Note: This week’s post is a collection of snippets, excerpts from otherwise unremarkable interviews, short interviews, and various appearances Fleming made in newspaper columns. I’ll resume posting full-length interviews after I return from my vacation in mid-October. I’m less than half-way through posting my collection, and the best is yet to come. See you in a month!
From “Personality of the Month, Ian Fleming,” (Books and Bookmen, May 1956):
“How could I have written this bilge? What a fool the hero is. The heroine is purest cardboard. The villain is out of pantomime.” Thus Ian Fleming after re-reading the typescript of his first novel, Casino Royale, which, in one leap, took him to bestsellerdom.
“Sir Anthony’s Rats” (Evening Standard, Dec. 12, 1956):
[Note: After the fiasco of the Suez Crisis, Prime Minister Anthony Eden suffered a mental breakdown and decided to recuperate at GoldenEye, having heard about the house from his wife, a close friend of Ann Fleming. The Edens enjoyed their time there, aside from all the rats…]
Sir Anthony Eden’s rat-catching activities in Jamaica have surprised his host, Commander Ian Fleming.
“They are not really bad rats at Goldeneye,” Fleming tells me today. “They are field rats, not house rats.”
The Prime Minister organized the rat hunt after he and Lady Eden had been disturbed by noises during the night. Seven rats were killed.
Commander Fleming tells me he had not warned the Edens about the rats.
“The rats have never given trouble before,” he says. “They wake one up in the night, knocking coral and crockery off the shelves. But I cannot believe they seriously frighten anyone.”
What is Commander Fleming’s reaction to the success of Sir Anthony’s campaign? “Violet (the housekeeper) will be delighted that they have been removed.”
From “For Christmas Atticus Considers…The Heart of the Matter” (Sunday Times, Dec. 20, 1959):
Thriller-writer Ian Fleming has more positive ideas on Christmas: “Ideally, the only possible place to spend it is Monte Carlo. You don’t have to eat turkey—a detestable bird. There aren’t any people there you know at this time of year, and it’s perfectly easy to play a little golf and avoid over-eating.”
But even for the creator of James Bond, the ideal is not always attainable, and Mr. Fleming will in fact be spending his Christmas near Belfast, reading three good American thrillers, including the latest Rex Stout, and “going to church in a long crocodile with the rest of the family” on Christmas morning. His one way of simplifying Christmas is to give the same present year after year to all and sundry. It consists of a dozen snuff handkerchiefs from Fribourg and Treyer.
From “Making Crime Pay” (Evening Standard, June 16, 1960):
Mr. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, said he never read detective stories. “I think they’re frightfully dull.”
“What I like is some amusing background and that sort of thing—not a lot of nice English bobbies sitting around drinking tea.”
From “Married to a Van,” (The Evening Standard, July 22, 1960):
Ian Fleming’s powerful Ford Thunderbird was the apple of his eye.
He once wrote an article in its praise that read like a love letter. There was the beauty of its line, the drama of its snarling mouth, the giant flaring nostril of its air intake. He made it sound like Joan Crawford.
“Its paintwork,” he wrote, “is immaculate, and there is not a spot of discoloration anywhere on its rather over-lavish chrome…”
But alas for Fleming. Alas for the Thunderbird. The paintwork is no longer immaculate. The over-lavish chrome is no longer unblemished. On a quiet English road the other day the Thunderbird came to grief.
It tangled with one of the most peaceful vehicles we know and came out of the contest rather badly.
Its opponent: an ice-cream van.
“I was coming back from Oxford with my wife’s small son, Caspar,” says Fleming. “We had been visiting Summerfields, the private school he will be going to in September.
“We were going down that terrific stretch of road near Henley when—well, when the Thunderbird got married to this ice cream van. We were shocked, of course, but remarkably no one was hurt.
“I had managed to brake like hell and swerve before the impact. The car will be away for three months.”
What is he doing without the Thunderbird? “I have to keep mobile,” he says. “So I have hired a Jaguar.”
From “James Bond Thrillers to be Filmed” (The Daily Gleaner, July 21, 1961)
“My books,” he said, “tremble on the brink of corn. One has to be very careful. And I am most anxious that there should be no mistakes in the films.
“I’ve made a mistake in every one of my books so far. In one I gave the Orient Express hydraulic brakes. You should have seen the angry letters I got from train lovers all over the world.”
[…] “I was looking for the dullest name I could find. A name as anonymous as the secret agent he was supposed to be.
“Ten years ago, in Jamaica, I was about to get married, and to take my mind off the ordeal, I was reading as much as I could. One of the books was Birds of the West Indies, by a Mr. James Bond. So I used that.
“Oddly enough I got a letter from Mr. Bond’s wife only the other day.”
“Smoking Again. Ian Fleming: 20 a day man” (The Evening Standard, Sept. 2, 1961)
I am delighted to say that James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, has not buckled under to those doctorly warnings not to smoke or play golf.
When he collapsed in his office in April and was packed off to the London Clinic, his doctors said the attack was brought on by too many cigarettes and that he would have to give the habit up.
Now he seems to have reached a very civilised agreement with them. The doctors say he can smoke 20 a day. And Fleming says he is keeping to this figure most of the time, only at moments of stress tending to creep up towards the 30 mark.
“My doctors seem quite satisfied with me,” he said. “And life can’t be a complete vacuum. I’m doing everything in moderation.”
I talked to Fleming at Sandwich, scene of that sinister golf match between Bond and Goldfinger. His secretary told me he had gone there to escape the “excitements and temptations” of London.
He won’t see much of his doctors, either.
“I am playing a bit of golf,” he admitted. “In fact my handicap has only gone up two strokes, to twelve, since my illness. I’m quite commercial on it.”
From “Sex and Sabotage” (San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 28, 1962)
Fleming’s a fast worker, too. He spends two months of every year in Jamaica, in the British West Indies, where he gets out his trusty portable every morning after breakfast and works from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The afternoon is devoted to an after-lunch siesta, swimming, skin-diving, reading. At 6 p.m., in the cool of the evening, he puts in another hour’s work. His day’s output is always about 1,500 words which, in two months, piles up into a novel.
[…] Young Fleming, an indifferent, even lazy student, concentrated on athletics. Once, he piled up so many bad marks he was due to be birched—on the date of the Eton steeplechase. With a great demonstration of salesmanship and pure nerve, the 17-year-old Fleming petitioned the headmaster to receive his caning at 11:45 instead of at the traditional time of high noon so that he could compete in the steeplechase.
“My request was acceded to,” Fleming recalls, “and with blood-stained shanks as a spur I duly came in second.”
[…] “All history is love and violence and those are the main themes of my books, plus accurate reporting and a rather overheated imagination. My stories are true to spy life.”
“About James Bond—” (San Francisco Examiner, June 11, 1963)
“Thank you very much for the splendid column. Glad you liked the Dr. No film, but the damn fools would of course go and make Sean Connery wear a tie with a Windsor knot. These show biz people are a lot of ignorant clots.
“I must try to get over to San Francisco some time. I was only there once flying from Pearl Harbor in that giant flying-boat called, I think, The Mars, and I adored the place.”
“From Graham Abroad,” by Sheilah Graham (Syndicated in The Honolulu Advertiser, Feb. 9, 1964)
Coming up on Burt Lancaster’s schedule, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which I found Ian Fleming reading when we met at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. “It’s the best thriller I’ve ever read,” said Ian, who has written some good ones himself.