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The Travellers in Towns
Ian Fleming, Norman Lewis, and Peter Duval Smith (Transmitted August 2, 1960 on the BBC Home Service)
PETER DUVAL SMITH: The travellers here tonight, Ian Fleming, Norman Lewis and myself, don’t entirely go along with people like Sir John Hunt and Wilfrid Thesiger that the most interesting places in the world to spend one’s travelling time are the North Pole or the middle of the Arabian Desert. I think perhaps we prefer to travel for people, for new friends, for new drinks and new food, and these sort of things are to be found in towns, I think. And I think that we agree that we prefer to go to towns rather than to explore. How do you go about, Ian Fleming, finding a new town and getting yourself into it?
IAN FLEMING: Well, I think if you take the ordinary town—Orleans, Hamburg, Vienna, anywhere you like—the first thing to do when you arrive in a town is to buy the ordinary town guide and town plan, and spend half an hour perhaps over dinner, over a drink, having a look at it and more or less getting your bearings; basing yourself on your hotel so that you won’t lose yourself when you start to get back. Generally, in all these towns are various landmarks—a river or a hill or a cathedral—and you can get yourself more or less straight on the thing. You can see the business centre, and the entertainment centre and the theatre and the suburbs.
From the point of view of the ordinary traveller arriving in a town, perhaps he’s had a puncture or something and he doesn’t know where to go, I think that one of the great things to remember is that the railway station, of course, is the centre of any town. And around that will be more or less the main centre of life of the city. And if in doubt, I think the thing to do is always to make for the railway station, and if in doubt about a hotel to stay in a station hotel...[places] where the commercial travellers come and they demand cleanly things, rather like Le Routier in France, where you get the minimum of everything but it’s fairly solid and good.
SMITH: I think another point about arriving into an unknown town is how to find anywhere good to eat. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got in your pocket; how does one go about getting a good meal?
FLEMING: Well, I think the thing to do really is to go to the fattest man or woman you can see and say politely, ask politely without looking at their fatness, where is the best place to eat, with a lot of “if you please,” and “thank you very much” and so on and so forth. Well, you can be pretty certain that if anybody is fat and has a cheerful face they’ll know the answer.
SMITH: Well, what if you’re in a country where the food is bound to be appalling?
FLEMING: When I’m stuck I always ask for three fried eggs.
[Peter Duval Smith discusses his experiences in Macao]
FLEMING: Did you go to the great house of pleasure, the Central Hotel?
SMITH: Oh yes, yes.
FLEMING: I rather like the idea that the—it’s what, seven or eight storeys high as I recall it. Big skyscraper. And the quality of the pleasures increases with the price according to the storey. You started off in the sort of low coolie area, the gambling and the girls and everything else, and then you went higher and higher and higher till you reached the final courtesan on the seventh floor.
Oh, I think Macao’s got a great future, but unfortunately it’s very far away.
SMITH: Well, perhaps that’s as well.
FLEMING: I think that to exchange one’s ordinary comfortable nest for something that’s really foreign, I think perhaps for a short time—probably a flight to Naples—gives one the original smell of being abroad more than anything, any other town that I know of. I think to fly from England to Naples, be suddenly thrust into this extraordinary world of people who cheat one, thieve from one, overcharge one, are rude to one, it has the authentic smell of the first place one ever went to when one perhaps crossed the Channel to Calais and was completely confused and got into trouble with the porters and so on.
They’re great experts in Naples at covering up those ghastly sea fish that they make one eat the whole time, sort of spiny…
LEWIS: Yes, Norman Douglas used to complain of them. They’re all bones.
FLEMING: Absolute muck, yes. But of course they’re great experts at really sort of shredding up the foreign tourist. I mean, I have great affection for Naples, because it’s a very beautiful place and there are wonderful things to see around—like Paestum and Herculaneum and Pompeii and Ischia and Capri, with Gracie Fields. But of course, they’ve got this business of eviscerating the tourists to a fine art.
But I rather like the story which is often repeated, about the ordinary G.I. in those days—the days you were referring to—who used to go wandering off into the back streets of Naples in search of pleasure, and he would be sold a bottle of hooch by some of the local gangsters and fall down insensible and then be carried off on a handcart into the background somewhere amongst the alleys and simply put up for auction as he stood or as he lay, with wrist-watch, wallet…and simply put up for auction.
The highest bidder would buy him. A big man with plenty of his clothes and belongings, and then after having stripped him and taken his belongings, he’d be carried off to a vineyard in the background and put to work until he dropped and be thrown back into the harbour. They’re real rapscallions.
SMITH: Well, what do you chaps do about languages? What does one do when one doesn’t know the language?
FLEMING: Well, I’ve got French and German. But I’m absolutely sunk anywhere south. I think the thing about language, which obviously is an appalling obstacle to all kind of travel, is that in England, where there are the most stupid sort of insular collection of people living on this this tiny little place, one must teach children languages. I think languages are absolutely essential to extend one’s life outside this little place that we live in.
SMITH: Well, how dearly one would like to be really bilingual in English and French.
FLEMING: Yes, one must have one other language. I mean every child must have one other language, and it ought to be made compulsory by law. To expect other people to understand English really is terribly—well, it’s not only insulting...you get stuck. In a place like Naples you get absolutely stuck, if you don’t know some Italian...We must learn languages. Some kind of language.
But of course, to get on in a town you—nowadays in a foreign town there’s nearly always, particularly near a railroad station there’s nearly always interpreters, people who can explain this, that and the other. It’s no good going to taxi-drivers, they know nothing at all.
SMITH: Of course, what you get if you don’t know languages, is only boring conversation. I mean, almost anybody is prepared to talk to you endlessly about your father’s name and your mother’s name and your job and things like that.
FLEMING: "How interesting, you come from England and do you know somebody who lives in Greenwich?"
SMITH: Yes. The gap between that and a real conversation is a terribly long way and it means knowing the language quite well.
FLEMING: I think people ought to learn—linguaphone records or any of these things—they ought to learn basic phrases. They’ll be much happier if they do.
SMITH: But which towns do you really hate?
FLEMING: Well, I think really—I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m afraid that I’ve taken very much against New York, now. I’ve been there many, many times since the war and I think the town is rapidly going downhill. It’s not only the fact that all the beautiful bits of New York are being torn down—the nice old brownstone houses—but the sort of manners of the people are very abrupt and rough...You’re an out of town man and alright, you ask the way, well you don’t know the way so why the hell should they answer, and they say sorry, bud…you know, and sort of go on their way.
But I must confess that I was in Moscow in 1939, and I do really think that Moscow is the dullest, flattest town in the world. It’s rather like Manchester on a sort of wet Sunday night.
SMITH: Worse than New York?
FLEMING: Worse than New York.
Guests: Ian Fleming, British suspense writer, and William Plomer, British author and critic.
The Writer Speaks… a [radio] program produced in cooperation with the New American Library, publishers of Signet and Mentor paperback books.
Our guest is Mr. Ian Fleming. In 1952, when British suspense writer Ian Fleming published his first book Casino Royale, the Sunday Times of London called him “the best new thriller writer since Eric Ambler”, while the Irish Times said the book was “a calculated assault on the nerves”. His reputation for first-class spy stories quickly spread throughout the world, as Fleming sent secret-agent James Bond into fantastic adventures with tropical madmen, international diamond smugglers and atomic blackmailers. His books—From Russia with Love, Doctor No, Moonraker and 7 others have been praised by prime ministers, read by President and Mrs. Kennedy and loudly applauded by the critics. Now, on The Writer Speaks, Ian Fleming discusses some of the ingredients of these thrillers with the English author and critic, William Plomer.
Plomer: I feel compelled to start off with a very blatant: question: Do you think your books are studies in sex, snobbery and sadism?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think they are studies in any of those quite proper ingredients of a thriller. Sex, of course comes into all interesting books and into interesting lives. As to snobbery, I think that’s pretty good nonsense, really, in fact, we’d all of us like to eat better, stay in better hotels, wear better clothes, drive faster motorcars, and so on, and it amuses me that my here does most of these things. As for sadism, well I think the old-fashioned way of beating up a spy with a baseball bat has gone out with the last war, and I think it’s permissible to give him a rather tougher time that we used to in the old fashioned days before the war.
Plomer: If someone asked you to compare yourself to Mickey Spillane, how would you do it?
Fleming: Well, I wouldn’t do it to begin with. If forced to, I’d only say that I can’t remember very much of Spillane’s work. I’ve read most of them in my time, but I’m afraid I must confess I can’t remember a single incident in any of them.
Plomer: Well then it’s not much good comparing yourself to him, is it? Now this is a most elementary question, but I would like to know what made you start writing thrillers at the age of 43. Could you, do you think, have written thrillers as good, say, at the age of 23?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think so, because, of course, to write thrillers you’ve got to know thrilling things and perhaps to have experienced some yourself, and certainly at the age of 23 I would have no wartime intelligence service, I wouldn’t have done any underwater swimming, and occasionally mess with an octopus or shark and so on, and so forth, and in fact I wouldn’t have had enough experience to write about secret service work with any kind of verisimilitude.
Plomer: Have you told us exactly what made you start writing thrillers at the age of 43? I don’t think you have; was it ambition?
Fleming: It wasn’t really ambition at all, my mental hands were empty and I was just about to get married, which is a terrible step to take at the age of 43, and I think, really, I started writing my first thriller to take my mind off the prospect of getting married.
Plomer: Tell us something about the famous James Bond. What did he start out to be in your mind?
Fleming: Well, he didn’t really…I mean he gradually built himself up through the books, but originally he was simply intended to be a blunt instrument and that's really why I gave him such a very dull name. And, incidentally, I'm afraid I purloined the name from a very famous American ornithologist, because one of my bibles in the West Indies is a book called “James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies”.
Plomer: Would you say that your concept of James Bond has changed over the ten years that you've been writing?
Fleming: I don’t think so, but I think he’s got slightly more cluttered up with mannerisms and quirks of one sort or another, probably, I mean he’s not quite such a simple character as he was at the beginning, ten years ago.
Plomer: Now you’re undoubtedly asked a million times to tell how you think James Bond and you are alike. Now tell me instead how you and he differ or in what ways you simply couldn’t be James Bond?
Fleming: Well, I couldn’t possibly be James Bond because first of all, he’s got much more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome and he eats more than, rather more richly than I could possibly manage to do.
Plomer: How do you think your own life has helped in creating a successful series of thrillers?
Fleming: Well, it’s been helpful, of course for me to have had experience in Reuters, the international news agency, because there one was taught to write fast and accurately. And of course by working in Berlin and Moscow and various other foreign capitals I got some experience of them, and I’ve traveled a very great deal, I’ve been twice around the world which helps anybody to write any kind of book. And, of course, my Naval intelligence work in the war has been a help because it’s brought me in contact with spies and methods of spying, and the same thing applies of course to my hobbies, such as skin diving, and occasional shooting, that sort of thing, like driving fast motorcars.
Plomer: Well now, could you pinpoint for us one of the adventures in your books which you actually experienced yourself?
Fleming: Well, the gambling scene in my first book Casino Royale is more or less, a blown up version of what happened to me during the war because I was flying to Washington with my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence and we came down at Lisbon and were told that if we wanted to go and see some German secret agents, they were always gambling in the Casino at Estoril in the evening. So we went along and my chief didn't understand the game of chemin de fer they were playing. I explained it to him and then it crossed my mind to have a bash at the Germans who were sitting around, and see if I couldn’t reduce their secret service funds. Unfortunately I sat down and after three bancos my travel money had completely disappeared. Now that, greatly exaggerated, was the colonel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre in which he took Le Chiffre to the cleaners.
Plomer: That’s very revealing, interesting to know. Well, what is your recipe for a good thriller? I mean your use of detail and the way you catch atmosphere, the way you use familiar places, and also the way you use implausible things which could, however, happen.
Fleming: Of course the recipe for a thriller is to write about thrilling things and I try and thrill the reader right down to his taste buds so to speak. But so far as implausible things are concerned, true secret service history is very fantastic, and we occasionally see a little bit of it in the newspapers, like, for instance, the U-2 affair, or the tunnel between West and East Berlin through which we and the Americans tapped the telephone lines of the Russians, and the man who escaped to Germany or rather came over to Germany for the Russian secret service to kill a West German with a cigarette case containing dum-dum bullets, which were poisoned, and if the man hadn’t been captured would have killed his victim at once. And similar little bits of information from the underground of secret service work are constantly getting into the papers and one would say they are fantastic, but they are certainly no more or less fantastic than what happens in James Bond’s adventures.
Plomer: That fits in very well with what we know about truth being a good deal more farfetched than fiction. Do you think more readers read their books as though they were you or as though they were James Bond? With whom do they identify?
Fleming: Well, I’m pretty certain of course, that we all when we’re reading a book with a particular hero, see ourselves in that hero’s shoes. I think that’s really the answer to that.
Plomer: Why do you do most of your writing in Jamaica?
Fleming: Well I’m lucky enough to have a small house there and it hasn’t got a telephone and it’s a very good place to write because it’s because one writes in a vacuum there, nobody to bother one, and when my wife and I go out there we simply pull up the drawbridge so to speak and I get down to writing and she gets down to painting. I work for three or four hours a day and stick to a routine.
Plomer: That seems a very good arrangement.
Fleming: Well, it's nicer to work in the sun than out of it.
Plomer: I bet it is. Is your own attitude toward women as functional as Bond’s? I’m rather curious to know why most of your heroines have some slight thing wrong with them. A crooked nose, or a slight limp, or a mole or two?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think this is really the place to discuss my sex life, but as far as the occasional limp or whatever it may be that my heroines have, I think we’d all of us agree that one’s girlfriends generally do have some tiny fault in their otherwise flawless beauty and I occasionally give my heroines such a fault because I think it’s truer to life.
Plomer: It’s a bit of naturalism. We know that nothing is perfect in this world, so I suppose that makes them more real. Well now, what spot in the United States do you think would make the best spy rendezvous? And why?
Fleming: Well the U.S., of course, is a very large place but the best place to meet a spy is usually in a park, or in a crowded swimming pool, public swimming pool. I once had this discussion with Raymond Chandler and he said that supposing it were a beautiful spy as opposed to a rather dull spy, the place to take her would be to the Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center because he said that was a very attractive place to meet anyway and also almost entirely used by out-of-town Americans and tourists, so that one would be unlikely to run into a friend or an acquaintance.
Plomer: Rather an anonymous place, in fact?
Fleming: Yes, that’s the answer. And I did, in fact, once meet a spy in the United States, a man I wanted to talk to, and I arranged to meet him at the reptile house at the zoo in Central Park. So we duly appeared at the zoo. Unfortunately there was no reptile house at the zoo, so this meeting didn't come off very well and we had to start all over again.
Plomer: Rather unfortunate. Still, some reptiles have two legs. How do you visualize your readers? I mean the different types of people attracted to your books?
Fleming: Well, I don’t really visualize them at all. I merely judge them from the ones that I meet and the ones who write to me and they seem to be more or less a very straightforward cutacross of…
Plomer: Just folks, as it were.
Fleming: Just sort of people really. But I think people like different things in books, either they like the movement, or the locales, or the excitement, adventure and so on and I think anybody likes a good spy story really.
Plomer: I think you’re being rather evasive. I think you ought to go into more detail about what sort of men, what sort of women, what sort of young people you notice particularly reading them.
Fleming: Well, I’m surprised to find that the teenagers are now going for these books and I hope they’re not doing them any harm.
Plomer: Well, that’s your responsibility. Tell me how you first met the Kennedys?
Fleming: Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr. Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along the street and she said, “Oh there are my friends Jack and Jackie,” and they were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And she said, “Do you know Ian Fleming?” And Jack Kennedy said, “Not the Ian Fleming?" Of course that was a very exciting thing for him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before they’re published over here.
Plomer: I think that was an historic encounter. We know that presidents and prime ministers do like to read thrillers, why do you think that is?
Fleming: Well, I think the answer is, of course, that it does take their mind off their more pressing problems. And I think they find them very relaxing and, of course, the fact that they usually have a satisfactory and happy ending is quite a change for a president or a prime minister who is usually tied up with inextricable problems through which he can’t see the end.
Plomer: I remember some 12 years ago, we were lunching together here in London, and how did we then get onto the subject of your writing books?
Fleming: Well, William, I had just written this book in Jamaica and of course, I had no idea whether it was going to be a success or not. I thought it was quite exciting, but I dreaded the day when a publisher would see it, and I remember we were lunching and I said to you, William, if you get smoke inside a woman, how do you get it out of her?
Plomer: I remember.
Fleming: And you said, “Explain exactly what you mean.” And I said, what if I was writing a book on a woman who’d inhaled a cigarette or a lungful of smoke. You couldn’t then say that she exhaled it, because that’s a stupid word, and puffed it out, dribbled it out and so on and so forth. This is a technical question I want to ask, how do you get it out of her. And you said, “Ian, you’ve written a book.” And I said, well, as a matter of fact William, it isn’t exactly a book but I have written a sort of thriller. And you then said, “Well I want to see it.” And I blushingly handed over the manuscript in a day or two and in due course you wrote a very kind report on the book and if you remember you managed to persuade the partners of my English publishers Jonathan Cape to publish it, although they hadn’t, I don't think, published a thriller since The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the book got off to a good start and…
Plomer: And since then you’ve never looked back. Well, I hope you don’t regret having become, as you have, so eminent a writer of thrillers.
Fleming: Well, I’m not so sure that thriller writers are eminent but still, it’s certainly been a tremendous success, the whole venture, and I've enjoyed it enormously because being a writer’s a very good life really, you carry your office around in your head and you don’t have to work at it all the time. You earn fairly good money from royalties and of course if you manage to sell serial rights or film rights you do very well indeed. But, I certainly think it’s marvelous to have a job, so to speak, which is also a pleasant hobby.
Plomer: Well, as you know, no one is more pleased with your success than I am. Have you any idea how many copies of your books have by now been sold?
Fleming: Well, that’s a very difficult thing to discover because they’ve been translated into about thirty foreign languages. But I should say that my sales in England over the past ten or eleven books would be around 2 or 3 million, and in America I think they’re certainly that and possibly more. I think they may be well up to 4 million because they’ve gone into the New American Library Paperback Edition and been very smartly dressed up and they seem to be going like hot cakes in the States.
Plomer: You ought to be pleased about that. I should think the number of your readers in America is increasing so rapidly that it will soon overhaul your British public. Do you agree with that?
Fleming: Well, it certainly seems to look like it, rather, because the sales figures that I see from New American Library are certainly very startling indeed.
Plomer: Well, that’s good. Tell me, I wonder, what writers have influenced you…can you think of any?
Fleming: Well, I think principally two American writers, the two great masters of the modern thriller, namely Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I was very struck by both those writers, as I know everybody else is. And particularly by their extremely good style and the verisimilitude of their stories. I should say those two Americans probably influenced me more than any other. But of course in one’s childhood one used to read the Phillips Oppenheim, Sax Rohmer, and bloods of those days and I suppose they all have played their little part too.
Plomer: They were all in the tradition, weren't they?
Fleming: Yes.
Plomer: Have you got another book on the stocks at present, and if so, can you tell me anything about it?
Fleming: Yes, I've finished a new, in fact the longest James Bond that I’ve written. And that’s as you know with the publishers over here now. And also a copy with my publishers in America and they seem to be fairly satisfied with it. It’s a very long story with a great deal of incidents, or various excitements, and it’s even suggested at one period of the book that James Bond may be descended from the man who named Bond Street, which I think will make a lot of people chuckle.
Plomer: Yes, that’s an interesting touch, isn’t it? Would you say you’ve broken rather fresh ground in this book?
Fleming: I wouldn’t say so. It's set in Switzerland actually and not as most of my books are in America or the Tropics.
Plomer: Well that’s unfamiliar to us…
Fleming: Yes, and there’s a great deal of incident in the high Alps which will certainly interest people who do winter sports, and skiing and so forth. Some pretty dreadful things happen.
Plomer: Well we shall be frozen to death with excitement. What about films? You know people often think your books ought to be films. Am I not right in thinking that the first film based on one of your books has just been made?
Fleming: Yes, it has. It was filmed mostly out in Jamaica this last winter. And it’s been done by United Artists through a subsidiary of theirs over here called EON Productions, and it’s been produced by the producer of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which was a very great success both here and in America.
Plomer: Have you seen a preview of your film?
Fleming: Yes, I have, I’ve seen the rough cut and I must say I think they’ve certainly managed to hit it off very well. They've got a very good star as James Bond, a man called Sean Connery, a Scotsman, who weight-lifts in Scotland and boxed for the navy and a very good Shakespearean actor and so on, and they’ve got plenty of excitement and gunplay and what all in the film and I think it’ll probably be a very great success.
Plomer: Well let’s hope it will be the first of a succession of films. I’m sure we all look forward to them.
Fleming: Well, they have got an option on the remainder of my books and I think the next one—this one they’ve just filmed is Doctor No, and I think the next one they intend to do is From Russia With Love.
Plomer: With the same star in it?
Fleming: I think certainly with the same star as James Bond, but probably of course, with different subsidiary stars.
Plomer: Ah yes. Well I thank you very much for answering all those questions. I really feel now that I know just a little bit more about you than I did before.
Fleming: Well, thank you William.
New Comment (The BBC Third Programme, April 18, 1962)
This evening’s programme is devoted to some aspects of the thriller...In the novel there have been perhaps more kinds of thriller, not surprisingly, than in any other art form: the ghost story, the Gothic horror novel, the science fiction novel, the detective story are all variants on the thriller formula. But in England, perhaps the most successful and original variant, at any rate over the last fifty years, has been the spy story.
It’s perhaps a consequence of our position as an imperial power in decline that our writers of thrillers since Buchan and Sapper have been preoccupied with the mystique of the English gentleman as a sort of individual lever of the political world, averting disaster with a flick of his eyelashes between two glasses of Marsala in his Brook Street club. The James Bond novels of Ian Fleming stand squarely in this tradition of the elegant spy story with an upper middle class flavour, but they’ve added the new and crucial ingredient of detailed popular newspaper realism—in setting, in background information, in their descriptions of sex and violence. In the following recorded interview Ian Fleming talks to T. G. Rosenthal about the nature of the thriller, and about his own work in this field.
Aficionados of Mr. Fleming’s thrillers will perhaps like to known that the interview took place at the top of a certain discretely distinguished building near Regents Park, which may account for the quality of the recording; alternatively you could put it down to a frustrated attempt at jamming on the part of Smersh.
T.G. ROSENTHAL: Mr. Fleming, it seems to me that a great deal of the appeal of the James Bond stories you’ve written is a kind of escapism—it’s the kind of escapism which you also find in the cinema, but if one just goes back to your short story that you wrote for the Sunday Times a few weeks ago, there’s a moment when the man who is instructing Bond at the rifle range at Bisley sees Bond finish, pack up, go away, and he says to himself “Mm. ’Spose he’s off to London to get a woman or something. Yes, he’s the kind who can get any number of women he likes.” Now this seems to me to be almost an archetypal comment about Bond, and I’m sure it’s one of those things that makes him most successful, because for the average Englishman to read about such a character and then identify with him, this undoubtedly gives him a thrill, and do you agree with this?
FLEMING: Well I s’ppose I do. I think all life or history is violence and sex, and I think that undoubtedly large proportions of them appear in my books. I think that it would be very hard if they didn’t because the thriller is a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress where you get the man starting off in rather poor shape and gradually working his way up until he defeats the villain and wins the prize, so to speak; and it’s perfectly true that in the case of most thrillers and certainly in the case of mine, the prize is a beautiful girl very often.
ROSENTHAL: As much as the actual goal of whatever his Secret Service was? Are the two equal in your structure?
FLEMING: Very much subsidiary—the girl or girls come into the story as part of the exercise in which Bond is engaged. Possibly [in] my present book that’s come out the girl takes the major part, because it is in fact the girl who is telling the story.
ROSENTHAL: Well you’ve mentioned the form of the thriller—now it’s a cliché to say that one of the chief problems of any kind of writing is self-discipline, but don’t you think that in the form which you have set yourself—with the exception of the latest book which we’ll come to later—but in the previous nine, you seem to have set yourself a certain formula, which I think ought to at least ease the problem of self-discipline, because having worked out this formula you can then fit the book to it. Do you find that this is in fact a help and does it give you a certain greater fluency?
FLEMING: Well of course I don’t see the formula. You perhaps see that as a reader and critic, but to my mind they’re all just entirely separate stories. Perhaps you could call them fairy stories for grown-ups, which I have to think I wrote entirely separately. I can’t fall back on what you would call a formula, because when I sit down at my desk with page one in front of me in the typewriter, yawning at me, I’ve got to tell a story of one kind or another. To fit it to formula doesn’t really cross my mind.
ROSENTHAL: No, wasn’t in any sense accusing you of having all the books the same—they’re all extremely different of course and there’s no question of any similarity between two books—
FLEMING: —I think I see what you mean.
ROSENTHAL: —but you can always be sure of one good bedroom scene, in nearly all the books there’s a torture scene of some kind, there’ll always be a shooting, there’ll always be a briefing by M and so on.
FLEMING: Yes I think there’s a lot in that, but of course he’s a serial character, James Bond, and he’s got to be started off on his mission by somebody, and the Secret Service has got to send him off and very often [there’s] a useful way of getting the plot on the move by M, who’s his Secret Service chief, saying “Look here, we’ve got a very nasty problem on our hands in Paraguay.” Well, now already you’ve got two or three chapters…letting the reader into the secret of more or less what Bond’s task is in this particular book, and if one didn’t have that, which is of course partly a formula, it’d be much more difficult.
In From Russia With Love for instance I started at the other end with a similar, so to speak, situation in the Russian secret service headquarters, where there was a briefing going on for the destruction of Bond, and Bond only then himself came in halfway through as being the object of the destruction of him that had been planned in Moscow.
ROSENTHAL: Yes, and indeed in fact From Russia With Love is the only book which ends with—obviously not disaster, because Bond is alive again for Doctor No, which is I think the one that followed, isn’t it?
FLEMING: Yes.
ROSENTHAL: [Bond is] getting an enormous rocket at the beginning of Doctor No for his slip-up at the end of From Russia With Love, but of course the last page of From Russia With Love shows Bond probably dying after being poisoned by the fiendish Russian woman.
FLEMING: Well that is quite correct, fictionally correct, because Bond had made an awful fool of himself in his behaviour at the end of that book, and he deserved punishment, which he in fact received.
ROSENTHAL: Using this word “punishment”—do you regard yourself as a moralist in any way?
FLEMING: (LAUGHING) I don’t know about that—I don’t think so, and I’d never pretend that James Bond is a particularly desirable character. I don’t really pretend that he’s a hero at all. I make it pretty clear that he’s got unlikeable traits, but does a very good job, and when I first thought of him as a character I intended him to be purely a blunt instrument in the hands of his government, who would be subjected to various adventures and excitements, but who would not show up as the stock hero of, for instance, let’s say the Buchan books or Bulldog Drummond, and so on and so forth, or the Saint, where the man is definitely given a heroic role. I meant this man really to be an extremely capable instrument in the hands of the government, and that is one of the reasons why I gave him such an extremely dull name, because rather than call him, for instance, Peregrine Carruthers, or something of that sort, I called him James Bond, being to my mind the dullest name I could lay my hands on.
ROSENTHAL: Yet you do Mr. Fleming, don’t you give Bond a certain number of rather better characteristics? You do give him [those] in one or two of the books, for example in Casino Royale [Bond] moralises himself, he philosophizes—he asks himself is it a good job he’s doing, should he be doing it, then he justifies the various killings he’s done, certainly the so-called cold-blooded ones, and finds reasons why they had to be done and were in fact unavoidable for the interests of the State, and leaving aside mere self-preservation.
FLEMING: Yes, you’re perfectly correct about that—probably I have a certain amount of sympathy for the chap, or [have been] developing one over the years, and I feel that he ought not to be made out quite such a monster as some of his critics do make him out as, and no doubt I write in these passages quite subconsciously, trying to make out that Bond is in fact a nicer man than he really is.
ROSENTHAL: …Well, of course you have a number of adverse critics who dislike the so-called cult of violence, but then there was, wasn’t there, this leader in the Guardian which said, among other things, that the books are providing a conveniently accessible safety valve for the boiling sensibility of modern man, and also provide a vicarious satisfaction of innately violent instincts.
FLEMING: Yes, I think it was rather well-said. As a matter of fact Paul Gallico said something rather similar—he wrote a most entertaining introduction to an omnibus volume of mine which appeared in America, and he likened the whole business to the psychologist’s theory that if you keep a cat you are in fact keeping a small tiger. I mean that in your mind the sense of danger of keeping a tiger is reproduced in the keeping of a cat.
ROSENTHAL: Mmm—mmm. If we could look for a moment at the sadistic element in the books, which I think is undeniable, how much of this is done in an attempt to titillate an audience, or how much is it done in the knowledge that this is rather what your readers want or expect?
FLEMING: Well, when I started out to write these books, it was really quite soon after the war, and I’d worked in Naval Intelligence and [was] fairly close to the sort of things that go on in a tenser form in the James Bond books, and the violence, or sadism that you mention, that appears in the books, is as nothing to what occurs in real life, in the life of true James Bonds.
ROSENTHAL: Well, it’s going on at the moment in Algeria and has been for a long time of course.
FLEMING: Yes, well that is true, and the tortures that I know of that were inflicted on our secret agents, particularly by the Moroccan French—if I published anything approaching their violence and horribleness, then I should undoubtedly be overstepping the bounds of what can be written. But I think this sort of Bulldog Drummond business of the hero just getting a bang on the head with a sort of wooden mallet isn’t good enough nowadays. We’ve been through a couple of major wars, and we know perfectly well that human beings do wreak far worse vengeance on each other than has ever been written in the old-fashioned thrillers, say, and as I try to make my thrillers…get fairly close to the truth of life, perhaps this kind of truth is unpalatable to some people, and also perhaps totally beyond our experience or knowledge.
ROSENTHAL: I think you’d agree with me that there is a very definite James Bond cult—some of the blurbs of your jackets refer to James Bond clubs and so on. Do you at all relish the idea, and I’m sure it’s going to come sooner or later, if it hasn’t already, of earnest Ph.D students in minor American universities taking all your books apart and analysing them and producing statistics of how many times Bond in the first part of lovemaking reaches for the right breast and feels the erect nipple and so on—
FLEMING: Well—I’m horrified at the thought it might happen, but it is already doing so. In fact I got a letter from an extremely earnest lady student in Germany the other day, asking for some information, because she was in fact writing her Doctorate thesis on the subject of the James Bond books, and that was in Germany, where I’m not very widely published.
ROSENTHAL: It seems to me that you have made a very definite and a very successful effort at a closely reasoned and fairly serious medium [in] your thrillers, following in the tradition of people in America like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Have you felt yourself to be influenced by these people—particularly, I think, Chandler?
FLEMING: Yes, definitely. I was tremendously impressed by both those writers—the fact that they got away from Mandarin English and also told a more of less truthful type of story. I admit fantasy enters into mine far more than it does into theirs, but it did seem to me that they’d taken the thriller a tremendous step forward away from ham, so to speak, and of course one of my great ambitions would be to write—as indeed Raymond Chandler says himself in his book Chandler Speaking—to write a great novel that would also be a great thriller. And I’m sure it’s certainly quite possible because when you look at the Russians—look at Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, the tremendously thrilling elements in their great novels.
I’m not in the least ashamed of telling a story, so to speak, I’m very unfashionable in that way, and I’m sure that we shall come upon a writer—Simenon is after all very nearly that, he’s written some quite remarkable novels, in which elements of violence and terror and death are very strong. Certainly as people become more adult in their reading habits, I think the thriller will develop along those lines—let’s say it [will] get closer to the novel, while at the same time remaining the telling of a story, rather than let us say, [the] lopped end of a life, which is rather current today.
ROSENTHAL: Well if we hark for a moment on the question of the novel, which is more important to you—the sequence of events, or individual events? You have written a few short stories, haven’t you, which seem to me to be constructed in a very similar fashion to the novels, in that there is always a beautiful girl involved, there is once more the element of pursuit and of capture, and of extreme violence and brutality. In other words, it seems to me that you can compress certain aspects of your novels into a much shorter space, but is it the whole sequence that counts or is it the individual events?
FLEMING: Well, I think that pace is probably the answer to that question—it’s a rather difficult question to answer. What I have tried to achieve is speed. That’s why you find very little dialogue on the whole in my books, and a great deal of incidents and descriptions of places and things. Whereas of course in a novel, it’s very difficult to write a successful novel unless you have long passages of dialogue, which personally bore me because I’m not very good at writing dialogue. I can pick up a Raymond Chandler and read his dialogue just for the pleasure of reading his dialogue, and very often, as I think must possibly occur in the case of many readers, one doesn’t really honestly know what the devil’s going on in a Chandler book, but the dialogue is so good it carries one...
...As many readers will find, they can pick up, as I can, a Raymond Chandler book and read it [as] such for the sake of the brilliance of the dialogue, and I, for my part, very often haven’t got the foggiest notion what is really happening in a Chandler book—I just read it with great pleasure because it’s so highly intelligent, but I think his plots are extremely dubious, very often he loses track of…
ROSENTHAL: You said a few minutes ago Mr. Fleming that you were very interested in the form of the novel as such, and that you would one day like to write a great novel which was also a great thriller. Now in your latest book, The Spy Who Loved Me, it seems to me that you’ve gone much more over to the novel rather than the thriller; certainly in the first half dealing with the spy, it’s obviously different because you’ve written it from the point of view of a girl. But also Bond comes into it very late indeed—is this a deliberate attempt to break away from what you feel might be a limiting formula or what?
FLEMING: Well I think if you’re writing about a serial character, and trying to be slightly intelligent about doing so, you do get rather tired of the reader’s desire that you should produce exactly the same mixture as before, and in this last book of mine, The Spy Who Loved Me, I have tried to get away from that, for a change—an intellectual change for myself, perhaps, and I’ve tried to look at Bond as one might say from the other end of the gun barrel, and the book purports to be written by a girl, and it is how she sees Bond, but I have tried to put [that] across, rather than for instance how Bond sees the girl, which is fact is not mentioned at all.
ROSENTHAL: But there are in fact only a very few pages which actually put this across—between a third and a half of the book is devoted to the girl’s previous history and her maltreatment at the hands of rather contemptible men.
FLEMING: Well, I had to make the girl the sort of girl to whom the exciting events that then come to pass would come to pass. She’s a French-Canadian, she’s had rather [a] normal life perhaps, but in London, before she gets to this rather sinister hotel in America, and I think artistically—if one can put it like that, or from the point of view of craftsmanship—I had to explain the girl pretty thoroughly before the gangsters arrived on the scene and then subsequently James Bond.
ROSENTHAL: Mmm. If we can change the subject completely, although in fact it’s a reversion to Hammett and Chandler, we’ve seen many films of books from those two, we know what their private eyes look like. It seems to me quite extraordinary—particularly these days, when a writer has to depend very often on film rights in order to live properly—that we haven’t yet had any James Bond films. Are there any on the way?
FLEMING: They just have begun. Previously there’s been a lot of dickering and flirting with the idea of Hollywood, which generally consisted of having very expensive lunches, and everybody saying “Ian, what a wonderful writer you are and what wonderful films you’d make, Ian” and so on and so forth, and then nothing—everything…fades out and Mr. Finkelstein disappears back into Hollywood, and that’s the end of that. But now [the] extremely able team of producers who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Entertainer and many other films have now got rights nearly all the James Bond books—all the James Bond books that are free, and they have started in effect.
They’re very nearly finished doing the first one, which is Doctor No—which is an extremely expensive affair in Technicolour—and I went and watched one or two scenes being shot on location in Jamaica, and I’ve seen some rushes from it and it does seem to me to get back to the likes of The Guns of Navarone—the old sort of blood and thunder film which I personally have always greatly enjoyed—when you stagger out into the night at the end of the film not really knowing what’s hit you. As for instance, Hitchcock, in his excellent North by Northwest pulled one’s legs so much that one went out into the night not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened.
ROSENTHAL: Who is playing Bond and do you approve of him?
FLEMING: I urged them not to get a typed actor, but to try and find somebody who was comparatively unknown, and they’ve found a most admirable man called Sean Connery, who is a Scotsman, and he’s a well-known Shakespearian actor, and he’s done a bit of TV as well. He’s boxed for the Navy, he weight-lifts for Scotland, and he plays centre-forward for the Variety Association Football team at weekends. He’s very good-looking, moves very well, very good with a gun, and I think he’ll do the job absolutely splendidly.
They’ve got a very beautiful Swiss actress called Ursula Andress who appears as the heroine in this, and some extremely good subsidiary characters…a very good villain called Wiseman from America, and a very good coloured man in the part of Quarrel, which is a rather important subsidiary part in the picture. And from what I can see they’re doing a tremendous job of it, and I suppose it’ll be coming out round the end of about August or September, and of course I shall be extremely interested to see what the public think of it all.
ROSENTHAL: Have you in fact any part in the supervision of the technical problems of that sort of grim obstacle race which Bond has towards the end of the book?
FLEMING: I’ve given them some ideas, but as a matter of fact I’ve kept as far away as possible because if you get mixed up in show business it can be an extremely time-wasting affair, and I have been writing in the last two months, while they’ve been filming, another full-length James Bond story, so I didn’t want to get too tied-up in the show business side of things.
ROSENTHAL: Is this all Bond this time?
FLEMING: Yes. First page to last.
ROSENTHAL: Er—good.
***
Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups (BBC, June 1, 1962)
“Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups” is a phrase Ian Fleming has used to describe his James Bond thrillers. In the interview which follows he is talking about their recipe with Peter Duval Smith.
PETER DUVAL SMITH: Mr. Fleming, this year is the 10th birthday of James Bond. Every spring since 1953 you’ve brought out a novel featuring Bond, the wonder M.I.5 [sic] secret service agent, as your hero. I wondered what started you off writing these enormously successful novels?
IAN FLEMING: Well it was really quite by chance, because I was in Jamaica, and I was faced by a kind of vacuum in my life, with nothing particularly in my mental hands, and I was also just on the eve of getting married, after being a bachelor for 43 years, and this was rather a dreadful step to take, and partly to anaesthetize my mind, as a sort of antibody to this situation, I sat down at the typewriter and decided to write a thriller.
SMITH: You’ve been a journalist since you were a young man working for the Times and Reuters and so forth, but had you ever wanted to write a book before?
FLEMING: No, I can’t really say I had, I’d never thought I’d have the energy to finish it.
SMITH: Had you always been interested in the cloak-and-dagger world that the novels take place in?
FLEMING: Yes, I think so. You know I was brought up on penny dreadfuls and then Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace and Phillips Oppenheim, the usual things—people nowadays are presumably brought up on rather similar stuff on television, westerns and so on and so forth. And I thought of it as an entertaining type of book to write, because I am interested in action more than dialogue and psychological insight, and my intention was to fill these books with action, or at any rate fill the first one with action.
SMITH: You seem to have at hand a lot of specialised knowledge about the cloak-and-dagger world.
FLEMING: Well I came a certain amount in contact with it when I was in Naval Intelligence during the war, but of course it’s pretty far from reality, and has to be, because otherwise I should be infringing the Official Secrets Act and have a lot of trouble on my hands. So it has to be, to a certain extent, fantastical, and it must not of course duplicate what in any case I don’t know myself personally happens in real life.
SMITH: What was the genesis of your great hero, James Bond? Was he based on anybody in particular, or any kind of person in particular?
FLEMING: Well, to go back to what I was saying, I wanted really to find a blunt instrument in the hand of the government, and get away from the old hero, the sort of Bulldog Drummond-Saint-Buchan type of hero, because I don’t believe they exist, to somebody who’s slightly more believable. Also, I didn’t wish him to obtrude his personality, I meant him to be read as simply a really good professional, without any particular trademarks, but of course he’s gathered them over the years, and now a sort of myth of James Bond has clouded what was a simple, straightforward pro.
And that’s really the reason why I chose his name, which I thought was an extremely dull name, James Bond, rather than calling him Peregrine Carruthers or something…That name I borrowed from one of my bibles in Jamaica, which is a book called Birds of the West Indies by a man called James Bond. And funnily enough last Christmas I got a very nice letter from Mrs. James Bond, saying that I was misinterpreting her husband’s character, and…
SMITH: Well James Bond, however anonymously you may have meant him, has put a lot of people’s backs up—as you know, you’ve been immensely criticized, especially by literary critics, for what one of them called “sex, sadism and snobbery.” Well sex I suppose is alright, but you wouldn’t want to be accused of sadism and snobbery, yet in the books there is a lot of violence, and sometimes it does seem to be—even to me, an admirer—a bit gratuitous.
FLEMING: Well I think that’s perfectly true; of course, in a way each of these stories has been a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, where James Bond surmounts Giant Despair and Mount Whatever it is, and goes through a great deal of physical pain in the process before he wins the prize at the end. And the old days of just getting a whack on the head like Bulldog Drummond used to get, perhaps with a cricket stump or something of that sort, are very much out of date, and I’ve always tried to keep these books to a certain extent contemporary. In fact, so far as sadism’s concerned, if I were to describe literally the tortures which you read being inflicted or that have been inflicted in Algeria I should certainly be stepping into the realms of sadism, far more than I am at present moment.
SMITH: But look, take things like Felix Leiter, the American secret service agent who is Bond’s great friend, being practically eaten alive by that shark in Live and Let Live I think—
FLEMING: Live and Let Die.
SMITH: Live and Let Die, and the girl being eaten in the West Indies in one of the other books.
FLEMING: Well the point really is if you do an awful lot of underwater swimming, which I do, the perils of sharks and barracuda become very real, and fix themselves in your imagination, and I think that the shark incident—and there’s been also trouble with barracudas and a giant squid and various other terrifying animals—is largely because I know the underwater world and I know its perils—I mean, one’s got to write about something—and I translate them into my stories.
SMITH: But what about Bond being nearly cooked alive in the health institute in Thunderball? I’m sure that’s never happened to you.
FLEMING: Well—funny, I don’t say he’s cooked alive, but—I’ve certainly been on this tension instrument for stretching the spine, and I found out the technical details of it and I’ve found out that it certainly could get out of hand, and that unless the tension was kept at around 120 lbs—if it was allowed to go up to say 200, which is the maximum of the machine, which was really a form of rack for stretching the spine...I had arthritis some years ago…That was another fact which fixed itself in my mind as a possible trouble that James Bond could get into.
SMITH: Well, to get back to the critics who dislike Bond so much and their charge of snobbery, all the stuff in the books about clubs and the very best wine for a certain dish and so forth—do you think that’s a fair criticism?
FLEMING: Well, I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, because I think everybody should strive for better—I don’t know what to say—better food, better soap, better bread, better everything. I think that there’s no harm in if one has an admiration for a particular kind of, let’s say, soap or something of that sort, mentioning it by name, just as I think it’s silly to talk about a hotel not more than a mile from Piccadilly Circus instead of describing the Ritz in detail.
SMITH: Yes. Yes.
FLEMING: The old-fashioned way to not mention any object or place in detail—
SMITH: Call it the Splendide or…
FLEMING: Call it the Splendide or something…on the grounds that one was advertising the place. Well I don’t mind advertising these things that I let James Bond use and so on, because very often I use them myself and I think they’re very good.
SMITH: Yes. And finally their accusation, these angry young men who are so angry with Bond, of perverse sex. And one can think of one or two examples. Why does Domino in Thunderball—that enchanting girl that he finds in Bermuda—why does she have one leg shorter than the other, though everything else is perfect?
FLEMING: Well, again, it’s an attempt to try and get closer to real life. The girls I have known have not all been Brigitte Bardots, some of them have had minor deformations of one sort or another, which one finds rather endearing. And giving Domino one leg slightly shorter than the other, I think gave her rather an attractive limp.
SMITH: Well that’s fair enough…
FLEMING: The trouble is you see with these heroines...again if one’s writing about a serial character like James Bond, it’s really awfully difficult not to write about the same sort of heroine, or the same sort of villain in each book, and it’s quite a business trying to make them very different.
SMITH: But if Bond is supposed to be close to real life in that respect, why then in his dealing, all his dealings, with all these enchanting girls isn’t he more tender? He’s very much a chap who has his sex and disappears.
FLEMING: Well, he hasn’t really got the time to be tender, he’s got to get back to his headquarters and go on with his next job. (Laughing)
SMITH: In writing the books, have you any kind of purpose? I know you haven’t had a solemn message to put across, but anything you’ve been trying to show?
FLEMING: Well, in a world where everybody’s smashing heroes and idols in every possible direction, I rather like in my own mind to create somebody who is in some shape a form of hero. He does a good professional job for his country and I rather deplore the fact that heroes have gone out of fiction, and that now it’s this anti-hero who holds the stage.
SMITH: I found a marvellous cutting from the Manchester Guardian—some of it would have never appeared in any other newspaper—that ran as follows: “It’s evident that fiction of this kind (Mr. Fleming’s) provides a vicarious satisfaction of innately violent instincts which tends to prevent their expression in the everyday world, therefore we should be grateful to Mr. Fleming for providing a convenient safety-valve for the boiling sensibility of modern man.”
FLEMING: Well I think that’s rather well-said, but as a matter of fact Paul Gallico wrote something rather similar in an introduction to an omnibus volume of my books that came out in America last year, when he rather likened them to the psychoanalyst’s comparison of the cat with the tiger. The psychoanalysts apparently maintain that a lot of people who keep cats [do so] because they are baby tigers, and that this domestic pet is in fact really the relic of some desire for a gigantic man-eating monster, but whether that’s true or not I don’t know.
SMITH: And do you think your books then work for people in the nature of a safe tiger—do you think that somebody who reads about violence and enjoys reading about it would be therefore less likely to do it?
FLEMING: I don’t think it really acts one way or the other. From the sort of letters I get from readers, they simply enjoy a jolly good story and have it at that. I’ve never thought that these books have any great effect on anybody—I should be rather horrified and frightened if I thought they did have, any more than Fu Manchu had a great psychological effect on me when I was about 12 or 14.
SMITH: Well the sex, sadism, and snobbery doesn’t bother me personally very much. I like the books very much, but I’ve got objections that are growing as I follow the Bond saga, and the main objection is to the decreased credibility of his more recent adventures.
FLEMING: Yes, well there again, I’ve written somewhere—I’ve forgotten quite where—that of course if you read the newspapers, you’ll find that you’re often astonished at what happens in the real life secret service. One occasionally sees the tip of the iceberg in an operation like the U2 operation, with all the poisoned needles the chap carried and the currency and so on. And then you get people like Khokhlov, the Russian who was sent to assassinate a man in West Germany, who carried an explosive cigarette case—when he offered a man a cigarette, you pressed a button and the bullet went through his heart.
And then you’ve got the Crabb exploit, when he was lost doing presumably some kind of underwater frogman’s job on the Russian cruiser several years ago. Now those you might say are rather incredible, but nevertheless they are real life, and lot of my stories are in fact based, or taken from actual incidents that I’ve read about. I could run through the whole gamut and tell you where I’d read about them and what it’s all about but basically, I try and keep my foot more or less on the ground.
SMITH: But you don’t seem to allow that there’s ever any element of farce in the Secret Service work.
FLEMING: Well, (laughs) the trouble is if you start to laugh at yourself, these books would destroy themselves, because they’re meant to be thrillers, and to thrill and chill as much as possible, and if I suddenly started laughing at myself, or at my audience, in my books, my purpose would be defeated and I should be writing an entirely different kind of book.
I have felt rather the same—I am a tremendous admirer of Hitchcock, for instance, the film producer, but when I saw his marvellous film North by Northwest I thought what a splendid plot he’s got there, and how because being Hitchcock and having a sly sense of humor he refused to go on being serious, he pulled the plot’s leg so much at the end that you came out of the cinema not knowing whether to shudder or to giggle, so to speak. I think there’s a certain amount of humor in my books—some of the dialogue is fairly humorous, I think. Felix Leiter makes humorous cracks every now and then, but of course it’s not in Bond’s character to be a humorous man.
SMITH: Yes. You don’t think that to have a more obvious background of ordinary life would help? Do you remember that Buchan novel that begins marvellously with the sentence—I think it runs something like this—“Sir Edward Leithen ran for his life like a hare down St. James Street, surrounded by ordinary, respectable, upper-middle-class London.” This man clutching his bowler hat and his briefcase, running for his life—and I miss that a little bit in the Bond books.
FLEMING: Yes…I think there may be something in that. Admittedly they are rather fantastic, but of course I find—perhaps remembering my youth—that one used to love the books that really took you out of yourself, into an entirely different world, and I think that possibly is what I have in mind when I write these books, that you’d be translated into an entirely different world where the improbable can happen, in rather luxurious surroundings.
SMITH: What everybody likes about the books is the tremendous display, and not at all a self-conscious display, of knowledge. You obviously know about the things that I know about, I know that you know about food and wine and aeroplanes, and obviously you know all about aqualung fishing and sunken treasure and guns and bath salts. Is the information accurate that we read?
FLEMING: Yes. I make about one mistake per book, but I take immense trouble to try and get it right. But the mistakes I do make of course pursue me endlessly through the years. The fact that I once, in my first [sic] book, said that a scent called Vent Vert was made by Dior instead of Balmain pursues me to this day, as also when I said the Orient Express had hydraulic brakes instead of air pressure brakes. Well, that pursues me, and there are various other items of that sort that enthusiasts pick up, and of course it’s the enthusiasts that generally write to you and say, “What the hell’s the good of writing this trash if you don’t know that Vent Vert is made by Balmain?” for instance.
SMITH: And there is such a car as the Studillac in Live and Let Die [sic]?
FLEMING: Oh yes, and I’ve driven it—in fact I was arrested in one going at 94 miles an hour on the New York State Highway.
SMITH: And could you in fact steal an H-bomber in the way that it is described in Thunderball?
FLEMING: Well I consulted a very high-up chap in the Air Ministry about this, and he told me, including a lot of gen which I gave about flying a plane, that a single man could in fact have flown this plane.
SMITH: I remember that you once in conversation with me gave yourself a splendid out about the probability business and so forth in the books when you said “well really I regard them as fairy tales for grown-ups.”
FLEMING: Yes, well I suppose that’s a convenient crack.
SMITH: You wouldn’t say daydreams, rather than fairy tales?
FLEMING: Yes, daydreams is another good simile.
SMITH: But fairy tales have got a shorter pipeline to real life than daydreams have.
FLEMING: Yes, and of course generally they have a much more clear moral than I produce in my books.
SMITH: Do you feel the complaint that Raymond Chandler, whom you admire, often made, that thriller writers are not properly treated by the critics, they’re not treated as if they could possibly be part of literature—does this bother you?
FLEMING: It doesn’t bother me, because I’ve always been pretty lucky in that respect. My critics when they’ve been harsh on me have been harsh for good reasons, but they’ve been pretty intelligent chaps. Chandler was hurt, and I know he was, but his books—which were in fact a step above what I might call thrillers, they were really novels of suspense—weren’t given rather more serious treatment. They are of course today, as are Dashiell Hammett’s, they’re regarded as part of American literary heritage. But I think on the whole that the ordinary run-of-the-mill thriller gets adequate treatment, and I think that probably the outstanding thriller doesn’t. But as things work in newspaper offices, if a thriller comes along it’s sent along to the thriller reviewer, and isn’t for instance taken out and given, say, to Cyril Connolly or Toynbee.
SMITH: Are you sorry about that?
FLEMING: Yes, because I think it’s great fun, first of all Cyril Connolly suddenly has some very entertaining views about my books, and I should be most amused to see him write them down one day.
SMITH: Who do you admire among your fellow thriller writers?
FLEMING: Well Eric Ambler of course I think is tops, and I hope that the disaster he’s suffered in California-Los Angeles fire last year, which cost him…nearly all his belongings, won’t have upset him too much and that he’ll be getting on with his writing. I think he’s the best alive today, though one or two—
SMITH: What about Buchan?
FLEMING: Well Buchan I’m afraid I try and read, but I find his writing is tremendously old-fashioned. Geoffrey Household is excellent, there’s a very good chap called Lyall—
SMITH: Gavin Lyall.
FLEMING: Gavin Lyall, yes, wrote a very good first thriller last year, The Other Side of the Sky, which I admired very much. There’s occasionally [something] really fresh and new, but the ordinary English thriller writer generally doesn’t go further than Soho and Tangier, and that’s about as far as his knowledge goes, and I’m very tired of Soho and Tangier.
SMITH: But these writers you’ve mentioned are all very literate writers, and we know from Chandler’s remarkable book of essays published recently that he was an extremely self-conscious writer, that he wrote as carefully as any poet. Do you yourself take a great deal of trouble over the novels?
FLEMING: Yes, I do, but then I write them very fast, and I do a tremendous amount of correcting afterwards. And I try to make them as literate as possible, but I also true avoid sort of O.K. English, because I think it holds up the pace of what are primarily books of action.
SMITH: Are you going to go on writing books about Bond? Will there be 20 books in 10 more years’ time?
FLEMING: Well I don’t think—I should rather guess that I shall run out of inventiveness by then, and you’ve already ticked me off for getting too bizarre, and I should think that my powers of invention will gradually die away. I have just in fact written, I think, the longest James Bond…where he appears on the first page and goes right through to the last. Some pretty extraordinary things happen in that, and in fact I’m just correcting it today. But how much longer I shall find any situations to put Bond in without getting stale and repeating myself, I really couldn’t say.
SMITH: You wouldn’t like to try a new kind, perhaps a more ambitious kind of novel that didn’t necessarily have Bond in it all—and that wasn’t necessarily just a thriller either?
FLEMING: Well I don’t know that I would, I don’t think I’ve got anything…you see, if you’re going to write a straight novel, you’ve got to either have some sort of message, or you’ve got to go over these hackneyed themes of youth, boyhood, first love and so on, so forth, which have been done ad nauseam. What I would like to do, of course, is to write a great novel which is also a great thriller, and Chandler says the same thing in one of his letters. I suppose one of these days there will be a thriller which is also a War and Peace but I doubt if I’m the man who’ll write it.
SMITH: Thank you very much, Mr. Fleming.
Tonight (April 16, 1962)
He wore a dark blue belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down. Carefully, almost too carefully, he lit a cigarette, a cigarette with three distinctive gold rings, blended for him from a Balkan tobacco mixture by Morland's of Grosvenor Street. With a look of cold, measured passion, he moved forward in his hand-made brown suede shoes. Deftly he slipped a point two five berretta out of its chamois leather holster, took aim and fired. James Bond, Secret Agent no. 007, had arrived. In fact, James Bond, as every addict knows, arrived ten years ago, bringing with him a smart-set world of iced vodka, martinis, Caribbean yachts, scent by Guerlain, Bentley Continentals, all the most expensive flesh pots. It’s also a world of naked flesh either in sexual collision or under sexual assault from weapons as varied as a carpet beater and the tail of a sting ray.
KENNETH ALLSOP: James Bond’s creator is Mr. Ian Fleming and the latest Bond adventure, The Spy Who Loved Me, is published today. Now Mr. Fleming, this new Bond book of yours, in fact it’s told by a girl, it doesn’t include any kind of death or violence until about half way through and Bond, himself, doesn’t appear until two thirds of the way through. Now do you think you’re getting a little bored with your hero?
IAN FLEMING: No, I never get bored with him at all but I think that if you write about a serial character, in the end you’ve got to find themes for the other end of the gin muzzle, so to speak, and I’ve tried in this book—I don’t know how successfully—to examine Bond from the view of somebody who got involved with him.
ALLSOP: Well, you said in a letter to the Guardian in exchange with an editorial they wrote about your books, you did seem rather to regret that you’d saddled Bond with what you called then his vulgar foibles and gimmickry. Do you still feel that you wish you hadn’t done this?
FLEMING: Well, Bond got himself involved. I’d meant him to be a perfectly straightforward instrument of Government, or secret government let’s call it, a blunt instrument who was extremely effective and efficient. I didn’t mean him to become a hero. He wasn’t supposed to be a hero. He was supposed to be extremely efficient.
ALLSOP: I know that some things in this new book of yours that I think are going to frustrate Bond’s admirers, you know. To begin with, there’s no refined torture of any kind, the sexes are very straightforward and, in fact, your only detailed mention of clothes is, I think if I remember rightly, the black matador pants of the heroine and her turtle neck sweater. Now I wondered if this might mean that you were aiming at a new market, perhaps the women’s market?
FLEMING: No, I’ve got no commercial intentions at all. I just write as I please. I like to write about James Bond because I like to write about his adventures. I’m not very interested in him as a character. I’m much more interested in the things that happen to him.
ALLSOP: This rather surprises me because now you’ve been said to have President Kennedy and Anthony Eden among your readers. Do you mean to say then that you’ve never consciously made James Bond the kind of top people’s hero?
FLEMING: No, very much the opposite, and I think that probably the sales figures of my books would show that. I mean that my Pan book paperback edition here and the New American paperback edition in America sold far more copies than my hardcover editions do and I don’t aim…
ALLSOP: That means a different kind of public altogether.
FLEMING: That means a different kind of public and I don’t aim at any particular public, I just enjoy writing these books. I mean, perhaps the zest that I put into them is too much for people or for some people but it is zest anyway.
ALLSOP: What I’m rather surprised about is your apparent dislike of James Bond. Now in your new book, I remember that you have a kindly policeman warning the heroine not to get involved with Bond and his words to her were that there’s a deadly quality common to professionals of both the criminal and detective type, so is this really as you see Bond in the end, just as a cold, useless instrument?
FLEMING: Well, I think you’ll find that if you talk to a policeman anywhere, you’ll find that they have a sort of love-hate relationship with their quarries, with the gangsters, and I think the particular man in this book, The Spy Who Loved Me, is merely expressing this love-hate relationship.
ALLSOP: Well, now, in a magazine published today, Mr. Fleming, you’ve been vehemently attacked. In fact, the editor, with a lot of examples, describes you as the nastiest and most sadistic writer of our day. Now do you simply shrug off this kind of criticism or does it upset you?
FLEMING: Well, I think the answer is that, of course, Today—this magazine Today—wanted to serialize my last book and I wouldn’t allow them to do so and presumably they’ve taken it out on me, as in the best journalistic sense one does, on me but I noticed in the particular issue of the magazine there’s a very dramatic picture of a man practically kicked to death and several girls in very slight costume and so and so forth, and I think it’s just the old journalistic gimmick, you know—or gimmick.
ALLSOP: Mr. Fleming, thank you very much.
Note: When the Daily Express rejected The Spy Who Loved Me for serialization, Fleming's de facto general agent Peter Janson-Smith offered it to Today. But Fleming was still upset with how the magazine had published "The Hildebrand Rarity" two years earlier and told Janson-Smith to stop negotiations. And then, according to Andrew Lycett:
"On publication of The Spy Who Loved Me, Today’s editor Charles Stainsby wrote a signed article calling it 'one of the worst, most boring, badly constructed novels we have read'. But this was only the point of entry for a protracted attack on, first, Ian himself, as the perpetrator of 'the nastiest and most sadistic writing of our day' and, second, his Establishment friends who promoted and peddled his wares. 'It is all part and parcel of the strange nastiness which afflicts many of the Top People in Britain,' opined Stainsby. 'We stand firmly against all the things represented by Mr Fleming. We find his writings disgusting drivel. We deplore the manner in which they have been puffed. And we deplore even more the fact that a respectable publisher chooses to put his imprint on them.'
"This outburst led to an invitation to Ian to appear on BBC Television’s current affairs programme Tonight. There he openly alleged that Today had 'taken it out' on him because he had refused to allow it to serialize his latest book. This version of events was disputed by Stainsby who claimed he had never wanted to publish any extract from Ian’s book in the first place. He called Ian’s statement 'extremely defamatory' and demanded an apology which Ian, rather ignominiously, had to give."
It seems to me that Today should have been the one to apologize! Putting aside this controversy, I find it interesting that The Spy Who Loved Me is the book Fleming gave the most interviews for. Presumably because by 1962 Fleming had reached the bestseller lists, and by the time OHMSS and YOLT were published Fleming had grown too ill too give many interviews.
We all know James Bond and the exciting life he leads—but what of his alter ego Ian Fleming? Writer Mary Salter turned sleuth and tracked him down in his sunny Jamaican retreat in Oracabessa: overleaf she reports back to Home.
Full of sun, sea, air, and the things we value…this is how Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s home at Oracabessa, on the north coast of Jamaica, strikes the visitor. The house has a feeling of space and uncluttered living, of the essentials. Nothing too much, yet everything needed for a house by the sea.
Lord Avon, then Sir Anthony Eden, and his wife planted this exotic tree in front of the house when they stayed at Goldeneye during his illness after the Suez Crisis.
Oracabessa, near Galina Point, the most northernly part of the island, is small and quiet compared with Ocho Rios, only a short drive away and one of the main tourist centres, though Oracabessa is in fact the leading banana port in Jamaica. Turn in at a white gate half hidden in the thick hedge of a by-road, go up a marl drive on to a lawn bordered with shrubs and trees, walk through a cool courtyard into the house (built in the shape of a “square U” is how Ian Fleming describes it), and you find yourself in a 60-foot living room, with magnificent views of the ocean through the open window spaces. Walk out through a door on the opposite side of the room and you are on the cliff edge, looking down onto a private beach and a shady cove with a small harbor for mooring boats. All through Jamaica you find this open air living: rarely a hot room or a feeling of being shut in.
Entrance to Goldeneye, which is built round three sides of a square: bedrooms on the right, kitchen on the left, and living room stretching across both wings.
When I arrived Ian Fleming was down on the beach, just finishing a pre-lunch swim; he keeps to a strict schedule when at Goldeneye: three hours work every morning, a siesta after lunch, then another working session. A glance outside might shake a less determined person, but this house is designed to bring the scent of the sea and the sun indoors. No glass anywhere, only louvered shutters, Birds—including the hummingbirds Ian Fleming studies, writes about and likes so much—fly through the rooms, the “kling-kling” (the Jamaican blackbird) hops in and out in search of food. Not so hard to sit indoors working in such a setting! He has written all his books here. The plot begins to form in his mind during the year, then be comes to Jamaica to do research and write. He works in his bedroom overlooking the sea, at a desk he designed himself.
Ian Fleming is at Goldeneye for only two or three months each winter. For the rest of the year the house is empty or lent to friends, with Violet the housekeeper and Felix the gardener (who is married to Freda the cook) in charge.
Fleming was one of the first Europeans to settle in Jamaica after the war, having been there officially in 1942 when U-boat sinkings in the Caribbean were giving rise to anxiety. Although it rained during most of his week’s visit he took a great liking to the tropics and went back as soon as the war was over. In 1946 he bought a completely flat strip of land (then a donkey race-course) known as Rock Edge, and built the bouse quite cheaply, using local labour and materials. The wooded gardens and tree shaded lawns were laid out, and the staff recruited from the village. The house itself needs very little upkeep: a shingle to be replaced on the roof, a new hinge for the typical wood-slatted shutters from time to time.
At first glance the floors look like dark blue stone, but are in fact of cement mixed with blue dye, polished to a high gloss with cut, bitter oranges. (This is a well-known polishing method in Jamaica—I saw maids in the old “great houses” go into the garden to pick oranges or lemons for polishing the mahogany furniture). Each bedroom has its own adjoining shower. There is a modest hot water system, but the sun heats the pipes enough to wash one’s hair in comfort by midday!
Entertaining is made easy with the three-sides refectory table in the dining area; bench cushions are covered in tough blue twill piped in white. The complete set of Riedinger Vienna Riding School prints is priceless.
Deep sea spear fishing equipment is everywhere, for this is Ian Fleming’s favourite sport. A fine collection of shells and coral is arranged on semi-circular shelves against the wall.
During lunch—with Bimbo, the Jamaican mongrel dog and his puppy, Satan, at our feet—Ian Fleming told me how he makes liqueur. “I call it Poor Man’s Liqueur, and it’s very potent!”
(Take a bottle of rum—preferably 3 Daggers, the kind which is cheap in Jamaica—pour a little into a bowl, add a tablespoon of white sugar and the whole rind of an orange and lemon. Beat with a spoon to extract the juices, then add more rum. Turn out the lights, set fire to the mixture, stirring with a fork till the flame turns from blue to yellow. Then put a plate over the bowl to extinguish it. Serve!)
The living room, with furniture of local mahoe wood and made in the village to Ian Fleming's design. Bimbo, the Jamaican mongrel, takes his daily siesta.
We went on to talk about making the film Dr. No. Ian Fleming had little to do with this “mainly because showbusiness people are time-wasting characters and I had another book to write.” I asked if there really were huge spiders in Jamaica like the one in the film and was told definitely not. It was hired from a man who collects tarantulas, and made to run up and down the stunt man’s body—Sean Connery, alias James Bond, would have nothing to do with it! This scene was shot in the studio at Pinewood, England—far from Morgan’s Harbour Beach Club, Sir Anthony Jenkinson’s hotel at Port Royal, where the other hotel scenes were made.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the last James Bond book to be published, was written while Dr. No was being filmed; the next one (due next spring) was on the typewriter as we talked, title undisclosed. Casino Royale was the first book to be written at Goldeneye, eleven years ago, followed by Live and Let Die, set in the Jamaican background used for two books and two short stories. From Russia, With Love—his favourite—is being filmed right now; meanwhile Thrilling Cities, published by Jonathan Cape, about some of the fascinating places he (and Bond?) knows so well, is due on the bookstalls any time.
Asked his views on the colour bar, Ian Fleming replied, “I am happy at the way things are going; we are becoming what we basically are—brothers. For me the colour problem does not exist.” So obviously true, with everyone in Jamaica knowing and liking him, his keen interest in local affairs, his roots are deep in the Caribbean.
https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/from-the-archive-ian-fleming-on-his-jamaican-villa-1958
Best of luck, and may you write many books there!
Yes, the text is also included in my thread "The Adventure Journalism of Ian Fleming." The pictures in the link partially show how much Goldeneye has changed since Fleming's death. It's more luxurious than the spartan original. The excellent website "Fleming's Bond" has an article, with pictures, describing a recent visit. The desk is still there.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009y5b3