The Ian Fleming Miscellany (11 page)

James Bond as he first appeared in the first
Daily Express
strip cartoon serialisation of
Casino Royale
in 1958.
Daily Express

The second incarnation of James Bond used in the Daily Express strip cartoon serialisations from 1960–62.
Daily Express

He wrote
Casino Royale
‘to take my mind off other matters'. He completed the 62,000 word manuscript in a little over two months, and when he thought it was readable, he took it back to London and married Anne, who that summer received a £100,000 settlement from her ex-husband.

In May 1952, he had lunch with William Plomer, a friend who worked at Jonathan Cape. He told him about the book but said it wasn't quite ready. Maybe, that first time, it wasn't. But after a short enticing period during which the manuscript was always not quite ready he eventually delivered it. The reaction was favourable. Cape would take it, with small revisions.

He proved to be the kind of author that publishers dread. He behaved – even to the august Jonathan Cape himself – rather as if he had paid Cape and they were hired labourers. Maybe he genuinely thought that he was doing them a favour; a lot of first-time authors do, although they live to be disabused of the illusion.

First of all, he did not accept their qualified acceptance. He accepted their revisions, but the book needed other changes, he said, before they could have it. He did the editing, wrote a whole new chapter, and re-delivered. They were satisfied. He then insisted on designing his own cover. It turned out to be cleverly deceptive. It was a charming image – sea blue, with parallel trails of crimson hearts down either side, and a central crimson heart enclosed by a wreath with the words ‘whisper of love'. Only the title indicated that this would be other than a soppy romance.

He was forever on the phone, finding out what was going on with his book and suggesting ideas for marketing it. In the most charming way possible, of course – but while the editor is talking to an author, an editor cannot be getting on with anybody's book.

He had none of the authorial embarrassment about money that was so unhealthily inspired during the Romantic period and endures to this day. He was not distracted by vanity. He had written
Casino Royale
for fun and money, and the cheques would not be forthcoming unless the marketing and sales were right. He kept his thumb on Jonathan Cape's neck. With Ian, the more profit he made, the more careful he got. Without an agent, he took advice from a solicitor, and became, with Anne, joint director of Glidrose, the company that held copyright and to which all film and television rights would be assigned.

In the long term, Ian Fleming really was doing Cape a favour, and the huge success of his early books owed a lot to his own drive in talking the book up and exploiting his networks – making sure that before the book appeared in 1953, review copies would go to all the right people. Raymond Chandler complimented ‘the best thriller writer since Eric Ambler. Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of the narrative art … the reader has to go on reading.' Fleming was on the phone again, demanding a bigger print run.

Ivar Bryce noticed that it was well reviewed, and extremely popular: there were three printings because of rising demand. Even so, he though it ‘gave little notice to the publishing world of the torrential rain of gold gathering strength over the horizon'.

Fleming asked Bryce to find an American publisher for him – one willing to put in the effort and shift a lot of copies. ‘I am not being vain about this book, but simply trying to squeeze the last dirty cent out of it.' Doubleday took the bait. Ian may have asked Paul Gallico, too, because he put in a word. Gallico, the massively prolific storyteller, loved the book anyway; he had already referred Ian to his own Hollywood agent. Things were going pretty well. ‘My signature is beginning to look more and more like Shakespeare's' Ian wrote. He could be quite funny when things were going well.

Cape offered him a three-book deal, but he didn't bite. He thought he could get a better offer elsewhere. Because he didn't think they were pushy enough, he insisted on contributing to their advertising budget for the book. He added a third as much as they'd been willing to spend. But Cape were British. America was a vastly bigger market, and in his view, the Britishness of Bond was his unique selling point; he was nothing like the usual gumshoe of American detective fiction. And since the USA had only recently got its own dedicated spy service, it had no spy-fiction genre. There had never been an American Scarlet Pimpernel, Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond. The things Bond knew and the way he behaved would be a revelation, he thought. There was also the class advantage: hadn't Ivar Bryce, old Etonian, managed to attract one of the wealthiest women in America? Americans in the forties may have thought a cut-glass English accent meant ‘a faggot', but American women found it sexy. In Ian's experience they did, anyway. They would love the laconic, precise manner of Bond's speech in the book.

Macmillan published
Casino Royale
in New York, after minor editorial tweaks, in 1953. It sold, though it didn't set the world on fire. Elsa Maxwell, whom the Flemings knew, gave it a good review.

In London he continued to seek distraction from his job at
The Sunday Times
. He got involved as a publisher with the Queen Anne Press, which produced the work of many friends – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Skelton and Cyril Connolly.

Eve must have been rather proud by the end of 1952. First of all she had a new grandson, Caspar. Ian had named his son after the Admiral Caspar John, the only boy born in wedlock out of Augustus John's fourteen-odd offspring. Peter, who wrote for
The
Spectator
these days, had published
A Forgotten Journey
, Ian had had
Casino Royale
accepted and Amaryllis Fleming was the toast of the town. She had spent her career so far touring with ensembles and trios and quartets, constantly learning and winning prizes. She had been taught by some of the great cellists of her time, including Pablo Casals and Pierre Fournier.

In 1952, she won another of many prizes, and Eve hired the Wigmore Hall for Amaryllis Fleming's début as a star. The hall was packed. All her half-brothers were there, and so was Princess Marie-Louise. Afterwards there was a big party at Fortnum and Mason. Amaryllis was launched. That summer she appeared at a Promenade concert with the Hallé at the Royal Albert Hall, and bookings came in from all over Europe. They continued to do so for decades.

A few years after that night at the Wigmore Hall, she confronted Eve about her parentage. Eve denied it. In the end it was Augustus John who, after much hesitation, admitted that she was his daughter. She met and spent time with the rest of the John half-siblings, including Caspar and his sister Poppet John. Poppet was one of the Connolly-Skelton-Freud-Topolski set, who were friends of Anne Fleming.

Amaryllis would go on to become one of the world's leading cellists. It is often said that her career did not fade until the arrival of Jacqueline du Pré.

When his second book,
Live and Let Die
, was published to much applause in England in 1953, Ian exulted. The James Bond series could run and run. ‘It is the freshness of the situations I put him into that are most important'. It was also the glamour. Writing the book in Jamaica the year before, he had handled a particular talisman every day. It was a gold-plated Imperial typewriter, a unique object he'd ordered as a present to himself after
Casino Royale
.

It stood on his desk as a reminder. The British craved luxury. Their clothes had not come ‘off ration' until 1949, and confectionery and sugar were still rationed. Consumer goods from abroad – silk stockings, imported records, new drinks and cameras and cars – were a revelation. Anything from America or even France seemed better designed, glossier, silkier and vastly more desirable than the grey flannel, peach underwear and brown paper that Britain was still wrapped up in. Britain was cold, with grey light. The Clean Air Act had not been passed, and London was foggy six months of the year, the buildings soot-blackened, the rain-spattered windows brown, skylights still blocked with blackout paint. Single, bare electric light bulbs cast shadows in living rooms. Ugly British Standard paint colours were ubiquitous. A fresh ‘look' was slow to arrive. Crowds at the Festival of Britain saw how clever designers could exploit tiny resources. Paper quality had declined during the war, and British illustrators had become expert at making arresting wallpaper and book illustration that could be printed in only three or four colours.

People craved light, laughter and better food. From October to May, vegetables stocked by a high street greengrocer would be turnips, swedes, parsnips, cabbages, beetroots, sprouts, onions, carrots and potatoes. There would be no garlic, or anything at all out of season; if you wanted peas, they came in a tin. Only the smartest restaurants imported food and good wine from abroad. Cars were still usually black. Luxuries were out of reach to almost everybody. Austerity could not continue, and the British were eager for change.

So the gold-plated typewriter, and his gunmetal cigarette case which was really gold as well, reminded Ian of the glee his readers felt when James Bond ordered a vodka and tonic, noticed Revlon bottles in a lover's bathroom or roared away in a speedboat. Revlon isn't an upmarket brand today, but it was an exotic American import then. You couldn't get vodka in the pub either. Most people had never tasted it.

When Bond saw a character with ‘brand new Ben Hogan clubs' his readers already knew enough about the golfer who owned them to guess that those must be the best set you could buy. Knowing the significance of a brand implied experience of other options. You knew the best, because (in your exciting life) you'd tried the rest. If you didn't keep up with what James Bond knew, you were a hick, because if the business you'd founded with your demob money went well enough, you might get invited to join a golf club, and thanks to Ian Fleming you would know what clubs to buy. James Bond would always be one step ahead. He knew so much that he had his cigarettes specially blended, which was awe-inspiring. If James Bond had a camera, it would be described with precision; perhaps Minolta Minox, a tiny apparatus that few people would have heard of before and even fewer could afford.

Fleming hit on the difference between new money and old. New has to be told the right label to buy. Old has had years of experience and hunts down the item that satisfies his unmet need – in Bond's case, for miniaturisation and a good lens.

In Britain, in the fifties, people wanted to know about glamorous things because they were looking forward to a better life. As well as social sophistication, James Bond offered a kind of street-wise canniness. He passed on a few tips about criminals. From James Bond, you found out how card sharps cheated (‘he wore no signet-ring for pricking the cards, no surgical tape wrapped round a finger for marking them'). Ian gave readers vague hints about tradecraft – false names, codes, that sort of thing. With insider nuggets like that to hand, you could impress your friends even if you'd never played poker or deceived a soul in your life. In this confusing post-war world there would be no flies on you. You'd be suspected of having a hidden hinterland, thanks to Bond. Also, Bond was unshockable. ‘A pleasant-spoken Import and Export agent called Blackwell had a sister in England who was a heroin addict.' Goodness. Imagine making such an observation so casually. You didn't know anyone, even at one remove, who was a heroin addict.

Another writer might put, for instance, a fat man alone in a bar. Fleming, through Bond's observations, can build a whole background from the sight of that fat man before he has shifted his buttocks on the barstool. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bond makes deductions because he can; he knows so much. Through his eyes we notice that the fat man's nails are perfectly manicured; that his skin is white, like someone who never leaves the casino or the underground lair; he is short, so Bond thinks he might have a Napoleonic superiority complex; His suit is stretched across the shoulders, implying ‘repressed power'; and so on. Every picture tells a story. Whether or not these judgements are rational or correct, we don't care; we've suspended our own judgement in favour of James Bond's.