The Man with the Golden Typewriter (22 page)

A couple of months later Fleming was back in the saddle and discovered that his introduction was longer and more detailed than expected. So much so, that he felt it had the makings of a full-length article.

FLEMING TO BOOTHROYD

12th July, 1961

Many thanks for your letter of July 5th, but I do so hope you will dig out the brief details of the murder case so that I can include them simply as a matter of record.

All the other brief references in my piece to this occurrence show the police in nothing but an extremely complimentary light, and I am sure you shouldn't worry about them.

I have had a word with your publishers and I realise that your book is part of an instructional series, which sounds an excellent idea.

But, as you will see when you receive the draft, my introduction is a pretty heavyweight affair entitled “The Guns of James Bond”, and is really more of a feature article than an introduction.

Accordingly, I have had a word with the Sunday Times and though they haven't seen the typescript they would, in theory, very much like to publish it as a piece of Bondiana, and it is probable that I may also be able to place it in the United States.

Now, this new idea would be infinitely more beneficial to your book and your general fame, I am sure it would delight countless readers, and properly timed publication in the Sunday Times would give your book a tremendous send off.

I shall be sending you a copy next week for you to add to as appropriate from your files, and then I would like to send it back for final typing and also, I hope, to agree with my suggested treatment of this business which seems to have grown rather larger than you may have expected.

Since the article is largely based on the expertise contained in your letters, I would pay you a fee proportionate to what I am able to extract from publication here and abroad, and it is quite possible that in the end you may make more money out of your contribution to this article than out of the book itself!

And then, of course, the article with some concluding phrases commending your book, could be used as a foreword by Arco [Boothroyd's publisher] when they publish as they plan to do approximately in January or February.

I do hope the whole tale as I have written it will amuse you as much as it has entertained me. I have written to the Editor of the Daily Express, Glasgow, for copies of the various photographs which were taken of both of us, and it would be embellished with a suitable one together with a photograph of the Chopping picture.

Please don't bother to reply to this until you have read the piece, but please try and dig out brief facts about that murder case so that we can round off the story appropriately.

I will have a word with your agent to tell him what I have in mind, but since this is an entirely friendly arrangement directly between you and me I don't see why he should have a commission from you on the profits I hope you will make from this article.

The murder details that Boothroyd unearthed were indeed brief. Although rounding off Fleming's article perfectly, they failed to mention that the culprit, Peter Manuel, was one of the decade's most infamous serial killers. Born in 1927 in New York to Scottish parents, he had been in and out of prison for rape and sexual offences since the age of sixteen, and in 1956 embarked on a spree of bloodshed that earned him the name ‘The Beast of Birkenshaw'. He eventually confessed to eighteen murders before being hanged at Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, on 11 July 1958.

‘The Guns of James Bond' appeared in the American magazine
Sports Illustrated
in March 1962 and in November of the same year the
Sunday Times
(who had initially turned it down) ran it under the title “James Bond's Hardware”. It sold well in America, too. In fact, so established had James Bond now become that the piece earned Fleming considerably more than the first UK paperback edition of
Live and Let Die
. ‘I have greatly enjoyed it,' he wrote to Boothroyd, ‘and looking back on it all what fun we had!'

By this time the first Bond film,
Dr No
, was underway, and on Fleming's recommendation the producers Albert ‘Cubby' Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had hired Boothroyd as firearms consultant. For the launch party in Pinewood Studios there was talk of Boothroyd, Fleming, Sean Connery and, strangely, the entertainer Michael Bentine, erstwhile member of
The Goon Show
, staging a gunfight. Boothroyd offered to supply the weapons and (live) ammunition but, come the day, wiser counsel prevailed.

Not that Fleming had much strength for that kind of shenanigans anyway. His health was deteriorating and his enthusiasm for Bond, once so energetic, was beginning to flag. The two men kept up an intermittent exchange, the chatty role being sustained by Boothroyd who informed Fleming of details such as his purchase of a ‘Queen Anne bureau with all the usual secret hidey holes. This piece of quite delightful furniture will always serve as a most pleasant reminder of our friendship.' Fleming's letters, on the other hand became terser and increasingly it was Beryl Griffie-Williams who took the strain. She had been privy to much of the conversation and had become as fascinated with Boothroyd's expertise as her employer. When Fleming died in 1964 the letters stopped. Boothroyd outlived him by two decades.

 

8

Dr No

In April 1956 Fleming wrote a series of travel articles for the
Sunday Times
, one of which opened with a typically
carpe diem
sentiment: ‘After the age of forty, time begins to become important, and one is inclined to say, “Yes” to every experience.' The experience he had in mind was an expedition to the Bahamian island of Inagua, organised by Ivar Bryce, to study the world's largest population of flamingos. The birds were dramatic enough, but what really caught Fleming's imagination was the 100-square-mile lake in which they lived – a shallow, mangrove-fringed expanse ‘the colour of a corpse', which exuded a miasma of rotten-egg decay – and the secluded, semi-feudal life of Inagua's 1,000-strong population. The only source of employment was a salt works, overseen by a European family who guarded their fiefdom with vigour. ‘It is a hideous island,' he wrote, ‘and nobody in his senses ever goes near the place.' The last time Inagua had been surveyed was 1916, since when it had dropped off the bureaucratic map. Could there be a better villain's lair?

Initially, he used the setting as a basis for a TV script,
James Gunn – Secret Agent
, which he submitted to American producer Henry Morgenthau III in September 1956. When Morgenthau turned the script down, he reworked it as a novel. The plot centred on a remote, swampy Caribbean island owned by Dr Julius No, a secretive man of German/Chinese extraction who owned a guano-exporting business. Visitors were discouraged, and local fishermen returned ashen-faced, with tales of a fire-breathing dragon. Ornithologists, however, were concerned
that Dr No's activities were destroying native bird colonies. Complaints from the Audubon Society prompted an investigation, and when several members of the Secret Service's Jamaican office were subsequently murdered, Bond was put on the job.

It was Fleming's most fantastical offering to date – also one of the most exciting. Dr No was an over-the-top villain in the pay of the Soviets who wore glass contact lenses (then something of a rarity), had his heart on the wrong side of his body (even more so) and was equipped with steel claws instead of hands. Behind his cover as a guano magnate, he ran a luxuriously appointed underground bunker that doubled as a jamming station to bring down American test missiles. Bond and his cohorts – Quarrel, a stout-hearted Cayman Islander; and Honeychile Rider, the abused, broken-nosed orphan of a plantation family – faced perils ranging from poisonous centipedes to flame-throwing marsh buggies. It culminated in a series of dramatic scenes in which Honeychile was pinned to a beach to be eaten by crabs, while Bond faced a sadistic obstacle course that involved crawling through a metal tube filled with tarantulas before being vented into a lagoon containing a giant squid. Having survived all of which, 007 smothered Dr No under a pile of guano.

When Fleming flew to Jamaica in January 1957, he did so with a feeling of satisfaction. Not only did he have a solid outline for his book, but he had by now achieved such a degree of fame that in December 1956, when Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, whose wife Clarissa was a friend of Ann, sought somewhere to recuperate after the Suez Crisis, it was Goldeneye that came to mind. Ever the patriot, Fleming accepted without demur.

Ann, however, was beginning to find Jamaica awkward. She disliked flying and travelled separately with Caspar by ship. The journey took eleven days, eight of which were spent in a gale. ‘We were tilted at the most acute angle,' she wrote, ‘and my curtains were horizontal with the ceiling.' As for the lower decks, they were, ‘awash with waves and broken glass and blood'. When she finally docked it didn't help to find that Fleming was having (or attempting to have) an affair with a neighbour,
Blanche Blackwell.
¹
Ann left early, after a show of discordance which imprinted itself so forcibly on Noël Coward's mind that he wrote a play about it.
²

Dismayed but undeterred, Fleming continued his research. In March he visited the Cayman Islands, primarily to hunt for seashells, which he collected in an enjoyably amateur fashion, but also to see first hand the home of Quarrel. All this he used for another series of
Sunday Times
articles, which included a fascinating digression on the history of the giant squid. Apparently, one such specimen had been engaged in mid-Atlantic combat by the French battleship
Alecton
in 1869. The ship fired at it repeatedly, ‘but her cannon-balls traversed the glutinous mass without causing vital injury'. When the crew looped it with a line, the creature fell in two. From the chunk they managed to haul aboard they estimated its total weight at two tons.

Barely had he returned home than in April he was off again, this time to Tangier, having committed himself to a series of articles on diamond smuggling for the
Sunday Times
. It was a subject dear to his heart and he took to it enthusiastically. He had the backing of Sir Percy Sillitoe, formerly head of MI5 but now advising De Beers, and was working with a South African agent, John Collard, to whom he assigned the pseudonym John Blaize. He wasn't impressed by Tangier: it was raining when he arrived and continued to do so throughout his two-week stay. Nor did he think much of either the locals or the expat community whom he described in a letter to Ann as mostly, ‘buggers [who] do absolutely nothing all day long but complain about each other and arrange flowers'. Whereupon, having complained about them a bit more, he arranged three dozen roses in his bedroom and made the best he could of this famously louche destination.

Between 1923 and 1956 Tangier had been an International City, outside the jurisdiction of any particular state, and as such had become a byword for every shade of murky dealing and home to Europe's escapists and drifters. He caught up with David Herbert, a footloose socialite who had
worked as a spy in Morocco during World War Two, and met Gavin Young, orientalist and sometime member of MI6, whom he later steered towards a successful career in journalism and travel writing. He also consorted with the columnist Alistair Forbes, whose career with the
Sunday Despatch
was coming to a premature close. But what drew him most was the thieves' kitchen of Socco Chico, ‘[where] crooks and smugglers and dope peddlers congregate, and a pretty villainous bunch they are too'. He was impressed, too, by a visit with Collard to the Atlantic coast where he encountered a forest of radio masts – one of the world's great communication hubs – where he ‘could imagine the air above us filled with whispering voices' and where, bizarrely, the beach was carpeted with a shoal of Portuguese men o' war blown ashore by a gale.

Fleming's high hopes did not survive the gauntlet of officialdom. By the time Collard, De Beers and Sir Percy had wielded their blue pencils his manuscript had lost much of its vim.
The Diamond Smugglers
was published by Cape in November 1957, to considerable acclaim (and an offer of £12,500 from Rank for the film rights) but Fleming was disappointed. In his privately bound copy of the book he wrote, ‘It is adequate journalism but a poor book and necessarily rather “contrived” though the facts are true', adding gloomily, ‘It was a good story until all the possible libel was cut out.'

Nevertheless, it had been an extraordinary year. In June he had been invited to play in a golf tournament that paired professionals with celebrity amateurs. It was the first of its kind and to his astonishment he played with that year's British Open winner, Peter Thomson, and acquitted himself admirably. The triumph was exquisite. Describing the occasion for the
Sunday Times
, he wrote: ‘Those treacherous crocodiles, my friends, who had come to laugh at my discomfiture, changed their tune. Now they edged up and whispered that my handicap would have to be reduced at Sandwich. I brushed them aside. The sun was shining, the course was beautiful. What fun it was playing with the Open Champion!'

Then, in November, he sat alongside his mother during a remarkable court action that saw the ageing but still beautiful Eve being sued by an only slightly younger Parsi lady, Bapsy Pavry, over the affections of the
decrepit Marquis of Winchester. The judge thought both of them silly but ruled in Eve's favour. Press photographers were on hand to capture the defendant and her famous son as they emerged from the Royal Courts of Justice.

In the same month he was invited by the
Sunday Times
to produce a series of articles about the world's exciting places. It was right up his street and he accepted at once, thus laying the foundations for his future travel book
Thrilling Cities
. Marital difficulties aside, the sun was indeed shining on him and, as far as his writing career was concerned, the course seemed beautiful. Furthermore, he had an idea for his next novel. It involved gold.