Had Ian Fleming lived beyond 1964...
Silhouette Man
The last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
...into the late 1960s and the 1970s, where would he have taken James Bond? Ian Fleming would hardly have approved of the direction the world took post-the 1964 General Election and the end of 'The Land of Lost Content'. The Beatles, The Rollng Stones, Harold Wlson's brand of new Socialism, 'White Heat', The Beat Movement, the Energy Crisis, the Man on the Moon, the Hippy Revolution, habitual illegal drug use, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Ian Smith in Rhodesia, the Nuclear Deterrent etc. etc. etc.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on what Fleming might have written about in this broad subject area on the background of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on what Fleming might have written about in this broad subject area on the background of the late 1960s and 1970s.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
Perhaps he might of got another writer in to co-wright some, as some modern writers
have done. but in the end, I think he'd of put Bond to bed.
The Ending to YOLT was a perfect, mysterious end to the Character. He should of left it there and then.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I thought he pretty much ended it at the end of TMWTGG.
He probably would of passed it onto someone else, and became a background Ideas Person.
Yes, that seems to be a modern trend with thriller writers, e.g. Alistair Maclean, Tom Clancy et al.
Fleming would have undoubtedly disliked much of what happened after 1964, though whether he'd have hated every new development is up for question. Perhaps he might have found some aspects of the counterculture of interest--or perhaps future Bond villains would have relied on student protesters. We can't be sure. Fleming's ecological interests would have likely made him sympathetic to the environmental movement.
Imagining what would have happened if Fleming lived also involves rewriting established history, because if Fleming survived then he would not have been afflicted by the illnesses of his final years, and that means both YOLT and TMWTGG would be different books from those we know today. (YOLT would have likely had a tighter structure and less travelogue material.)
My own predictions are that many future Bond villains would have been KGB agents, though like Amis Fleming might have gravitated to the Red Chinese. There would be plots involving NASA-type space programs, and perhaps some involving drug smuggling (Fleming's interest in this is clear from The Poppy Is Also a Flower). Bond would go to some of the places Fleming was captivated by in Thrilling Cities, like Hong Kong and Macao. And the books would probably grow slightly more self-parodic and humorous, though there would be further griping and bitterness on the decline Britain. Fleming certainly died on the cusp of a new era, and wondering how Bond would have reacted to it is one of the great what-ifs of spy fiction.
Thank you, Revelator. Yes, he certainly did die on the cusp of a new era, didn't he?
The end of the short orthodox premiership of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Tory grandee and his replacement at the October 1964 election by Harold Wilson by the tiny majority of just four seats brought the end to what was dubbed the "13 years of Tory missrule" (1951-1964) and it ultimately brought about the end of the "Land of Lost Content". Interestingly, Lord Home's brother Henry was responsible for breaking Ian Fleming's nose at a football match at Eton, resulting in a permanent break and a metal plate having to be fitted.
Bond novels by Gardner, Benson etc. Or do they have some order
stopping any other company buying the rights.
I know EON now own all the rights to all the fleming Novels but I
was wondering about the rest.
The documentary on the book rights for Casino Royale ( On dvd )
is amazing, The rights went through so many hands, and companies
untill Eon finally got them.
Eon owns the rights to the Continuation Bonds also as far as I know but has so far elected to do nothing with them. They'd have to pay 10% to IFP and presumably 10% or less to the Estate of Gardner, to Raymond Benson etc. This puts them off filming the continuations, though they have of course used elements from them over the years.
My pleasure, Thunderpussy.
Also, Richard 'Dikko' Hughes's "Sayonara to James Bond" (which can be read in Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies or Hughes's Foreign Devil) relates that Fleming was extremely interested in researching and visiting the Panama Canal. Hughes believes Fleming intended to send Bond there, and only illness got in the way.
Lastly, given how often Fleming said he was fed up with Bond, I wonder if he would have eventually accepted outside help with the series. Not necessarily ghostwriters, but committee-drafted plots and scenarios which Fleming would oversee and rework to his satisfaction. Alexandre Dumas's collaboration with Auguste Maquet, which produced The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, is an example.
Thank you, Revelator. I have that book by Richard Hughes. It has some interesting details and is one of the cornerstones for my upcoming article, among some other forgotten things.
Some good food for thought there on Fleming and drugs - I concur.
Obviously, even had his health not overcome him, the TB lawsuit, his troubled marriage and having a son to support took it's toll anyway. I think he would have divorced, kept drinking and smoking and would have been even more depressed at the shrinking of the empire and the counter culture youth movement that slowly strangled to death his conservative world and the values, manners and attire along with it. Though EON kept his character modern, Fleming was part of an anachronistic British culture that was fading away.
Given all that, he may have written a couple more novels and may have even placed Bond back in the fifties in them. However, with the success of the films and all their clones, it's hard to say whether he would have done that or just would have let the whole thing go and lived off his money from the novels and films.
Sure, the idea of an Amis CS would certainly have appealed to IF's vanity and Jenkins PFO would most likely have seen the light of day, but I doubt much else. There would certainly not have been anything as remotely vulgar as JB by John Gardner nor - shudder at IF's reaction - Raymond Benson.
Consider: Fleming said the books go wildly beyond the probable but not the possible - imagine, then IF's reaction to the lunacy of the film of YOLT. It has been suggested that the film YOLT might have been a template for Fleming's new direction; I totally disagree. Fleming's last novel TMWTGG was understated and a return to the simplicity of DAF. Many suggest this is because the novel was half-formed. But what if it was as IF intended, a simple novel as a response to his over-inflated TSWLM and YOLT. Might Fleming have planned a series of gritty but straightforward thrillers?
I think its undeniable IF's input would have slowed; he seems essentially to be a lazy sod. But I can see him returning to HIS creation, as he had after FRWL and YOLT, though with the usual self-pitying background affectations of a man of his nature. And JB would have become more Connery as he had from OHMSS onward, culminating in the two becoming one in the steaming macho meeting of JB and Scaramanga in Savannah La Mar.
However, one can only imagine how IF would have recoiled at the sight of YOLT Connery? Would he have "rebooted" when he saw Lazenby? Would he have got round to the early 70s Bond novel where a semi-retired Bond has married for a second time, two kids, a Rover and a house overlooking Royal St Marks and is suffering from loads of ennui?
I'm no so sure. While Fleming was a conservative, he delighted in the modern world and all it could offer: fast cars, airplanes, kitchen gadgets and the like. I even think he delighted in taking a haughty, conservative view of the new world around him :
"James Bond slung his suitcase into the back of the old chocolate-brown Austin taxi and climbed into the front seat beside the foxy, pimpled young man in the black leather windcheater. The young man took a comb out of his breast pocket, ran it carefully through both sides of his duck-tail haircut, put the comb back in his pocket, then leaned forward and pressed the self-starter. The play with the comb, Bond guessed, was to assert to Bond that the driver was really only taking him and his money as a favor. It was typical of the cheap self-assertiveness of young labor since the war. This youth, thought Bond, makes about twenty pounds a week, despises his parents, and would like to be Tommy Steele. It's not his fault. He was born into the buyers' market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight. For him, life is easy and meaningless. Bond said, "How far is it to Shrublands?''" Thunderball, Chapter 2.
If Fleming were still alive, do you think the producers would have made Fleming's YOLT into a film rather than ask Roald Dahl to write an original story with merely a Fleming title? None of the films before showed disrespect to Fleming's books, but to take Fleming's title and put a completely different story to it is disrespectful to Fleming (regardless of whether the film's story is good or not).
There is still a fair amount of Fleming's YOLT in the film - though a lower % than previously- and I would hope that figure would have been higher if he had lived.
Once again we'll never know, but if Richard Maibaum had been the chief scriptwriter then we might have had a very different YOLT today.
Ironically, up to now I was of the belief that Fleming would have never relinquished control of the books to ghost writers. I still don't think he would have relinquished full control. Now, in the case of Colonel Sun, Fleming would have probably limited himself to reviewing the manuscript and giving suggestions, but in other cases--involving less prominent writers with less understanding of Bond--the working process might have been similar to what happened with Thunderball (albeit with better legal protection). Plotting was never Fleming's strongest skill, and he might have appreciated help with that.
In my last post I also brought up the example of Auguste Maquet and Alexandre Dumas, who cowrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and many other books. The two would have "script conferences," after which Maquet would plot each chapter or provide a summary with skeleton dialogue. Dumas would then flesh out the lifeless directions and produce a rich work of literature. Perhaps Fleming would have found a Maquet of his own to keep the Bond bandwagon rolling.
Perhaps you meant OHMSS rather TSWLM, though neither seems over-inflated to me, and pretty much all of the Bond novels seem gritty and straightforward next to the films. In Fleming, the flamboyance tends to derive either from the villain's scheme or his lair, and one could argue that the Bond books had already reached their height of flamboyance in Goldfinger (the Fort Knox setting and plot) and Thunderball (the nuclear hijacking). The settings and schemes in OHMSS and YOLT are smaller-scale and more plausible than those of the earlier books. I would interpret that as a sign of Fleming winding down, with TMWTGG as final proof. That book's villainous scheme is downright boring (sugar futures? really?) and its setting was chosen because Fleming didn't have to travel to obtain it (the book would have been more interesting if set in Cuba, and doubly interesting if Fleming had made it to the Panama Canal).
But ultimately we return to the main factor: Fleming's health. If he was in better shape, I have no doubt that he would tried to compete with the flamboyance of the movies--because he would have likely enjoyed the film of Goldfinger and because he knew the public would come to expect such qualities. The film of YOLT would have probably been a step too far for him, but the filmmakers would have been more hesitant to jettison the books of a living author.
Hey, one book a year is not lazy! Chandler thought it positively prolific, though it should be said that truly prolific writers--like E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace, and Erle Stanley Gardner--often dictated their books to their secretaries (so did Henry James, but he was never a bestseller).
Not a chance YOLT would have been the bloated film it became in 1967.
I suspect Cubby and Harry would have used IF as a sounding board on most things (though as Barbel points out there was no obligation to), a sort of Obi Wan figure. I think as soon as they had floated a hollowed out volcano and space craft kidnapping, IF would have laughed and thrown plausibility back at that. I think IF's view would have overcome any movie maker hustering from Cubs and Harold...
I would also suggest that in 1967 IF would have suggested to them that if EON wanted to make an action Bond they should consider making MOONRAKER or OHMSS (regardless of the inconvenience of snow...)....
As another thought, I wonder of IF would have involved himself with mediating with Connery? Connery would surely have respected IF as Bond's creator, (though other than a nod to Terence Young, Connery thought no one else had worked on Bond other than himself) or would Fleming have considered by the mid 60s Connery was nothing more than a out of shape below stairs hand who was blowing his chance and wasn't worth his time?
Did you ever write this piece, and if so where online (or on this forum) can it be found? I checked your blog but didn't see it there, unless I just missed it. I'd love to read it!