four-letter words, will be almost unrecognisable. But only almost, because beneath the author’s vicious brush-strokes the ancient brickwork, the remembered totems and taboos come through, often with exquisite brilliance.
Briefly, the story is of Scarfe, a grammar-school boy bent and finally broken by the snobbery, sadism and sexuality (hetero-, homo-, and auto-) which, in the Benedictan view, are the devils in the machine of an Eton education, and this theme, for a man with as sharp a pen as the author’s, is, of course, a natural.
Knowing nothing of the strains and stresses suffered by the modern Scarfes beneath the weight of Eton and its customs, it is difficult for an older Etonian not to argue that in his day the psychologically halt and lame boys also went to the wall, and he might complain, I think legitimately, that the author has outstripped the bounds of truth in laying Scarfe’s downfall to the three S’s mentioned above.
I cannot, for instance, swallow the Bishop with his militant religiosity combined with voyeurism. I do not believe in the sadism of Defries, Captain of the House, in the strangulation of the hero’s pet bird, nor in the pusillanimity and downright venality of the housemaster and the headmaster (in a foreword Mr Benedictus makes plain what is obviously true, that none of his characters have any relation to any living person) when faced with blackmail by a boy’s mother who finally pays off the housemaster with her body.
These, and many other incidents, however brilliantly described—an elder boy who hires out his younger brother is a sharp and disagreeable case in point—are sheer caricature, and to give poor Scarfe festering wounds which sent him to the sanatorium after being tanned by the Captain of the House as a punishment for a breach of the rules, which both culprits could have explained, is, to this former target of cane and birch, incredible.
And was it really necessary to be so much involved in the angry swim as to need to direct a harsh side-kick at Royalty?
But these are criticisms of a reader who was fascinated by one of the most brilliant first novels since the war, written with rapier wit, acute observation and a perceptive eye for each of the lesser characters. The style is sharp and professional (though Mr Benedictus will kindly write out “éminences grises”—page 21—a hundred times) and the whole devastating package is embellished by the Jacket of the Year.
We shall hear more of Mr. Benedictus, so I informed myself about him. He is 23, the son of the managing director of a famous London store, and he was Captain of his House at Eton. Then came Balliol and the State University of Iowa to learn play-writing . He is now with the B.B.C.
Which of these institutions will bend next to the harsh block?
The reason Ian Fleming reviewed this novel apparently was its "Jacket of the Year," by none other than Richard Chopping, Fleming's favorite book cover artist:
For more information, consult the article "Blessed by Fleming, Adorned by Chopping – ‘The Fourth of June’".
My crude guess is that Chopping asked Fleming to review The Fourth of June as a favor, and though Fleming hated the novel's portrait of Eton and said so, he sweetened his review with some blurbable praise ("one of the most brilliant first novels since the war").
Interested potential readers should be informed that the most recent reprint of the book dispenses with Chopping's cover. Speaking only for myself, I've never been crazy about Chopping's trompe-l'œil book covers, even for the Bond novels.
by Ian Fleming
I have various qualifications for writing an introduction to this series of distinguished and highly entertaining essays.
First of all, I invented the idea of the series when, a couple of years ago, I was still a member of the Editorial Board of the London Sunday Times. This Board meets every Tuesday to comment on the issue of the previous Sunday, discuss the plans for the next issue and put forward longer-term projects.
It is quite a small Board of seven or eight heads of departments—I was Foreign Manager at the time—together with the Editor and the Proprietor, Mr. Roy Thomson, and we are all good friends, though at this weekly meeting, beneath the surface of our friendliness, lurk all the deadly sins with the exception of gluttony and lust. Each one of us has pride in our department of the paper; many of us are covetous of the editorial chair; most are envious of the bright ideas put forward by others; anger comes to the surface at what we regard as unmerited criticism, and sloth, certainly in my case, lurks in the wings.
The same pattern is probably followed at all executive meetings in all branches of business. When someone else puts up a bright idea, however useful or profitable it may be to the business concerned, traces at least of Envy, Anger and Covetousness will be roused in his colleagues. Yet, on the occasion when I put forward this particular "bright" idea for the future, I seem to remember nothing but approbation and a genial nodding of heads.
The project was outside my own sphere of action on the paper and I heard nothing more of it until I had left the Sunday Times to concentrate on writing thrillers centered round a member of the British Secret Service called James Bond. So I cannot describe what troubles the Literary Editor ran into in his endeavours to marry the Seven Deadly Sins to seven appropriate authors. So far as I can recall, the marriages I myself had suggested were closely followed, except that I had suggested Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge to write on the theme of Anger on the grounds that he is such an extremely angry man. In the event, as you will see, Mr W.H. Auden was the brilliant choice.
My next claim to introduce these essays was my suggestion to Mr. Lawrence Hughes, a friend of mine and a Director of William Morrow & Co., that he should publish them in a book. Usually when one makes brilliant suggestions to a publisher, a dull glaze comes-over his eyes and nothing happens. But in this case Larry Hughes was enthusiastic and, despite all kinds of copyright problems, energetically pursued my suggestion and gathered these seven famous English authors together between hard covers—no mean feat if you know anything about copyright and literary agents.
So you might think I could justifiably allow myself a modest indulgence in the deadly sin of Pride. You would be mistaken. I have read and re-read these essays with pleasure and profit, but their moral impact upon me has been uncomfortable. To be precise and truthful, the critical examination of these famous sins by some of the keenest brains of today has led me to the dreadful conclusion that in fact all these ancient sins, compared with the sins of today, are in fact very close to virtues.
To run through the list. I have always admired the Pride of Dame Edith Sitwell, the pride which, with her proudful brothers, has carried this remarkable literary family through battles of opinion and taste reaching back to my youth.
The Covetousness of Cyril Connolly, which he takes off so brilliantly in his piece of fiction, is one of his most endearing qualities and he would be a smaller and less interesting man without it.
The Gluttony for life, food, drink and women of Patrick Leigh-Fermor are the essence of his tremendous zest for everything. Lust? If Christopher Sykes is lustful, may he, and I for the matter of that, long remain so.
Envy has its ugly sides, but if I, as a second son amongst four, had not been envious of my older brother and his achievements I would not have wished all my life to try and emulate him. As for Anger, surely we all need more rather than less of it to combat the indifference, the "I'm all right, Jack" attitudes, of today.
Of all the seven, only Sloth in its extreme form of accidia, which is a form of spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy, so brilliantly examined by Evelyn Waugh, has my wholehearted condemnation, perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its face.
How drab and empty life would be without these sins, and what dull dogs we all would be without a healthy trace of many of them in our make up! And has not the depiction of these sins and their consequences been the yeast in most great fiction and drama? Could Shakespeare, Voltaire, Balzac, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy have written their masterpieces if humanity had been innocent of these sins? It is almost as if Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt and Van Gogh had been required to paint without using the primary colours.
The truth, of course, is that generally speaking these Seven Deadly Sins were enumerated by monks for monks, and one can easily see how mischievous and harmful they could be within a monastery.
We do not live in a monastery, but in a great pulsating ant heap, and this brings me back to the moral confusion into which I have been thrown by these essays and which amounts to feeling that there are other and deadlier sins which I would like to see examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this.
I have made a list of these Seven Deadlier Sins which every reader will no doubt wish to amend, and these are my seven: Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy, Self-righteousness, Moral Cowardice and Malice. If I were to put these modern seven into the scales against the ancient seven I cannot but feel that the weight of the former would bring the brass tray crashing down.
But is this loose thinking? Could it perhaps be argued that if we are free of the ancient seven we shall not fall victim to their modern progeny? I personally do not think so, but it would need better brains than mine and a keener sense of theological morality than I possess to pursue the argument. As a man in the street, I can only express my belief that being possessed of the ancient seven deadly sins one can still go to heaven, whereas to be afflicted by the modern variations can only be a passport to hell.
And by the same token, what about the Seven Deadly Virtues?
What about the anal-eroticism which the psychologists tell us lies at the base of Frugality? How much is Charity worth when it springs from self-interest? Is political acumen a virtue as practised by the Communists? What hell Sociability can be! Where is the line to be drawn between Deference and, not to use a more vulgar, hyphenated word, Sycophancy? Neatness in excess becomes pathological, so does Cleanliness. How often is Chastity a cloak for frigidity?
But I have held you for too long from these wonderful, and each in its different way exciting, essays and I must at all costs avoid that deadliest of all sins, ancient or modern, a sin which is surely more durable than any of those I have enumerated—that of being a Bore.
Fleming hoped his Seven Deadlier sins would be "examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this." 57 years later he got his wish...sort of.
At my suggestion, the website Artistic Licence Renewed has run a series of article on Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins, to examine how they apply to the Bond books and whether Fleming or Bond were guilty of them. It would have been impossible to assemble "authors of equal calibre" (especially since I was part of the new team), but the results are a worthy examples of literary criticism, in my obviously biased view.
The master page for the entire series is here. And here is the roster of Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins:
AVARICE, by Wesley Britton
HYPOCRISY, by Edward Biddulph
SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, by Michael May
MORAL COWARDICE, by Benjamin Welton
MALICE
CRUELTY
SNOBBERY
The last three sins were written by me. I had originally intended to write only "Malice," but had to pinch-hit after some authors became unable to work on the project. "Snobbery" was began by the editor of Artistic Licence Renewed, who deserves co-credit but is too modest to give it to himself.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about the Fleming's Deadlier Sins. If you think we've missed any examples of them, please say so!
By Ian Fleming
An essential item in my ‘Desert Island’ library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me each Friday by a well-trained albatross. If forced to produce some reason for my affection for the journal, I would lamely say that I am nearly always interested by its front page article, by the letters, although there are not enough of them, and, being myself a book collector, by its back page of bibliophily. But, less lamely, I would praise the anonymity of its writers and reviewers which surely lies at the root of the unshackled verdicts that are, sometimes to the point of splendidly savage denunciation, to be found in the T.L.S.
Not long ago I was flying over the Nevada Desert on my way from Los Angeles to Chicago. It was one leg of a lunatic journey round the world in thirty days writing about its thrilling cities for the Sunday Times. My mail had caught up with me at Los Angeles and it included two issues of The Times Literary Supplement. In contrast with the mushy infant food of the American newspapers and magazines that had been my daily fare since arriving in America, I cannot describe the thrill of excitement with which I read a particularly devastating review of Miss Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed: I remember that the slashing broadside made me almost lightheaded with pleasure.
All this is to explain the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book which would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April 14th, 1961, and some of which, by permission, I now reprint.
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among ‘lost’ books, this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it—if I would write an introduction. I will not discuss here my mixed reactions to this suggestion, but one thing was clear the rebirth of this book now lay, rightly or wrongly, with me. I had only to say "Fly again, little bird", and it would fly. So, of course, I accepted and asked Capes for any material they had about the book and the author. The result was extremely meagre, but among the yellowing scraps, mostly ecstatic reviews, there was one treasure—an introduction by James Agate to the author’s next book Helen Between Cupids. I cannot remember much of this or any other of Hugh Edwards’s books, but what Agate has to say about All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is so apt to the theme of what I now write that, risking the criticism that all my words are other people’s, I must repeat here some of what Mr. Agate had to say twenty-five years ago.
The rest of the introduction to Helen need not concern us. Suffice it to say that, despite rave reviews when All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s was first published in 1933, and despite Mr. Agate's powerful reminder in 1935, it took more than four years for the modest edition of fifteen hundred to be sold. The author earned £31.3s. and the publisher barely covered his costs, having rashly spent over £50 on advertising.
In 1937 the book was reset and republished in the "New Library" edition at 2s. 6d. (Edwards was in good company here. "The New Library" included Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and O’Flaherty’s The Informer) and this edition of a further three thousand sold out in seven years, earning £43.17s.9d. for the author. Edwards’s total reward for his "little masterpiece" thus amounted to just under £7 a year over eleven years, to which was later to be added a modest windfall of ten guineas when the little book was published in a Services paperback edition by Guild Books in 1943...
Hugh Edwards died in 1952 at the age of 74. At first I could find out nothing about him except, from his elderly sister, the widow of an Admiral, the following bare bones. He was born in Gibraltar in 1878 of a Naval family, was educated privately and then at Sandhurst whence he joined the West India Regiment and saw service mostly in the West Indies and West Africa. After twelve years in the army, he was invalided out and retired to his sister’s cottage in East Prawle in Devon. A forlorn attempt to render service in the First World War resulted only in a brief spell as an officer of the garrison of Cork. His health proved quite unequal to military duty and he returned to seclusion.
Encouraged by the success of former contributions to his regimental magazine (for which, incidentally, he had designed the cover) he had set about writing professionally, but it was some twenty years before Capes accepted his first novel, Sangoree. This was followed by the present book, then by Crack of Doom (Jonathan Cape, 1934), Helen Between Cupids (Jonathan Cape, 1935), and Macaroni (Geoffrey Bles, 1938). After that, silence! Hobbies: painting, polo, bridge and chess.
With these scraps of biography my researches had come to a full stop when, by chance, Commander and Mrs. E. J. King-Bull heard of my interest in Edwards and swam into my ken.
Commander E. J. King-Bull (who is, incidentally, a descendant of the character said to be the original ‘John Bull’ of old England) is a well-known writer and producer for the B.B.C. and has, with his wife, close connections with members of the Edwards family, notably the Leonards who, as children, sat at the feet of Hugh Edwards and listened to their uncle’s stories.
King-Bull was a great admirer of Edwards and, enjoying All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s as much as I do, turned the book into a radio play and persuaded the B.B.C. to allow him to produce it in the Third Programme in 1950. The play was conceived as a tribute not only to the memory of Hugh Edwards but also to the memory of King-Bull’s friend, the late Captain R. F. Leonard, D.S.C., R.N., from whom King-Bull had heard so much about Edwards. The play was a tremendous success, and was broadcast four times.
From what King-Bull told me it is clear that a whole book could be written about Hugh Edwards, but I have insufficient space here to do more than mortar together a few of the loose stones I have already put on display.
Having been at Sandhurst myself, and being thus able to imagine the regimental snobbery that must have permeated the place around about 1900, I was surprised that Edwards had joined the West India Regiment. But apparently about that time his parents lost most of their money and he had to accept a commission in an unfashionable regiment to protect his shallow purse. He was rewarded by seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendor—a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons— were to inspire all he wrote, culminating in the Kingston earthquake which features in his Crack of Doom. To Hugh Edwards the cataclysm may well have seemed to presage the vanishing of the only era in which he was to live any other than a kind of ghostly existence.
It was the custom in those days for one battalion of the regiment to alternate between the Caribbean and Sierra Leone, and it was while exploring the hinterland of Sierra Leone that Edwards contracted blackwater fever, as a result of which he was invalided out of the army with a meagre pension.
With this, and with his sister to keep house, he retired to the tiny fisherman's cottage in
East Prawle in which he lived the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books. It was at about this time that he inherited from a relative, who had been in his day a West Indian planter, a stack of old documents and diaries of the eighteenth century in which Edwards immersed himself to that extent of total rapport that emerges almost supernaturally in the story from which I am holding you.
It is interesting, perhaps, that he should have been stationed for a while at Cork, that fair Atlantic seaport which, in the heyday of eighteenth-century trade, had had long associations with the West Indies, and which forms part of the back-cloth to more than one of the novels.
At Prawle he lived the remote life of his imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of illustrated nonsense rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the holidays. One catches a glimpse of the man from the fact that, as I am told, he began the draft of an autobiography, never to see the light of day, by addressing in affectionate gallantry a bevy of his charming nieces and their friends.
In his Edwardian youth he had been, by all accounts, a young blade of tremendous dash and virility and with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for these things, and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the background of high life to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s are sentimental memories of the young rake-hell he had once been.
Perhaps also the poignancies of this story, which so pierce the heart, are in part tears shed for his brief youth. But these and other secrets of this strange and in some curious sense ghostly figure have gone to his grave with him and will, I fancy, never be disturbed.
I, at any rate, have come to the end of my brief researches into the story of the man who wrote All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s and it is now time for him to speak in his own strange and beautiful words.
Note: I read All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s several years ago and must confess that it didn't make much of an impression on me. But you can decide its merits for yourself, since the book is available for free online at the Internet Archive.
The Honoured Society by Norman Lewis (Collins 30s)
By Ian Fleming
The Mafia, the Chinese Tongs and the assassination Apparat of the Soviet K.G.B., great grandspawn of the TCHECKA, are the only deeply evil phantoms of the past that still haunt the world. I have left out America gangsterdorm, for all its many-sided horror, because it is a mere stripling in the sudden-and-slow-death markets and only gained its “official quotation” in this century (unless we count the rough house “Tweed Mob” of the 1870s which, I dare say, was pretty bad news in Keystone Cop days ). The others have been buying and selling murder almost since markets in other world commodities—wheat, bullion, insurance—organised themselves (for greater efficiency) into cooperative groups.
The secrets of the Mafia were bound to be cracked first. Its cohesion was, paradoxically, too tightly knit, its family ties too incestuously woven, its geographical boundaries, though it tried with some success to extend them to the United States, too confined. It had not got the vast backgrounds of China or Russia into which to disappear when the heat, momentarily, was on. The Mafia’s fate was in danger when it began eating itself, stealing its own funds, betraying itself. The phase will no doubt pass.
Norman Lewis is not writing the Mafia’s obituary, only an interim appendix to one secret chapter of contemporary history. “Cosa nostra”—that chummy password from the dripping shrubberies of some schoolboys’ gangland—will continue to be “Our Thing” so long as Sicily stays harsh and poor and its tough people bite back at the world like cornered hounds. But I admit that, in my life-time, I never expected a writer to tell me with quiet, unjournalistic authority what the Mafia is, how it operates, with names and dates, and what it has been up to since the war.
To give a synopsis of the book daunts me. The families, the politicians, local and national, the tortuous double role of the police—of everybody down to A.M.G.O.T. officials—cannot be summarised. Even the foursquare figure of Giuliano, the famous bandit, grows further sides—six, eight, ten—as you tread among the crosses and double-crosses of which he was now the architect and now the pawn. But what interested me as a writer of crime fiction was how in the name of heaven Norman Lewis was able to open this grim and closely guarded safe deposit and get away with the contents. And, since so many of the host who will read this book will ask the same question, here is what I have elicited from him and his publishers.
Norman Lewis served throughout the Hitler war in the Intelligence Corps in the Mediterranean area. He is bilingual in Italian and his first marriage was to a Sicilian from an aristocratic Palermo family who, as automatically as any Lampedusa character, was privy to the secrets of the Mafia. From this and other more secret sources he was able to proceed to the detective work which has occupied him for the past two years. It was then only a question of putting the story down in the exciting narrative style Norman Lewis’s many admirers are accustomed to, and one’s only disappointment is that he didn’t spend another year in America expanding on his over-brief references to the overseas, and particularly American, operations of the Mafia and the links between its empire and its Sicilian motherland.
As I have suggested earlier, Norman Lewis is not greatly impressed by the recent clean-up and the “exile” of Genco Russo. Many Mafiosi have put up the shutters or even pulled out, just as happened to the London gangs who rapidly dispersed into temporary retirement when the heat generated by the Great Mail Robbery was at its height. Unless marina falls from heaven on Sicily, it will be “business as usual” within a matter of months and every Sicilian will once again be in that business at least up to his elbows.
Note: A week after this review's publication, Fleming wrote the following to his Sunday Times editor Leonard Russell:
"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."
Fleming's review was published little more than months before his death, which makes it the last article or literary work Fleming ever wrote. And so this thread comes to an end.
Well hopefully you will find some more Fleming rarities in the future Revelator, and please post them here when you do.
I've sure been enjoying all these articles. Titles I've seen mentioned in the Fleming bios but never thought I'd get a chance to read myself.
I'm delighted you've been enjoying them! I would very much like to find more of Fleming's literary journalism, but I have the feeling there isn't much unnoticed work left to discover. What's left in my collection are some of Fleming's travel and treasure-hunting articles, but those are too long for online reading, especially on a message board. There are also one or two interviews with Fleming that have yet to be tracked down, including one for the New York Herald-Tribune. Whatever I find I will be sure to post here.
Note: When I started this thread I decided against posting "How to Write a Thriller" because it was easily found on many other websites. But I recently acquired scans of the original article from *Show* magazine and realized most of the online versions are slightly abridged. Here is the most complete available text of the article. Because of limitations on post length I will post it in two parts.
How to Write a Thriller
President Kennedy’s favorite fiction writer, the creator of secret agent James Bond, offers his recipe for best-selling suspense.
by Ian Fleming (Show: The Magazine of the Arts, August 1962)
"The only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money.”
In this disarming memoir the British journalist who, in a dozen thrillers, has given the world a hugely successful combination of E. Phillips Oppenheim and Mickey Spillane, discusses some problems of his craft. He also shows how they cause him to be keenly aware of the world around him, and “this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.”
The craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. In this age of higher education, writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.
I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are not designed to find favor with the Homintern. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds.
I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semifriendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport. “I bet you call yourself an Author,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists and then again there are writers and painters.”
This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, whilst stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman from the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money.
I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money. I say unashamedly because writing for money was once a respectable profession. Balzac did it, and so did Dickens. In fact, when Dickens found that reading his works aloud brought in more money than writing, he more or less gave up writing. Walter Scott may have enjoyed writing to begin with, but subsequently he only turned out books to satisfy his creditors. Trollope wrote for money as strenuously and impersonally as if he were working at the coalface. And then of course there was that man, what was his name again? who obviously hadn’t the smallest idea he was writing as well as he was. He wrote for his supper in the troubadour fashion. When he became famous and “got into the money,” so to speak, he blew it all on having a coat of arms designed for himself and buying the biggest house in, where was it now? Stratford-on-Avon, and then had to sit down and churn out some reams of blank verse to pay for it.
All this is heresy, and of course there is a big difference between being respectably married to a rich muse and being a literary prostitute, but I would like to make the point that where fame is the spur for some, money is for others.
I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature,” whose practitioners have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.
All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose-style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative. But these qualities will not make a bestseller. There is only one recipe, for a bestseller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.
If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have this quality. You simply have to turn over the page.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. That is why I said that your prose must be simple and unmannered. You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages.
There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader. He must never have to ask himself “Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?” Above all, and this goes for so many thrillers and detective stories, there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects on, what he might have done or what he proposes to do next. There must be no wads of space-filling prose. By all means, set the Scene or enumerate the heroine’s measurements as lovingly as you wish but, in doing so, each word must tell, and interest, or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.
I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him furiously and shouting “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, “Goldfinger,” three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.
Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narrative, what are we to put in the book—what are the ingredients of a thriller?
Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses—a absolutely anything. In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of. Personally I am not a gourmet and I abhor wine-and-foodmanship. My own favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of “Live and Let Die,” James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proofreader at my English publishers, Jonathan Cape, suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for James Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say, “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.
This business of meals may seem a small thing to worry about, but in fact it is a part of all successful writing, which consists of writing interesting words rather than dull ones. Leaving out the economic factor, that is, the actual price of the food, it is surely more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by homemade trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque), you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinners; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
You may well say that all this is nonsense, and so it would be if your target was the reader’s intellect rather than his senses. However good the cottage pie and the trifle, eating them in one’s imagination, as the reader will, is a banal experience, and banality is the enemy of the English thriller writer. What I endeavor to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.
I have not thought this theme out very carefully, nor have I reread any of my books to see if it stands up to close examination, but I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places round the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of James Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, “pleasures” the reader and takes him out of his dull surroundings into a warmer, more colorful, more luxurious, world. In a fashion which I suppose nowadays would be described as “subliminal,” this predisposes him favorably towards the book.
At this stage, let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavoring to analyze the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me, and if there is a strong streak of hedonism in my books it is there not by guile but because it comes out through the tip of my ballpoint pen.
All right, now we have style and pace and plenty of pleasure. What other ingredients must we add?
In my case, though not in the cases of such masters as Ambler, Hammett and Simenon, my plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from West to East Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb’s frogman exploit to examine the hull of the Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets; the Gouzenko case in Canada that led to the arrest of Fuchs; The Man Who Never Was—the corpse with the false invasion plans that we left for the Gestapo to find on the Spanish Coast. This is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate. Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4 1/2-litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these small details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.
Again I repeat that this technique is not, or certainly was not until I came to write about it, guileful. I am interested in things and in their exact description. I see no point in changing the name of the Ritz to the Grand Hotel Majestic, or the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to a Hirondelle. The technique crept into my first book, “Casino Royale.’’ I realized that the plot was fantastic and I wondered how I could anchor it to the ground so that it wouldn’t take off completely. I did so by piling on the verisimilitude of the background and of the incidental situations, and the combination seemed to work.
By the same token, I rarely write about places I have not seen. In “Live and Let Die,” for instance, the descriptions—of Idlewild, Harlem, an American express train, St.Petersburg in Florida,the underwater terrain of off-shore Jamaica—are technically accurate. I know these places. They have great romance and excitement for me, and I try to communicate these feelings to the reader.
Well, I seem to be getting on very well with picking my books to pieces, so we might as well pick still deeper. People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.”
I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, “Casino Royale,” there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other was of blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a high explosive bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which the two assassins could escape. One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smokescreen before throwing the bomb. In fact, of course, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the identical method used in the Russian attempt on von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgars and they were blown to nothing while von Papen and Frau von Papen, walking from their house to the Embassy, were only knocked down and bruised by the blast.
As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident: I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence—Admiral Godfrey—in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence before America came into the war. We were taking the Southern Atlantic route, and our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop. We had talks there with our Intelligence people and they described how Lisbon and the neighboring Estoril were crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants, we were told, gambled every night in the casino at Estoril. I immediately suggested to the D.N.I. that he and I should have a look at these people. We went and there were the three men, whose descriptions we had, playing at the high *Chemin de Fer* table. The D.N.I. didn’t know the game. I explained it to him and then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service. It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had some £50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out. A humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief’s estimation.
It was this true incident which is the kernel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre.
Finally, the torture scene. There were many tortures used in the war by the Germans, but the worst were devised by the Moroccan-French. What I described in “Casino Royale” was a greatly watered-down version of one of these French-Moroccan tortures known as *Passer à la Mandoline* [stretching a mandolin string between the testes], which was practiced on several of our agents.
So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one and, if I had time, I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some such real happenings as I have described. [End of first part]
["How to Write a Thriller" continued]
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
A house is being demolished in the suburbs of Oxford, a Victorian villa, let us say. In the cellars, the demolition team unearths a tiny theater with a small stage and a dozen seats. Everything is upholstered in faded red velvet. There are signs of recent use. What was this little theater for? What went on there? Immediately our imagination takes off and is sent orbiting like a Sputnik in the sinister realms of black magic, Aleister Crowley, Cinemas Bleus, murdered virgins and the rest. What about that Cambodian student at Balliol? They say he eats live mice dipped in honey. Things with a capital T have been disappearing from the operating theater of the hospital. What has happened to Brunella McNought, the pretty young physicist “à la cuisse hospitalière" as the French put it so gracefully, at Lady Margaret Hall? She hasn’t been seen for weeks...and, so on and so forth. You see! We are almost there. All we need is a caricature of you for the hero, the four fried eggs, the hot-buttered toast and the large cup of black coffee and “The Blonde with a Bomb in Her Bustle” is on the bookstalls.
Haying assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathize with you. I, too, am lazy. Probably rather lazier than you. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well-chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
In my case one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work, whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so that I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these two months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef. But by the sixth year I had exhausted all the possibilities inherent in these activities, I had ironed out the problem of taking on a rather difficult job as Foreign Manager to The Sunday Times of London at the end of the war, and I was about to get married—a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidgets. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 year as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can strongly recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.
So far as the physical act of writing is concerned, the method I have devised is this: I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine and—I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything, and I never look back at what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. 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.
By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be, and is, in my case, in around six weeks. I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is finished I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting short passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape, and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a more or less fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a salutary dig at the author’s vanity to realize how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the jeweled words which it has taken him so many months to try and arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labors, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and 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, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, 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.
Much appreciated, Revelator. Thank you for posting this and the other Fleming texts some may have missed.
yes, more @Revelator content! welcome back old chum, thanks for this and the info on the new Fleming biography you gave us elsewhere.
I appreciate the upgrade on How to Write a Thriller. I checked the version I have saved to my harddrive and its preface states it was cobbled together from various incomplete and contradictory sources, definitely that was a placeholder til something more complete came along. So was it published in a few different places in slightly different forms each time?
This essay is another one of those items that should be compiled into an official book of appendices to Fleming's Bond canon, along with the abandoned short stories, his notebook of plot ideas, various film and teevee proposals etc. I know he wrote a lot that is long out of print, but there is a subset that is specifically Bond related that if complied would make for a good Volume 15.
say hi to our pal @Thunderpussy for us.
Totally agree with the last line there, please say hi.
Bloody hell, what an amazing thread and some amazing work being done here by @Revelator
How come I never read this before? Oh, wait, I was otherwise preoccupied through 2019...
I need to read these in close detail. they are essential essay reading for Fleming aficionados and share sometime quite brilliant insight.
Thanks very much for the kind words gentlemen!
"How to Write a Thriller" was indeed reprinted by several other publications, usually with cuts and edits. As far as I know, the Show magazine version is the original and most complete one. The article was based on Fleming's Oxford University student lecture “The Art, or Craft, of Writing Thrillers,” delivered in May 1962.
Along with most of Fleming's journalism, "How to Write a Thriller" is collected in Talk of the Devil, one of the rarest and most expensive Fleming books around. It was published in 2008 but only as part of the Queen Anne Press edition of The Complete Works of Ian Fleming. The cheapest edition of this set goes for £2,000. If I ever win the lottery...
Me too. You know, that wouldn't make a bad Bond title (certainly we've had worse).
Ian Fleming on the film Our Man in Havana (The Third Programme, BBC, Jan. 7, 1959)
It is very sad that they are even knocking the Secret Service these days. Sad, I mean, for those who have thrilled since their childhood to the glorious myth and sad for all the world of writers and actors whose livelihood depends on the Great Stone Face, perhaps with a black patch over one eye, that can be written about and acted but for security’s sake never properly described.
Already most of the Secret Service cliches have died. In the old days it was apparently possible to get hold of a beautiful girl with a basic training in architecture and ballistics and get her into bed with the enemy general who, between transports, would give her full details of the fortress that was the strong point in his country’s defence. And there was that great prize of the code book purloined by the embassy valet, and the people in mackintoshes followed by other people in mackintoshes, the conversations among the potted palms and champagne buckets overheard by mustachioed waiters, and the assassinations—right down to William Le Queux’s explosive cigar between the lips of the English Foreign Secretary—all these splendid situations are so rusty that no amount of oil can cure the squeaks and rattles of steam-age spy-manship.
Nowadays, and for so long as war is a threat, the spy is a ticking seismograph on top of the Jungfrau measuring distant atomic explosions on the other side of the world, or instruments carried in aircraft that measure the uranium or plutonium content of the atmosphere, and these things have about as much romance as a dentist’s drill.
Except in very small contexts, the number of tanks, the number of soldiers, the design even of a hydrogen bomb, are hardly worth the powder of a Secret Service. The big people have all the big weapons and the small people have them not. Details of the weapons are unimportant. They are known. They’ll destroy the world. There is only one thing to know, a sure thing, and that knowledge itself is only vital for perhaps a quarter of an hour during which preventive or retaliatory measures can be mounted—where, exactly when, to a millionth of a second, is whose finger going to press a button?
These things being so, and they are so, any book or play or film about the Secret Service must be either incredible or farcical. Personally, I am sufficiently in love with the myth to write basically incredible stories and to keep, without any difficulty for I am in love with the myth, a straight face. Graham Greene in his book had a more ruthless approach and a modern one. He took the splendid Secret Service myth of centuries and kicked it hilariously downstairs.
Briefly, Our Man in Havana is a vacuum cleaner salesman called Wormold (a typical “reluctant hero” name) eking out a living in Havana in company with his daughter, in the book an adorable nymphet, on whom, since his wife left him, Wormold lavishes his love and his spare money. Alec Guinness is totally Wormold, as he is totally all his acting parts, but Miss Jo Morrow as his daughter, endowed with only half the appropriate co-efficient of nymphetry, seems more like a mistress.
Wormold, because of the cash that will help to push his daughter on in Havana Society, is half-willingly impressed into the Secret Service by Noel Coward, who plays the pin-stripe “Steady on, old man” Secret Service agent to hilarious perfection.
Alec Guiness soon finds that he can get by in the Secret Service with a lot of half-baked mumbo-jumbo. He uses names drawn at random from the membership list of the local country club and reinforces them with drawings on secret weapons copied from his vacuum cleaner catalogue.
This splendid situation, that is almost too close to the truth for those who served in wartime intelligence to find funny, should proceed horribly from farce to real terror but somehow it doesn’t quite come through. The photography is magnificent—the sleazy and acutely observed Cuban scene [is] dotted with harsh-looking Cuban police and dominated by the vast personality of Burl Ives. (The trouble with Ives is that he always has the ability to act anyone else off the screen. Here he plays the agent of an unspecified power as Emil Jannings would have played him.)
Miss Maureen O’Hara, the Secret Service agent sent out from London headquarters to help Wormold—does Wormold marry her in the end? I couldn’t make [it] out—is as desriable as I would wish her to be, and Mr. Ernie Kovacs as the Chief of Police has all the villainy of understatement and, because he has been solidly cast, holds the narrative sequence more or less together. There is of course not enough of Sir Ralph Richardson, the Chief of the Secret Service and head of the tragical farce that Graham Greene has made of our favourite myth.
For the rest, it need only be said that if the Secret Service had to be kicked downstairs, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Sir Ralph Richardson should have been able to do it. In fact this film, which is somehow made extraordinarily incomprehensible, is largely carried, despite the great names, by Mr. Ernie Kovacs, Mr. Burl Ives, and Miss Maureen O’Hara, in that order.
I’m afraid I don’t understand Sir Carol Reed. He directs individual scenes brilliantly but so often it seems to me he loses narrative sequences. In short this to me was a brilliant book that has somehow lost its point, and it was a very good one, as a film.
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Note: A year earlier Fleming had reviewed the novel Our Man in Havana.