Introductory note: Many of you are familiar with the discussion between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming broadcast by the BBC in 1958. It exists as 24 minute audio recording and is notable for being the only recording of Chandler’s voice and one of four surviving recordings of Fleming’s.
What you might not know is that over a third of the discussion was cut before broadcast; partly because of content, mostly to fit the 20 minute time slot. The excised material no longer exists on audio, but can be found on a transcript in the BBC Archives. Thanks to the great kindness of a fellow researcher and collector, I can now share the full conversation with you.
I have assembled what follows from the uncorrected BBC transcript, made from a telediphone transcription of the unedited program; a partial transcript of the broadcast printed in Five Dials No. 7; and an online recording of the broadcast, which I have used to check the transcripts.
The BBC’s transcriber was slightly flummoxed by Fleming’s drawl and Chandler’s mumbling, and majorly flummoxed whenever they talked over each other, so a few areas of the transcript are garbled or missing a few words. I have therefore used “[…]” in areas where the transcriber was unable to take down everything they heard and left a gap that could not be checked against the audio.
A Conversation Between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming
The men behind Philip Marlowe and James Bond discuss some differences between English and American thrillers and compare their own latest books, ‘Playback’ and ‘Dr. No.’
Recorded June 26, 1958. Transmitted July 10, 1958, BBC Home Service, 10:25-10:45 PM.
Title: English and American Thrillers Playback and Dr. No
IAN FLEMING: Well, the first thing I suppose Ray, really, is to define what we’re supposed to be talking about. I think the title of what we’re supposed to be talking about is English and American thrillers. First thing is, what is a thriller? In my mind of course, you don’t write thrillers and I do.
RAYMOND CHANDLER: I do too.
IF: I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.
RC: Other people call them thrillers.
IF: I know. I think it’s wrong.
RC: Well—
IF: I mean, you write novels of suspense like Simenon does and Eric Ambler does perhaps, but in which violence is the background, just as love might be in the ordinary or straight kind of novel…
RC: Well, in America, a thriller, or a mystery story writer as we call them, is slightly below the salt. (Laughs)
IF: Well, I suppose thriller writing is very below the salt really…
RC: You can write a very lousy long historical novel full of sex and it can be a bestseller and be treated respectfully. But a very good thriller writer, who writes far, far better, just gets a little paragraph of course.
IF: Yes, I know. That’s very true.
RC: Mostly. There’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.
IF: Well, I don’t know—I suppose. But you yourself are judged as a writer, and Dashiell Hammett was, I think . . .
RC: Yes, but how long did it take me? You starve to death for ten years before your publisher knows you’re any good. (Laughs)
IF: Yes, of course. Your first story is now a very valuable first edition…[from] Black Mask magazine. What is it called, do you remember?
RC: The first story?
IF: Yes, the first published story was the—wasn’t it [in] the Black Mask?
RC: Some have been republished and I don’t think—perhaps it has. It was called “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” It took me five months to write and I rewrote it, and I rewrote it and I rewrote it and I got 180 dollars for it.
IF: That was jolly good money in those days.
RC: One cent a word.
IF: One cent a word.
RC: Yes, it was 18,000 words long.
IF: That was very good money I should have thought.
RC: […] Good money, you can’t live on that sort of thing.
IF: Well now, what’s your current sort of rate—a dollar a word?
RC: Oh, I can’t exactly tell you by the word but I get about 2,000 dollars—1,000 pounds […] and 5,000 in America.
RC: That’s for a book.
IF: Yes.
RC: These were novelettes.
IF: Yes. Where do you get your material? Nearly always a Californian setting, isn’t it? Has it ever not been a Californian setting?
RC: Well, I lived many years in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles had never been written about. California had been written about, [in] a book called Ramona—a lot of sentimental slop. But nobody in my time had tried to write about a Los Angeles background in any sort of realistic way. Of course now, half the writers in America live in California. (Laughs).
IF: Nathanael West did, I think, didn’t he?
RC: Yes, but he came along much, much later.
IF: Yes, that’s quite true.
RC: He wrote a wonderful book called Day of the Locusts. And then he wrote another book about Hollywood. Very very clever but a little disorganized. […] No, he got killed.
IF: Yes, he did. Of course Scott Fitzgerald up to a point used the West Coast, didn’t he?
RC: No, no.
IF: He is all the East?
RC: He did write a book (The Last Tycoon) about Hollywood, but Hollywood is not California—it’s not Los Angeles.
IF: …His last unfinished novel was about California—about Hollywood, wasn’t it?
RC: Yes, and it might have turned out to be the Hollywood novel if he’d left out the nonsense about the girl. But the actual talk about movie-making is very good.
IF: Yes, well of course he was a writer. As far as my material is concerned I’m afraid I just get mine by going to places and taking down copious notes because I can’t remember anything.
RC: Yes, but you’re an experienced journalist.
IF: I think that’s probably the answer. I mean, I learnt by writing…
RC: You can go to Las Vegas and you can get Las Vegas in a few days, except the iced water. (Laughs)
IF: Oh yes, you complained about one of the meals James Bond ordered in Las Vegas. I described the meal and I didn’t get in the waitress bringing the iced water as the first thing…
RC: That amused me because that’s the first thing that happens in an American restaurant—
IF: I kick myself…
RC: —is a glass of iced water, put down by the waitress or the busboy—
IF: I kicked myself when you told me that.
RC: —the busboy is comparable to a commis here.
IF: Yes, because I rather pride myself on trying to get these details right, and that was a very bad break.
RC: But I don’t think any English writer has ever got as many right as you have.
IF: Well, it’s laborious work.
RC: I mean, that stuff in Harlem was wonderful.
IF: Was it?
RC: I thought it was, and also in St Petersburg.
IF: I rather liked St Petersburg.
RC: I don’t think any American writer could have done it more accurately.
IF: But they didn’t like it down in St. Petersburg, they got very angry—
RC: —Nothing to do with the quality of the writing.
IF: Well, that’s fine. They didn’t like these elderly folk being described as they were though.
RC: No, that’s the way they are. Just people dying in the sun.
IF: Yes, I know—we’ve got it a bit, I suppose. Torquay, Bournemouth, we have that sort of world too—retired people, sunshine.
RC: Yes, retired farmers from Ohio and Indiana and so forth and they just go down there, I don’t know what they do there.
IF: I find it, I don’t know if you do, extremely difficult to write about villains. Villains I find extremely difficult people to put my finger on. You can often find heroes wandering around life. You meet them and come across them and plenty of heroines of course. But a really good solid villain is a very difficult person to build up, I think.
RC: I don’t think I ever in my own mind think anybody’s a villain.
IF: No, that comes out in the books. But you’ve had some quite tough, villainous people there.
RC: Yes, they exist.
IF: This man Brandon [?] in your book…he must have been a villain before you settled down—
RC: No, I wouldn’t say so, I would only say that he was a businessman racketeer.
IF: He handles himself well in that book I thought. He handled that scene in the nightclub well, when the girl’s head—
RC: Well, you know all-out big racketeers nowadays are businessmen. […]
IF: […] I suppose the FBI have got some pretty smart lawyers of their own to get round—to outsmart the gangsters’ lawyers.
RC: […] They have some very smart people…
IF: I see they had another killing last week in New York. One of these men connected with that dock union man—what’s his name?
RC: Albert Anastasia?
IF: Anastasia, yes. How’s a killing like that arranged?
RC: Very simply. You want me to describe how it’s done?
IF: Yes, yes.
RC: Well, first of all the syndicate has to decide if he must be killed, and they don’t want to kill people.
IF: No.
RC: It’s bad business nowadays.
IF: Yes.
RC: When they make the decision they telephone to a couple of chaps in, say, Minneapolis, who run a hardware store or something or other and have a respectful business front. These chaps come along to New York and they’re given their instructions and they’re given a photograph of the man and told what’s known about him. And when they get on the plane, if they have to get on the plane—
IF: In Minneapolis?
RC: They’re given guns…No, not in Minneapolis. After they get their instructions. They’re given guns—now, these guns are not defaced in any way, but they are guns that have passed through so many hands that the present owners can never be traced. The company could [only] say the first purchaser.
So they go to where the man lives, they get an apartment or a room across the street from him, and they study him for days and days and days until they know just exactly when he goes out and when he comes home, what he does. And when they’re ready, they simply walk up to him and shoot him. And they have to have a crash car—Bugsy Siegel was a great man for the crash car. The crash car is in case a police car should come down the street, and it accidentally on purpose smashes the police car…
IF: Yes, I see what you mean.
RC: …so they get away. They get back on the plane and go home and that’s all there is to it.
IF: They drop the guns at the spot, do they?
RC: They always drop the guns, yes.
IF: And wear gloves?
RC: How many fingerprints have ever been taken off guns?
IF: Yes, quite.
RC: If you hold ’em by the butt…
IF: Yes, that’s quite true. Of course they always appear to be taken off in books, but I suspect that, because by filing the material on the butt and scraping it well you make a rough surface that won’t take any prints at all.
RC: No, and butts aren’t made that way. They’re made to be rough.
IF: Yes, quite true. How much do they get paid for that, each?
RC: Ten thousand.
IF: Ten thousand each?
RC: Yes, if it’s an important man. That’s small money to a syndicate.
IF: Yes. And then they go back to their jobs in hardware stores in Minneapolis?
RC: Yes. It’s quite impersonal.
IF: They don’t mind one way or the other—
RC: They don’t care anything about the man, they don’t care if he’s dead or alive. It’s just a job to them. Of course they have to be a certain sort of people, or they wouldn’t do it. They’re not like us. We wouldn’t do it.
IF: No. Difficult thing to imagine doing.
RC: Well, I’ve known people I’d like to shoot.
IF: For instance? Anybody in England?
RC: No, not in England.
IF: What do you want to shoot them for?
RC: I just thought they were better dead. (Laughs)
IF: But what sort of things have they done wrong, these people…?
RC: …Just rotten.
IF: Yeah.
RC: Sub-human.
IF: Yeah.
RC: My doctor, who is a neurologist—a neuro-surgeon—thinks we made a great mistake to [get rid of] capital punishment.
IF: He does?
RC: Mm-hmm.
IF: Yes.
RC: He thinks there are certain people there is no logical reason to keep alive.
IF: No, quite.
RC: A sex offender or a sex murderer in a mental hospital—a criminal mental hospital. Eventually they will let him off because they are so overcrowded. They will do it all over again.
IF: Yes, it’s quite true, it’s happened here.
RC: Yes, it happens everywhere.
IF: Yes it does.
RC: On the other hand that’s a very difficult decision to take.
IF: It is. Rather nicer for the government to take it than oneself for instance.
RC: Well, as a matter of fact you know, there are eleven states in the United States that do not have capital punishment, and they are much more dreaded by hoodlums than those that have.
IF: They are?
RC: The chances of being convicted […] in California are about one in five, chances of being executed are about one in fifty. Whereas in Michigan they give you a life sentence—[if] it’s a life sentence you might be there 25 or 40 years.
IF: But again to go back to villains. Of course, the difficulty is in writing about a man such as the people you describe is to be certain oneself—and to be able to persuade the reader—that the man is not to be pitied for being a sick man. It’s difficult to depict somebody who really is tough without being a psychopath.
RC: Well, it’s almost impossible to imagine an absolutely bad man who is not a psychopath.
IF: It is, know. And then you see, you create pity for him at once. It’s difficult, and that’s what I mean about villains. They’re very difficult people to build up.
RC: Well, he may have his very human side. He may be very kind to his family, but in his business—illegitimate—he may be quite ruthless.
IF: One’s got to know these people, you can’t invent them.
RC: [Pause] You don’t find anyone really that’s all bad. Except the low class hoodlums.
IF: Yes.
RC: And they don’t seem to be human beings at all.
IF: No, there are a class of people in Mexico called Capungos who kill for about 15 mil-réis, which is about 25 shillings, and I should think they are just about as low as you can get in that particular class.
RC: I imagine they have no brains and no imagination.
IF: No, no imagination. Now do you think so far as heroes are concerned…your hero, Philip Marlowe, is a real hero. He behaves in a heroic fashion. My leading character, James Bond, I never intended to be a hero. I intended him to be a sort of blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get into bizarre and fantastic situations and more or less shoot his way out of them or get out of them one way or another. But of course he’s always referred to as my hero, but I don’t see him as a hero myself. I think he’s on the whole—
RC: You ought to.
IF: —a rather unattractive man. “You ought to,” I know. I’d certainly write about him with more feeling and more kindness probably.
RC: I think you did in Casino Royale.
IF: Do you?
RC: Yes.
IF: Well, I—yes, he had some emotions at the end, when the girl died.
RC: That’s all right. A man in his job can’t afford tender emotions.
IF: Well, that’s what I feel.
RC: He feels them but he has to quell them.
IF: Yes. On the other hand Philip Marlowe feels them and speaks about them.
RC: He’s always confused.
IF: He is, is he? (Laughs)
RC: (Laughs) He’s like me.
IF: But for instance, I’ve managed to get hold of an advance copy of your last book, the one that’s just coming out—Playback—and I was very interested by this passage talking about violence and toughness and so on and so forth. It seems to me very well put. He’s gone into this girl’s bedroom having overheard her conversation as a blackmailer.
(Fleming reads from the book) She brought out a small automatic up from her side. I looked at it. “Oh guns”, I said, “Don’t scare me with guns. I’ve lived with ’em all my life, I’ve teethed on an old Derringer, single shots, the kind the riverboat gamblers used to carry. As I got older I graduated to a lightweight sporting rifle, then a 303 target rifle and so on. I once made a bull at 900 yards at open sight. In case you don’t know, the whole target looks the size of a postage stamp at 900 yards.” “A fascinating career,” she said. “Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They’re just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
(Laughs) I think that’s well put! But you see that is a far more sensible point of view than the one which I put forward in my books, where people are shooting each other so much and so often that you often need a programme to tell who is in the act and who is a spectator.
RC: Why do you always have to have a torture scene?
IF: Well…do I always? Yes, let me think now…maybe you’re right.
RC: Well, every one that I’ve read.
IF: Really? I suppose I was brought up on Dr. Fu Manchu and thrillers of that kind and somehow always, even in Bulldog Drummond and so on, the hero at the end gets in the grips of the villain and he suffers; either he’s slugged or something happens to him…
RC: Well, next time, try brainwashing. Probably worse than torture.
IF: I think it is, yes. I don’t like that, that’s too serious. (Laughs) No I agree, I think it’s a weakness. On the other hand, I think this so-called hero of mine has a good time. He beats the villain in the end and gets the girl and he serves his government well. But in the process of that he’s got to suffer something in return for this success. I mean, what do you do, dock him something on his income tax?
RC: (Laughs) It’s enough suffering for him to find out that the girl was a counter-spy.
IF: Yes. But that came, of course, right at the end. I don’t know…
RC: All right. You’re having your hero beaten up a little, because usually when you put yourself in dangerous situations, that can happen.
IA: It can.
RC: But these elaborate torture scenes that you work out…(Laughs)…they’re so elaborate!
IA: I’ve heard about that…I’ve really tired of the fact that the hero in other people’s thrillers gets a bang on the head with a revolver butt and he’s perfectly happy afterwards—just a bump on his head. Well, I think my chap ought to suffer more—
RC: That’s one of my faults—they recover too quickly. I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt. The first thing you do is vomit.
IF: It is, is it?
RC: Mm-hmm.
IF: Yeah. Well, there you are. You see, that’s already getting violent and unattractive and so on. The truth is like that, you see. It goes on in North Africa now, and Morocco and so on. It was just the sort of thing going on during the war and they used to have these ingenious tortures. There was one called passer á la mandoline, which some of our agents had to go through. Well—it’s true life. These things happen. Villains are villainous. They invent villainous tortures.
RC: Well, there’s one beauty the Nazis had. They had a machine that broke your knuckles one by one. There you are. That sort of thing [has happened] ever since the Inquisition.
IA: Tortures existed, and while there’s certainly criticism of my books that it comes in too often, I think my so-called hero has got to suffer before he gets his prize at the end of the book.
RC: Well, he’s got to suffer a little, that’s true, but…
IF: Not too much. Well, he doesn’t get hurt in the next book which I’ve just written. Much.
RC: Have you?
IF: Yes.
RC: What’s it called?
IF: It’s called Goldfinger.
RC: Which?
IF: Goldfinger.
RC: How can you write so many books with all the other things you do?
IF: Well I sit down…and I have two months off in Jamaica every year. That’s in my contract with the Sunday Times, and I sit down and I write a book every year during those two months, and then I bring it back.
RC: I can’t write a book in two months.
IF: But then you write better books than I do.
[Continued in the next post]