Christmas with Ian Fleming

RichardTheBruce

For 2019, this seems to be the annual Season's Greetings from Ian Fleming Publications.

2019.
http://www.ianfleming.com/seasons-greetings-us-ian-fleming-publications-2/


Sourced from their own

RichardTheBruce

The Spy Who Loved Me, Ian Fleming, 1961.

Chapter 2 - Dear Dead Days

...
And then I met Derek.

By now I was seventeen and a half, and Susan and I were living in a tiny three-room fiat in Old Church Street just off the King's Road. It was the end of June, and there wasn't much more of our famous "season" to go and we decided to give a party for the few people we had met and actually liked. The family across the landing were going abroad on holiday, and they said we could have their flat in exchange for keeping an eye on it while they were away. We were both of us just about broke with "keeping up with the Joneses" at all these balls, and I cabled Aunt Florence and got a hundred pounds out of her, and Susan scraped up fifty, and we decided to do it really well. We were going to ask about thirty people and we guessed that only twenty would come. We bought eighteen bottles of champagne—pink because it sounded more exciting—a ten-pound tin of caviar, two rather cheap tins of foie gras that looked all right when it was sliced up, and
lots of garlicky things from Soho.

We made a lot of brown bread-and-butter sandwiches with watercress and smoked salmon, and added some sort of Christmasy things like Elvas plums and chocolates

—a stupid idea: no one ate any of them—and, by the time we had spread the whole lot out on a door taken off its hinges and covered with a gleaming tablecloth to make it seem like a buffet, it looked like a real grown-up feast.

RichardTheBruce

Thrilling Cities, Ian Fleming, 1963.

Chapter III - Tokyo

I was full of reservations about Japan. Before and during the war they
had been bad enemies and many of my friends had suffered at their
hands. But many other friends whose opinions I value love the country
and its people, and my comprador, Richard Hughes, who came with me in
the Comet and who, being an Australian, should have been predisposed
against Japan, was totally enamoured of it. There was nothing to do
but clear my mind of the splendours of Hong Kong and prepare myself for
a great deal of hissing and bowing.

We had a happy landing. Japanese friends of Dick Hughes were at the
airport to meet him and I was at once taken with

'Tiger' Saito,
editor-in-chief of This is Japan, the massive and beautifully produced
annual which the privileged receive through the Japanese Embassy around
Christmas time.

He was a chunky, reserved man with considerable stores
of quiet humour and intelligence, and with a subdued but rather tense
personality. He looked like a fighter--one of those war-lords of the
Japanese films. He had, in fact, been a judo black-belt, one rank
below the red-belt elite, and there was a formidable quality about him
which I enjoyed. We crowded ourselves into some kind of a car and
hurtled off into the night. It was an hour's run through endless and
very depressing suburbs (Tokyo, with a population of nine million, is
the largest, and incidentally the most expensive, city in the world).
It had been a four-and-a-half hour flight from Hong Kong. It was one
o'clock in the morning and everyone was chattering about people I
didn't know. I began to long for bed and solitude.

Dick had tried to get us into a Western hotel, but on top of hordes of
American tourists attending the fashionable autumn or Chrysanthemum
Season, six hundred delegates for a G.A.T.T. conference had descended
on the town and Dick had finally had to accept rooms in a Japanese inn.
'They're wonderful,' he enthused. 'Much better than those ghastly
Western hotels. You'll really be seeing the Japanese way of life.'

Chapter V - Los Angeles and Las Vegas

I had had three jackpots. I had positively hammered the syndicate. I
spread the money on the bed and counted it. Two hundred and ten
dollars. Whoever said the Las Vegas machines were crooked? The whole
place was a mechanical Christmas tree!

The telephone suddenly jangled.
It was 2 a.m. Was the syndicate after their cut? I lifted the
receiver. A drunken, plaintive voice said, 'Is that you, Mamie?' I
said sharply, 'No, it isn't, it's her husband,' banged down the
receiver and, pleased with my all-round brilliance and savoir-faire,
went to bed after washing the filth of the United States currency off
my hands. I had taken on the one-armed bandits and, by golly, I'd
licked them!

Chapter VI - Chicago

That afternoon, to wash the smut of ancient crime out of my mind, I
repaired to the Chicago Art Institute. I had been there once before
when it firmly established itself as my favourite picture gallery in
the world. Here, if you like the French Impressionists, there is
everything--rooms full of Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, with at least
twenty superb examples of each. The Toulouse-Lautrecs are as fine as
any in the world and the Cézannes and Gauguins, let alone the Picassos,
are of a quality not to be seen at the Jeu de Paume, and possibly not
even in Russia.

It was a Saturday afternoon, but the spacious,
beautifully-lit gallery was almost empty, though the Christmas-card
shop on the ground floor was crowded.

This was the first really
peaceful time I had had to myself for three weeks, and I made good use
of it before getting back to my accustomed beat--dinner with my
newly-found friends in the famous Pump Room of the Ambassador Hotel and
a visit to the hottest strip-tease in town at the Silver Frolics, a
display in a large ballroom, full of commercial travellers and other
businessmen, of positively exquisite boredom and lack of finesse.

And so, my brains boiling with a fine confusion of impressions, to bed.

(Ten days later, in London, editing these notes on Chicago, I read in
the evening paper that, while I was editing them, Roger 'The Terrible'
Touhy was ambushed and killed by two gunmen dressed as policemen in
West Side, Chicago. He and a retired police sergeant, with whom he had
spent the night discussing Brennan's book, were mown down from behind
by five sawn-off shotgun blasts. Touhy had been released from prison
on November 24th after serving twenty-six years. Somebody from the
blood-stained Capone era has a very long memory indeed!)

Chapter VII - New York

I enjoyed myself least of all in New York. It was my last lap and
perhaps I was getting tired, but each time I come back (and I have
revisited the city every year since the war) I feel that it has lost
more of its heart. Steel and concrete, aluminium and copper sheathing
for the new buildings, have smothered the brownstone streets that had
so much warmth in the old days. The whole of the beautiful Washington
Square area has disappeared, and up town the new resettlement
areas--vast blocks of tiny apartments for the negroes and the Puerto
Ricans--have now overwhelmed the old happy sprawl of Harlem.

There are still thrilling moments--when your taxi goes over the hump on
Park Avenue at 69th Street and the lights turn to red and you pause and
watch them all go green the whole way down to 46th, your heart turns
over for New York. But this is an architectural, a physical, thrill.
Go into the first drugstore, ask your way from a passer-by, and the
indifference and harshness of the New Yorker cuts the old affection for
the city out of your body as sharply as a surgeon's knife. It is
partly the hysterical pursuit of money, the fast buck, that chills, but
it is also the disdain of the New Yorker for the guy who doesn't know
his way about, who isn't on the inside.

In New York you don't get politeness unless you pay for it. Here, the
tipping system has gone mad. You are ruled by the head waiter, the
bell captain, the reservation clerk, the credit manager and the
black-market theatre-ticket operator. They are the Establishment, and
you must be 'in' with these people or you will sink without trace.
And, of course, in New York the expense-account aristocracy have
increasingly ruined one's old haunts, deflating the quality of the food
and inflating the prices.

(At Christmas-time and New Year, for
instance, fifty-dollar bills are slipped into head waiters' hands all
over America so that they will 'look after you' in the following year.)

The latest expense-account joke is that two businessmen are having
luncheon together. When the check comes, one man says, 'Give me that,
I'm on an expense account, it's deductible.' The other man quickly
snatches the check from him, 'No you don't. I'm on cost-plus. I can
make a profit on it.'

Agent_99

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang doesn't feel right to me without John Burningham's illustrations:



WHOOSH!!

RichardTheBruce

On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Ian Fleming, 1961.

Chapter 6 - Bond of Bond Street?

...
Bond wondered if he should get in touch with Marc-Ange. So far, in his report, he had revealed only a lead into the Union Corse, whom he gave, corporately, as the source of his information. But he shied away from this course of action, which would surely have, as one consequence, the reopening with Marc-Ange of the case of Tracy. And that corner of his life, of his heart, he wanted to leave undisturbed for the time being. Their last evening together had passed quietly, almost as if they had been old friends, old lovers. Bond had said that Universal Export was sending him abroad for some time. They would certainly meet when he returned to Europe. The girl had accepted this arrangement. She herself had decided to go away for a rest. She had been doing too much. She had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

She would wait for him. Perhaps they could go skiing together around Christmas time? Bond had been enthusiastic.

That night, after a wonderful dinner at Bond's little restaurant, they had made love, happily, and this time without desperation, without tears. Bond was satisfied that the cure had really begun. He felt deeply protective towards her. But he knew that their relationship, and her equanimity, rested on a knife-edge which must not be disturbed.

Bond rang his exchange on the only outside number he was allowed to use, said '007 reporting,' and was at once put through to his secretary. She was a new one.

Loelia Ponsonby had at last left to marry a dull, but worthy and rich member of the Baltic Exchange, and confined her contacts with her old job to rather yearning Christmas and birthday cards to the members of the Double-O Section.

But the new one, Mary Goodnight, an ex-Wren with blue-black hair, blue eyes, and 37-22-35, was a honey and there was a private five-pound sweep in the Section as to who would get her first. Bond had been lying equal favourite with the ex-Royal Marine Commando who was 006 but, since Tracy, had dropped out of the field and now regarded himself as a rank outsider, though he still, rather bitchily, flirted with her. Now he said to her,' Good morning, Goodnight. What can I do for you? Is it war or peace?'

She giggled unprofessionally. 'It sounds fairly peaceful, as peaceful as a hurry message from upstairs can be. You're to go at once to the College of Arms and ask for Griffon Or.'

Chapter 8 - Fancy Cover

...
'Oh, I'll do that all right,' said Bond reassuringly. 'Now, be a good girl and get a radio taxi to the Universal Export entrance. And put all that junk inside it, would you? I'll be down in a minute. I'll be at the flat all this evening' - he smiled sourly - 'packing my silk shirts with the crests on them.' He got up. 'So long, Mary. Or rather goodnight, Goodnight. And keep out of trouble till I get back.'

She said, 'You do that yourself.' She bent and picked up the books and papers from the floor and, keeping her face hidden from Bond, went to the door and kicked it shut behind her with her heel. A moment or two later she opened the door again. Her eyes were bright.

'I'm sorry, James. Good luck! And Happy Christmas!' She closed the door softly behind her.

Chapter 17 - Bloody Snow

...
And then the bastards chose to fire off three more flares followed by a stream of miscellaneous rockets that burst prettily among the stars. Of course! Bright idea! This was for the sake of watchers in the valley who might be inquisitive about the mysterious explosions high up the mountain. They were having a party up there, celebrating something. What fun these rich folk had, to be sure! And then Bond remembered.

But of course! It was Christmas Eve! God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay! Bond's skis hissed an accompaniment as he zigzagged fast down the beautiful snow slope. White Christmas! Well, he'd certainly got himself that!

But then, from high up above him, he heard that most dreaded of all sounds in the high Alps, that rending, booming crack! The Last Trump! Avalanche!

...
Yes! There was the flag! Bond hurtled into a right-hand Christie just as, to his left, he heard the first trees come crashing down with the noise of a hundred monster crackers being pulled - Christmas crackers!

Bond flung himself straight down the wide white glade between the trees. But he could hear that he was losing! The crashing of the trees was coming closer. The first froth of the white tide couldn't be far behind his heels! What did one do when the avalanche hit? There was only one rule. Get your hands to your boots and grip your ankles. Then, if you were buried, there was some hope of undoing your skis, being able, perhaps, to burrow your way to the surface - if you knew in your tomb where the surface lay! If you couldn't go down like a ball, you would end up immovable, a buried tangle of sticks and skis at all angles. Thank God the opening at the end of the glade, the shimmer of the last, easily sloping fields before the finish, was showing up! The crackling roar behind him was getting louder! How high would the wall of snow be? Fifty feet? A hundred? Bond reached the end of the glade and hurled himself into a right-hand Christie. It was his last hope, to get below the wide belt of trees and pray that the avalanche wouldn't mow down the lot of them. To stay in the path of the roaring monster at his heels would be suicide!

The Christie came off, but Bond's right ski snarled a root or a sapling and he felt himself flying through space. He landed with a crash and lay gasping, all the wind knocked out of him. Now he was done for! Not even enough strength to get his hands to his ankles! A tremendous buffet of wind hit him and a small snow-storm covered him. The ground shook wildly and a deep crashing roar filled his ears. And then it had passed him and given way to a slow, heavy rumble. Bond brushed the snow out of his eyes and got unsteadily to his feet, both skis loose, his goggles gone. Only a cricket pitch away, a great torrent of snow, perhaps twenty feet high, was majestically pouring out of the wood and down into the meadows. Its much higher, tumbling snout, tossing huge crags of broken snow around it, was already a hundred yards ahead and still going fast. But, where Bond stood, it was now silent and peaceful except for the machine-gunfire crackling of the trees as they went down in the wood that had finally protected him. The crackling was getting nearer! No time to hang about! But Bond took off one sodden glove and dug into his trouser pocket.

If ever he needed a drink it was now! He tilted the little flask down his throat, emptied it, and threw the bottle away. Happy Christmas! he said to himself, and bent to his bindings.

* * *
[Bond, a grey-faced, lunging automaton, somehow stayed upright on the two miles of treacherous Langlauf down the gentle slope to Samaden. Once a passing car, its snow-chains clattering, forced him into the bank. He leaned against the comforting soft snow for a moment, the breath sobbing in his throat. Then he drove himself on again. He had got so far, done so well! Only a few more hundred yards to the lights of the darling, straggling little paradise of people and shelter!

The slender campanile of the village church was floodlit and there was a great warm lake of light on the left of the twinkling group of houses. The strains of a waltz came over the still, frozen air.

The skating-rink! A Christmas Eve skaters' ball.

That was the place for him! Crowds! Gaiety! Confusion! Somewhere to lose himself from the double hunt that would now be on - by SPECTRE and the Swiss police, the cops and the robbers hand in hand!

Bond's skis hit a pile of horse's dung from some merrymaker's sleigh. He lurched drunkenly into the snow wall of the road and righted himself, cursing feebly. Come on! Pull yourself together! Look respectable! Well, you needn't look too respectable.

After all, it's Christmas Eve.

Here were the first houses. The noise of accordion music, deliciously nostalgic, came from a Gasthaus with a beautiful iron sign over its door. Now there was a twisty, uphill bit - the road to St Moritz. Bond shuffled up it, placing his sticks carefully. He ran a hand through his matted hair and pulled the sweat-soaked handkerchief down to his neck, tucking the ends into his shirt collar. The music lilted down towards him from the great pool of light over the skating-rink. Bond pulled himself a little more upright. There were a lot of cars drawn up, skis stuck in mounds of snow, luges and toboggans, festoons of paper streamers, a big notice in three languages across the entrance:'

Grand Christmas Eve Ball! Fancy Dress! Entrance 2 Francs! Bring all your friends! Hooray!'

ggl007

Last Fleming's Christmas...



Any guesses about that Hefner's Christmas present?

Revelator

A Playboy Bunny? Joking aside, I have no idea but thank you for this very nice find. Playboy had serialized OHMSS and at this time was readying YOLT for serialization. The note about Jamaican hotels is also interesting, since Fleming was writing TMWTGG and hotels, particularly the Thunderbird, figure heavily in its plot.

ggl007

The Marrakesh Hotel did end in Hugh Hefner's hands... and bunnies: November'64















http://jamaicahotelhistory.com/postcards/marrakesh.htm

It could be curious to know if Fleming had something to do with it... and with what purpose...

RichardTheBruce

Further sharing 2022 Season's Greetings from Ian Fleming Publications.