The Ian Fleming?
By Hollis Alpert (Saturday Review, May 26, 1962)
“There’s only one gun for that, sir,” said Major Boothroyd stolidly. “Smith and Wesson Centennial Airweight. Revolver. .38 calibre. Hammerless, so it won’t catch in clothing. Overall length of six and a half inches and it only weighs thirteen ounces. To keep down the weight, the cylinder holds only five cartridges. Fires the .38 S & W Special. Very accurate cartridge indeed…”
The writer of the above passage? Obviously Ian Fleming, Sandhurst educated, English author of ten James Bond thrillers (latest, The Spy Who Loved Me), master of the precise detail, resident of London and Oracabessa, Jamaica, B.W.I. It is at the latter place, in a house called Goldeneye, that he does the writing each year of a new James Bond adventure, each featuring an exotic villain and a beautiful girl, a girl who gratefully succumbs to Bond’s superior style of lovemaking. But no bed can hold the British Secret Service agent for long, and Fleming’s faithful readers (including the President of the United States) now firmly expect Bond to desert his lovely conquest before the next book appears.
Fleming became aware that JFK was among his fans when he met the then campaigning Senator at a Washington reception. “Not the Ian Fleming?” asked Kennedy. “I couldn’t have been more surprised,” the tall author said, over a drink at the Carib-Ocho Rios. “A most pleasant encounter indeed.” And he admits to having visited the President and his First Lady since.
He was at work on his eleventh James Bond (his next year’s book), and hardly a dozen miles away the first movie to be based on one of his thrillers was being filmed, with an Irish [sic] actor, Sean Connery, playing James Bond, and in pursuit of the malevolent Doctor No. Authenticity of background is not usually regarded as important in the movie-thriller genre, but an Ian Fleming whodunit was another matter, so Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the producers, had decided on a real Jamaica instead of a studio replica.
“I find the script rather ingeniously done,” Fleming said, “and although I’ve made it a point to keep my nose out of their business, I’ve told Cubby and Harry that the crabs have got to come in. They’ve been left out, you see.”
He referred to the fact that the heroine in Doctor No had been menaced in the book by an army of crabs, which were supposed to have eaten her alive while she lay pegged to the ground. “If they don’t get in the bloody crabs,” Fleming said, “all my fans will be disappointed. The girl won’t be harmed, because crabs are vegetarians.”
Fleming confessed that, for the accumulation of such fine points of detail, he always carried a pad with him “for jotting down the things one sees as one goes along. For the rest of it I use a research service in London. Yet I invariably manage to make one big mistake per book. For instance, I gave the Orient Express hydraulic brakes. Dozens of people wrote, absolutely furious.”
He also admitted that the British Secret Service, to which he was once attached, was made, in the book, “a bit larger than life. I can’t be too faithful to the reality there. Must not tread on toes or go beyond the limits of security.” SMERSH, the Soviet organization that once menaced Bond, will not exist in future books. “I have dissolved it myself, for the sake of good international relations.”
Fleming writes four hours a day on the average, and settles for about 2,000 first-draft words per day. “I have a rule of never looking back. Otherwise I’d wonder, ‘How could I write such piffle?’ It’s no good writing for the muse, I find. I must regard it as office work, and bloody well get on with it. I use a German portable typewriter. Tried a few until I found the one that suited me. Let me see now—what is its name?”
The master of detail could not remember.
Note: In a letter to The Spectator (Oct. 26, 1962), Fleming returned to the crab controversy:
“Queequeg asks what happened to the crabs in the film Dr. No. Alas, they went the way of the giant squid, despite urgent representations from me and from one of the producers. The black crabs had not started ‘running’ in Jamaica last February when the Jamaican scenes were being shot, but on my return to London in March I received an excited invitation to visit Pinewood and inspect a consignment of spider crabs obtained from Guernsey. A large tank was unveiled. All the crabs were dead. I asked if they had been preserved in sea water and was told that, since none was available, they had been put in fresh water with plenty of salt added! After that the crab faction gave up.”
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The image (and mistaken caption) are from the May 19, 1962 issue of Tatler.