You can’t ask for more!
By Rene MacColl (Daily Express, February 24, 1964)
When I met Raymond Burr in Hollywood, I kept almost calling him Perry Mason. And when I met Ian Fleming at Oracabessa today it was difficult not to address him as James Bond.
Fleming is a man who deliberately set about plotting the good life which he now so abundantly enjoys.
It is a life he richly deserves, thanks to his prodigious dedication to hard work and the fantastic imagination which has so far produced 12 books chronicling the adventures of the entirely unstoppable Secret Agent No. 007.
The 12th Bond, You Only Live Twice, which is to be serialized in the Daily Express next week, is set in Tokyo.
“Bit of a lucky coincidence really,” remarked Fleming, with a huge, crumpled smile as he smoked his favourite brand of English cigarette from a small-sized filter-holder.
“The Olympic Games are being held there this year and the topicality might help the sales quite a bit.”
If any author could afford to do without fortuitous help in the sales of his books it is surely Fleming.
So far the Bonds have sold 20,000,000 copies in 23 different languages and No 11, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is still, after several weeks, in the American best-seller lists, a rare achievement for a thriller.
At the moment the granite-faced Fleming, with his prominent, high-bridged nose and wavy, greying hair, is at work on No. 13, The Man With the Golden Gun, set, like his Doctor No, right here in Jamaica.
“I’ve done about 30,000 words on it,” said Fleming, “but it should by now have been 50,000. I seem to be slowing up a bit—I used to regularly do 1,500 words a day.
“But I didn’t go abroad last year and that’s a handicap. I should travel regularly in order to recharge the batteries.”
Fleming, lanky and sunburned in his trunks and sandals, had come in from swimming. This is a wonderful spot, a 27-acre hide-out he has named “Golden Eye,” 2½ hours’ drive east from Montego Bay along the north coast of Jamaica.
Fleming maintains that he planned the house and garden in his head while still working at the Admiralty in the last year of the war.
Down below is his private beach. From it “The Commander,” as he is known thereabouts, delights in underwater swimming.
Fleming led me into his bedroom where he keeps his triangular working desk. This he has fitted into a corner so that all he can see if he glances up from his typewriter are the blank, whitewashed walls, an old-fashioned lamp with a shade made of “jippa jappa” palm leaf, and the jackets of all 12 of his previous best-sellers as encouragement.
I asked Fleming about the remarkable expertise he shows in all manner of fields. How was the homework done?
“Well,” he said, “they are nearly always subjects in which I’m already interested, such as sharks. And then I always study the best authorities on the particular subject.”
He has no intention of ever abandoning Bond. “When you’ve got hold of a serial character like him it would be a great mistake to let him go,” he says.
“I like to generate a sense of urgency, of almost intolerable excitement. The essence of a thriller is that you have to try and force the reader to turn the next page.
“I really don’t see why Bond should drink miserable cups of tea and dreary half-pints of beer. I insist on seeing to it that the man enjoys only the best.”
“I don’t write to a pattern. I have no priority on the basic things—sex, money, fast cars, luxury living, and so forth. I never write coolly—I get terribly excited myself.”
Fleming has a coloured housekeeper named Violet, who has been with him for 18 years, He has a cook, a housemaid, a gardener, and a gardener’s boy.
He detests such run-of-the-mill food as roast mutton, pudding, and custard. Instead, he and his delightful wife go in for such Jamaican delicacies as curried goat.
Other offerings at the Fleming table—where I enjoyed an excellent lunch—include such exotica as salmagundi (a mixture of raw herring, onions, and spices), salt fish, ackee—a local fruit which, while delicious when ripe is a violent poison if eaten too early—fresh limes, grapefruit, and pawpaws from the garden. And the great legion of fish brought to the Fleming beach by fishermen in their canoes.
Fleming keeps on his desk a loose-leaf “book of golden words,” phrases and ideas which he notes as he goes along.
Among the current ones are: “Mr. Szasz” (Szasz, he feels, would make a splendid villain’s name), “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” (a Bulgarian proverb), and “You won’t have a lover if you don’t love,” which is pure Fleming.
He told me: “One can only be grateful for the talent that came out of the air, and to one’s capacity for hard, concentrated effort. I am perhaps the smallest and most profitable one-man factory in the world.
“If I chose to leave England and live somewhere like Switzerland I could be a millionaire.
“I don’t want yachts, racehorses, or a Rolls-Royce. I want my family and my friends and good health and to have a small treadmill with a temperature of 80 degrees in the shade and in the sea, to come to every year for two months.
“And to be able to work there and look at the flowers and birds and fish, and somehow to give pleasure, whether innocent or illicit, to people in their millions. Well, you can’t ask for more.”