by Andrew Cook
In the long term, Ian Fleming really was doing Cape a favour, and the huge success of his early books owed a lot to his own drive in talking the book up and exploiting his networks – making sure that before the book appeared in 1953, review copies would go to all the right people. Raymond Chandler complimented ‘the best thriller writer since Eric Ambler. Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of the narrative art … the reader has to go on reading.’ Fleming was on the phone again, demanding a bigger print run.
Ivar Bryce noticed that it was well reviewed, and extremely popular: there were three printings because of rising demand. Even so, he though it ‘gave little notice to the publishing world of the torrential rain of gold gathering strength over the horizon’.
Fleming asked Bryce to find an American publisher for him – one willing to put in the effort and shift a lot of copies. ‘I am not being vain about this book, but simply trying to squeeze the last dirty cent out of it.’ Doubleday took the bait. Ian may have asked Paul Gallico, too, because he put in a word. Gallico, the massively prolific storyteller, loved the book anyway; he had already referred Ian to his own Hollywood agent. Things were going pretty well. ‘My signature is beginning to look more and more like Shakespeare’s’ Ian wrote. He could be quite funny when things were going well.
Cape offered him a three-book deal, but he didn’t bite. He thought he could get a better offer elsewhere. Because he didn’t think they were pushy enough, he insisted on contributing to their advertising budget for the book. He added a third as much as they’d been willing to spend. But Cape were British. America was a vastly bigger market, and in his view, the Britishness of Bond was his unique selling point; he was nothing like the usual gumshoe of American detective fiction. And since the USA had only recently got its own dedicated spy service, it had no spy-fiction genre. There had never been an American Scarlet Pimpernel, Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond. The things Bond knew and the way he behaved would be a revelation, he thought. There was also the class advantage: hadn’t Ivar Bryce, old Etonian, managed to attract one of the wealthiest women in America? Americans in the forties may have thought a cut-glass English accent meant ‘a faggot’, but American women found it sexy. In Ian’s experience they did, anyway. They would love the laconic, precise manner of Bond’s speech in the book.
Macmillan published Casino Royale in New York, after minor editorial tweaks, in 1953. It sold, though it didn’t set the world on fire. Elsa Maxwell, whom the Flemings knew, gave it a good review.
In London he continued to seek distraction from his job at The Sunday Times. He got involved as a publisher with the Queen Anne Press, which produced the work of many friends – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Skelton and Cyril Connolly.
Eve must have been rather proud by the end of 1952. First of all she had a new grandson, Caspar. Ian had named his son after the Admiral Caspar John, the only boy born in wedlock out of Augustus John’s fourteen-odd offspring. Peter, who wrote for The Spectator these days, had published A Forgotten Journey, Ian had had Casino Royale accepted and Amaryllis Fleming was the toast of the town. She had spent her career so far touring with ensembles and trios and quartets, constantly learning and winning prizes. She had been taught by some of the great cellists of her time, including Pablo Casals and Pierre Fournier.
In 1952, she won another of many prizes, and Eve hired the Wigmore Hall for Amaryllis Fleming’s début as a star. The hall was packed. All her half-brothers were there, and so was Princess Marie-Louise. Afterwards there was a big party at Fortnum and Mason. Amaryllis was launched. That summer she appeared at a Promenade concert with the Hallé at the Royal Albert Hall, and bookings came in from all over Europe. They continued to do so for decades.
A few years after that night at the Wigmore Hall, she confronted Eve about her parentage. Eve denied it. In the end it was Augustus John who, after much hesitation, admitted that she was his daughter. She met and spent time with the rest of the John half-siblings, including Caspar and his sister Poppet John. Poppet was one of the Connolly-Skelton-Freud-Topolski set, who were friends of Anne Fleming.
Amaryllis would go on to become one of the world’s leading cellists. It is often said that her career did not fade until the arrival of Jacqueline du Pré.
• 9 •
TECHNIQUE
• GLAMOUR •
When his second book, Live and Let Die, was published to much applause in England in 1953, Ian exulted. The James Bond series could run and run. ‘It is the freshness of the situations I put him into that are most important’. It was also the glamour. Writing the book in Jamaica the year before, he had handled a particular talisman every day. It was a gold-plated Imperial typewriter, a unique object he’d ordered as a present to himself after Casino Royale.
It stood on his desk as a reminder. The British craved luxury. Their clothes had not come ‘off ration’ until 1949, and confectionery and sugar were still rationed. Consumer goods from abroad – silk stockings, imported records, new drinks and cameras and cars – were a revelation. Anything from America or even France seemed better designed, glossier, silkier and vastly more desirable than the grey flannel, peach underwear and brown paper that Britain was still wrapped up in. Britain was cold, with grey light. The Clean Air Act had not been passed, and London was foggy six months of the year, the buildings soot-blackened, the rain-spattered windows brown, skylights still blocked with blackout paint. Single, bare electric light bulbs cast shadows in living rooms. Ugly British Standard paint colours were ubiquitous. A fresh ‘look’ was slow to arrive. Crowds at the Festival of Britain saw how clever designers could exploit tiny resources. Paper quality had declined during the war, and British illustrators had become expert at making arresting wallpaper and book illustration that could be printed in only three or four colours.
People craved light, laughter and better food. From October to May, vegetables stocked by a high street greengrocer would be turnips, swedes, parsnips, cabbages, beetroots, sprouts, onions, carrots and potatoes. There would be no garlic, or anything at all out of season; if you wanted peas, they came in a tin. Only the smartest restaurants imported food and good wine from abroad. Cars were still usually black. Luxuries were out of reach to almost everybody. Austerity could not continue, and the British were eager for change.
So the gold-plated typewriter, and his gunmetal cigarette case which was really gold as well, reminded Ian of the glee his readers felt when James Bond ordered a vodka and tonic, noticed Revlon bottles in a lover’s bathroom or roared away in a speedboat. Revlon isn’t an upmarket brand today, but it was an exotic American import then. You couldn’t get vodka in the pub either. Most people had never tasted it.
• INSIDE INFORMATION •
When Bond saw a character with ‘brand new Ben Hogan clubs’ his readers already knew enough about the golfer who owned them to guess that those must be the best set you could buy. Knowing the significance of a brand implied experience of other options. You knew the best, because (in your exciting life) you’d tried the rest. If you didn’t keep up with what James Bond knew, you were a hick, because if the business you’d founded with your demob money went well enough, you might get invited to join a golf club, and thanks to Ian Fleming you would know what clubs to buy. James Bond would always be one step ahead. He knew so much that he had his cigarettes specially blended, which was awe-inspiring. If James Bond had a camera, it would be described with precision; perhaps Minolta Minox, a tiny apparatus that few people would have heard of before and even fewer could afford.
Fleming hit on the difference between new money and old. New has to be told the right label to buy. Old has had years of experience and hunts down the item that satisfies his unmet need – in Bond’s case, for miniaturisation and a good lens.
In Britain, in the fifties, people wanted to know about glamorous things because they were looking forward to a better life. As well as social sophistication, James Bond offered a kind of street-wise canniness. He passed on a
few tips about criminals. From James Bond, you found out how card sharps cheated (‘he wore no signet-ring for pricking the cards, no surgical tape wrapped round a finger for marking them’). Ian gave readers vague hints about tradecraft – false names, codes, that sort of thing. With insider nuggets like that to hand, you could impress your friends even if you’d never played poker or deceived a soul in your life. In this confusing post-war world there would be no flies on you. You’d be suspected of having a hidden hinterland, thanks to Bond. Also, Bond was unshockable. ‘A pleasant-spoken Import and Export agent called Blackwell had a sister in England who was a heroin addict.’ Goodness. Imagine making such an observation so casually. You didn’t know anyone, even at one remove, who was a heroin addict.
• IMAGES •
Another writer might put, for instance, a fat man alone in a bar. Fleming, through Bond’s observations, can build a whole background from the sight of that fat man before he has shifted his buttocks on the barstool. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bond makes deductions because he can; he knows so much. Through his eyes we notice that the fat man’s nails are perfectly manicured; that his skin is white, like someone who never leaves the casino or the underground lair; he is short, so Bond thinks he might have a Napoleonic superiority complex; His suit is stretched across the shoulders, implying ‘repressed power’; and so on. Every picture tells a story. Whether or not these judgements are rational or correct, we don’t care; we’ve suspended our own judgement in favour of James Bond’s.
Young women in Fleming’s books don’t wear many clothes but when they do, it’s black lace rather than utility knickers and a set of hair curlers. A girl may be literally killed by gold, and of course she is an excuse to display diamonds. There is not much detail here; the reader – usually a man – can supply his own fantasy, but the wrapping is yet another expression of riches and luxury. A female character may be put firmly in her place at the commencement. ‘Be a good girl and ...’ It was how Fleming often addressed the women in his own life. They seemed to like it.
He avoided giving readers any clues about real-life trickery that had worked. Ewen Montagu would undoubtedly have put his Operation Mincemeat on the desks of the right people before he published it in 1954, but Ian avoided sensitive material in his fiction. As to the extravagant gadgets, Ian once said that because he had worked in Naval Intelligence, he knew exactly how far he could go. In the real intelligence world, bag drops in parks did take place, and surveillance, and clandestine meetings with agents as well. His art lay in giving nothing away: getting them slightly wrong, either too obvious or too outrageous to be believable in real life. The same applied to gadgetry. Swordsticks could be bought in London shops, miniature cameras really were used, rooms were bugged and commandos did carry knives in their socks.
MI R(C) had been instituted during the war especially to come up with weapons for ‘irregular warfare’ – it was known as ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’ – and the OSS set up a special department for working on this kind of thing. Ian simply took an idea and put knobs on it.
• SNOBBERY •
M makes a dismissive show of not being able to understand ‘our currency and bullion reserves and all that’. Gentlemen didn’t: it was vulgar to discuss money. At least, so the reader is supposed to assume, though in fact Ian Fleming knew better than to open the traps: either boring the reader or revealing big holes in the plot. James Bond (Eton and Fettes), confronted with the prospect of a lecture on how all this financial stuff works, ‘felt boredom gathering at the corners of the room’. Fleming himself had been a lazy student. If your family owned a bank, there really wasn’t much reason to understand how it worked; people were employed to do that sort of thing. Years later, at Ian’s memorial service, Amaryllis had organised everything and the choirmaster required payment – 10 per cent of £100. Richard, then chairman of Fleming’s, wondered aloud how much that was.
This was no doubt mere affectation, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. Not understanding money was loaded with meaning. It signified that filthy lucre was so easily come by, you didn’t need to bother about it. Another version of this underlay the inverted snobbery of the writers Anne knew, some of whom were not ashamed to live in comparative squalor, because it signified that they were artists, and an artist’s inspiration was somehow sublime. Ian made a fetish of being mercenary over the books because he wanted to make it quite clear to Anne’s sneering friends that he had no literary pretensions. In later years, he once walked in on a bunch of them when they were giggling over a particularly purple passage of his – making it sound a lot sillier than it was. He was humiliated. He couldn’t win. They could pretend to great art while living in a hovel but had no compulsion about drinking his wine in his smart four-storied stucco terrace near Buckingham Palace while feeling free to despise his work.
And then there was science. He was deeply interested in the outcomes achieved by practical people. He had not personally been educated in that way; he was no Sidney Cotton. In Fleming’s social world, people on the whole showed no enthusiasm or much curiosity about science, or engineering for that matter. So James Bond drove some pretty swanky cars but probably couldn’t have described the workings of an internal combustion engine. He was ten years younger, roughly, than Ian Fleming but had Fleming’s generation’s outlook. At Eton, when Fleming was there, Science was all one subject, until you were about 17, when you could also do biology. And even if you intended to become a doctor, you couldn’t get into medical school without Latin. It seemed more gentlemanly to specialise in the humanities. This outlook persisted, despite decades of protest that the German Gymnasia taught science much better, and certainly well enough to give German industry a massive advantage before the First World War.
• IN-JOKES •
In Casino Royale Le Chiffre (‘the total amount’), the villain, was allegedly inspired by Aleister Crowley, the humourless old drug-addict, self-styled wizard and alleged murderer, rumours of whose bizarre rituals thrilled London society in the 1920s. Eve may well have invited him to her parties in Chelsea, for he was quite a pet of London sophisticates at one time. Ian had known him during the war.
Each of Fleming’s characters was generally inspired by more than one real person. There are several contenders for James Bond himself, for instance. But the in-jokes were in the names. In all the books he ever wrote, he used the names of characters from his own life. A John Blackwell, a friend of his, was related to the woman who became his lover, and the real Blackwell was unlikely to have had a heroin-addicted sister. A Mr and Mrs Bryce appear as a couple on a train. Ernest Cuneo, the lawyer, is a cabbie called Ernie Cureo. Smithers, who shepherded the SIS families across France in 1940, becomes Colonel Smithers, head of research for the Bank of England. James Bond himself, an American ornithologist, lunched at Goldeneye with his wife early in 1964. And poor Tom Blofeld, member of Boodle’s and chairman of the Country Gentleman’s Association, had his name used for an evil genius intent on taking over the world.
Patrick Dalzel-Job, one of several influences that contributed to Bond’s fictional personality. The National Archive
Architect Erno Goldfinger, whose name Fleming commandeered for the villain of his 1959 novel. Washington Post
Fleming came a cropper with Goldfinger. Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect, was not noted for his sense of humour or equanimity of temper. He perceived, in the character given his name, sniping anti-Semitism. He engaged lawyers. They wrote a letter. Fleming retorted that in that case he’d call the character Goldprick and include a note to say why, which was unnecessarily rude. But it all died down, and Goldfinger withdrew, with his costs paid by Fleming, before the case came to court.
• PLOTS •
Fleming’s plots – sub-plots were largely absent – had to involve life or death struggle. Both James Bond and his terrifying antagonist must have everything to play for and sometimes in the course of a real game. Baccarat, bridge and golf featured, and were games that Ian knew well. The big picture
was the one that Fleming, who had conjured intrigue throughout a world war, was always aware of. So both parties, whether SMERSH or Goldfinger or British Intelligence, had to have access to shatteringly powerful means of destruction. Fleming knew he was an ignoramus about all this, and he had to stay the right side of science fiction. Whatever he came up with must be able, potentially, to work. So a shark really would have eaten a man, a limpet mine did exist and would blow up a ship, and a single individual who knew what they were doing (such as Bond) really could re-direct a nuclear missile away from a target. Everything must be checked and sources consulted. This was not easily done from a remote village in Jamaica, so the plots were carefully mapped out and researched as far as possible in the months before writing began. His recollections of reading First World War NID case files and his first-hand Second World War experiences seem too to have provided a wealth of ideas and plot inspiration. Documents that came to light in 2008 involving British spy chief William Melville’s 1914 investigation of a possible German plot to blow up the Bank of England’s gold reserves to bring about economic chaos in Britain may well have sparked a thought in Fleming’s mind that led to his Fort Knox Goldfinger plot. Indeed, Gustav Steinhauer, Melville’s German opposite number and author of the Bank of England plot, bore all the hallmarks of Auric Goldfinger’s Teutonic persona. Known as ‘M’, Meville was another character, in addition to Admiral Godfrey, who may well have influenced Fleming’s thinking in terms of Bond’s fictional boss.
Fleming was, without doubt, heavily influenced by real life events that were mostly within the public domain, but occasionally events that were, at the time, beyond the knowledge of the general public. He started in his first book Casino Royale as he meant to go on. There were a string of incidents in the book that were all based on fact. For example, the attempt to assassinate James Bond outside the Hotel Splendide had its root in an incident a decade before. SMERSH, the Russian espionage agency he had initially chosen as 007’s nemesis, had given two Bulgarian assassins box-camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was red leather and the other blue. SMERSH had told the Bulgarians that the red case contained a powerful high-explosive bomb and the blue one an equally powerful smoke bomb that would allow them both to escape under the cover of the ensuing smoke screen.