The Writer Speaks (1962)
Guests: Ian Fleming, British suspense writer, and William Plomer, British author and critic.
The Writer Speaks… a [radio] program produced in cooperation with the New American Library, publishers of Signet and Mentor paperback books.
Our guest is Mr. Ian Fleming. In 1952, when British suspense writer Ian Fleming published his first book Casino Royale, the Sunday Times of London called him “the best new thriller writer since Eric Ambler”, while the Irish Times said the book was “a calculated assault on the nerves”. His reputation for first-class spy stories quickly spread throughout the world, as Fleming sent secret-agent James Bond into fantastic adventures with tropical madmen, international diamond smugglers and atomic blackmailers. His books—From Russia with Love, Doctor No, Moonraker and 7 others have been praised by prime ministers, read by President and Mrs. Kennedy and loudly applauded by the critics. Now, on The Writer Speaks, Ian Fleming discusses some of the ingredients of these thrillers with the English author and critic, William Plomer.
Plomer: I feel compelled to start off with a very blatant: question: Do you think your books are studies in sex, snobbery and sadism?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think they are studies in any of those quite proper ingredients of a thriller. Sex, of course comes into all interesting books and into interesting lives. As to snobbery, I think that’s pretty good nonsense, really, in fact, we’d all of us like to eat better, stay in better hotels, wear better clothes, drive faster motorcars, and so on, and it amuses me that my here does most of these things. As for sadism, well I think the old-fashioned way of beating up a spy with a baseball bat has gone out with the last war, and I think it’s permissible to give him a rather tougher time that we used to in the old fashioned days before the war.
Plomer: If someone asked you to compare yourself to Mickey Spillane, how would you do it?
Fleming: Well, I wouldn’t do it to begin with. If forced to, I’d only say that I can’t remember very much of Spillane’s work. I’ve read most of them in my time, but I’m afraid I must confess I can’t remember a single incident in any of them.
Plomer: Well then it’s not much good comparing yourself to him, is it? Now this is a most elementary question, but I would like to know what made you start writing thrillers at the age of 43. Could you, do you think, have written thrillers as good, say, at the age of 23?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think so, because, of course, to write thrillers you’ve got to know thrilling things and perhaps to have experienced some yourself, and certainly at the age of 23 I would have no wartime intelligence service, I wouldn’t have done any underwater swimming, and occasionally mess with an octopus or shark and so on, and so forth, and in fact I wouldn’t have had enough experience to write about secret service work with any kind of verisimilitude.
Plomer: Have you told us exactly what made you start writing thrillers at the age of 43? I don’t think you have; was it ambition?
Fleming: It wasn’t really ambition at all, my mental hands were empty and I was just about to get married, which is a terrible step to take at the age of 43, and I think, really, I started writing my first thriller to take my mind off the prospect of getting married.
Plomer: Tell us something about the famous James Bond. What did he start out to be in your mind?
Fleming: Well, he didn’t really…I mean he gradually built himself up through the books, but originally he was simply intended to be a blunt instrument and that’s really why I gave him such a very dull name. And, incidentally, I’m afraid I purloined the name from a very famous American ornithologist, because one of my bibles in the West Indies is a book called “James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies”.
Plomer: Would you say that your concept of James Bond has changed over the ten years that you’ve been writing?
Fleming: I don’t think so, but I think he’s got slightly more cluttered up with mannerisms and quirks of one sort or another, probably, I mean he’s not quite such a simple character as he was at the beginning, ten years ago.
Plomer: Now you’re undoubtedly asked a million times to tell how you think James Bond and you are alike. Now tell me instead how you and he differ or in what ways you simply couldn’t be James Bond?
Fleming: Well, I couldn’t possibly be James Bond because first of all, he’s got much more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome and he eats more than, rather more richly than I could possibly manage to do.
Plomer: How do you think your own life has helped in creating a successful series of thrillers?
Fleming: Well, it’s been helpful, of course for me to have had experience in Reuters, the international news agency, because there one was taught to write fast and accurately. And of course by working in Berlin and Moscow and various other foreign capitals I got some experience of them, and I’ve traveled a very great deal, I’ve been twice around the world which helps anybody to write any kind of book. And, of course, my Naval intelligence work in the war has been a help because it’s brought me in contact with spies and methods of spying, and the same thing applies of course to my hobbies, such as skin diving, and occasional shooting, that sort of thing, like driving fast motorcars.
Plomer: Well now, could you pinpoint for us one of the adventures in your books which you actually experienced yourself?
Fleming: Well, the gambling scene in my first book Casino Royale is more or less, a blown up version of what happened to me during the war because I was flying to Washington with my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence and we came down at Lisbon and were told that if we wanted to go and see some German secret agents, they were always gambling in the Casino at Estoril in the evening. So we went along and my chief didn’t understand the game of chemin de fer they were playing. I explained it to him and then it crossed my mind to have a bash at the Germans who were sitting around, and see if I couldn’t reduce their secret service funds. Unfortunately I sat down and after three bancos my travel money had completely disappeared. Now that, greatly exaggerated, was the colonel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre in which he took Le Chiffre to the cleaners.
Plomer: That’s very revealing, interesting to know. Well, what is your recipe for a good thriller? I mean your use of detail and the way you catch atmosphere, the way you use familiar places, and also the way you use implausible things which could, however, happen.
Fleming: Of course the recipe for a thriller is to write about thrilling things and I try and thrill the reader right down to his taste buds so to speak. But so far as implausible things are concerned, true secret service history is very fantastic, and we occasionally see a little bit of it in the newspapers, like, for instance, the U-2 affair, or the tunnel between West and East Berlin through which we and the Americans tapped the telephone lines of the Russians, and the man who escaped to Germany or rather came over to Germany for the Russian secret service to kill a West German with a cigarette case containing dum-dum bullets, which were poisoned, and if the man hadn’t been captured would have killed his victim at once. And similar little bits of information from the underground of secret service work are constantly getting into the papers and one would say they are fantastic, but they are certainly no more or less fantastic than what happens in James Bond’s adventures.
Plomer: That fits in very well with what we know about truth being a good deal more farfetched than fiction. Do you think more readers read their books as though they were you or as though they were James Bond? With whom do they identify?
Fleming: Well, I’m pretty certain of course, that we all when we’re reading a book with a particular hero, see ourselves in that hero’s shoes. I think that’s really the answer to that.
Plomer: Why do you do most of your writing in Jamaica?
Fleming: Well I’m lucky enough to have a small house there and it hasn’t got a telephone and it’s a very good place to write because it’s because one writes in a vacuum there, nobody to bother one, and when my wife and I go out there we simply pull up the drawbridge so to speak and I get down to writing and she gets down to painting. I work for three or four hours a day and stick to a routine.
Plomer: That seems a very good arrangement.
Fleming: Well, it’s nicer to work in the sun than out of it.
Plomer: I bet it is. Is your own attitude toward women as functional as Bond’s? I’m rather curious to know why most of your heroines have some slight thing wrong with them. A crooked nose, or a slight limp, or a mole or two?
Fleming: Well, I don’t think this is really the place to discuss my sex life, but as far as the occasional limp or whatever it may be that my heroines have, I think we’d all of us agree that one’s girlfriends generally do have some tiny fault in their otherwise flawless beauty and I occasionally give my heroines such a fault because I think it’s truer to life.
Plomer: It’s a bit of naturalism. We know that nothing is perfect in this world, so I suppose that makes them more real. Well now, what spot in the United States do you think would make the best spy rendezvous? And why?
Fleming: Well the U.S., of course, is a very large place but the best place to meet a spy is usually in a park, or in a crowded swimming pool, public swimming pool. I once had this discussion with Raymond Chandler and he said that supposing it were a beautiful spy as opposed to a rather dull spy, the place to take her would be to the Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center because he said that was a very attractive place to meet anyway and also almost entirely used by out-of-town Americans and tourists, so that one would be unlikely to run into a friend or an acquaintance.
Plomer: Rather an anonymous place, in fact?
Fleming: Yes, that’s the answer. And I did, in fact, once meet a spy in the United States, a man I wanted to talk to, and I arranged to meet him at the reptile house at the zoo in Central Park. So we duly appeared at the zoo. Unfortunately there was no reptile house at the zoo, so this meeting didn’t come off very well and we had to start all over again.
Plomer: Rather unfortunate. Still, some reptiles have two legs. How do you visualize your readers? I mean the different types of people attracted to your books?
Fleming: Well, I don’t really visualize them at all. I merely judge them from the ones that I meet and the ones who write to me and they seem to be more or less a very straightforward cutacross of…
Plomer: Just folks, as it were.
Fleming: Just sort of people really. But I think people like different things in books, either they like the movement, or the locales, or the excitement, adventure and so on and I think anybody likes a good spy story really.
Plomer: I think you’re being rather evasive. I think you ought to go into more detail about what sort of men, what sort of women, what sort of young people you notice particularly reading them.
Fleming: Well, I’m surprised to find that the teenagers are now going for these books and I hope they’re not doing them any harm.
Plomer: Well, that’s your responsibility. Tell me how you first met the Kennedys?
Fleming: Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr. Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along the street and she said, “Oh there are my friends Jack and Jackie,” and they were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And she said, “Do you know Ian Fleming?” And Jack Kennedy said, “Not the Ian Fleming?" Of course that was a very exciting thing for him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before they’re published over here.
Plomer: I think that was an historic encounter. We know that presidents and prime ministers do like to read thrillers, why do you think that is?
Fleming: Well, I think the answer is, of course, that it does take their mind off their more pressing problems. And I think they find them very relaxing and, of course, the fact that they usually have a satisfactory and happy ending is quite a change for a president or a prime minister who is usually tied up with inextricable problems through which he can’t see the end.
Plomer: I remember some 12 years ago, we were lunching together here in London, and how did we then get onto the subject of your writing books?
Fleming: Well, William, I had just written this book in Jamaica and of course, I had no idea whether it was going to be a success or not. I thought it was quite exciting, but I dreaded the day when a publisher would see it, and I remember we were lunching and I said to you, William, if you get smoke inside a woman, how do you get it out of her?
Plomer: I remember.
Fleming: And you said, “Explain exactly what you mean.” And I said, what if I was writing a book on a woman who’d inhaled a cigarette or a lungful of smoke. You couldn’t then say that she exhaled it, because that’s a stupid word, and puffed it out, dribbled it out and so on and so forth. This is a technical question I want to ask, how do you get it out of her. And you said, “Ian, you’ve written a book.” And I said, well, as a matter of fact William, it isn’t exactly a book but I have written a sort of thriller. And you then said, “Well I want to see it.” And I blushingly handed over the manuscript in a day or two and in due course you wrote a very kind report on the book and if you remember you managed to persuade the partners of my English publishers Jonathan Cape to publish it, although they hadn’t, I don’t think, published a thriller since The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the book got off to a good start and…
Plomer: And since then you’ve never looked back. Well, I hope you don’t regret having become, as you have, so eminent a writer of thrillers.
Fleming: Well, I’m not so sure that thriller writers are eminent but still, it’s certainly been a tremendous success, the whole venture, and I’ve enjoyed it enormously because being a writer’s a very good life really, you carry your office around in your head and you don’t have to work at it all the time. You earn fairly good money from royalties and of course if you manage to sell serial rights or film rights you do very well indeed. But, I certainly think it’s marvelous to have a job, so to speak, which is also a pleasant hobby.
Plomer: Well, as you know, no one is more pleased with your success than I am. Have you any idea how many copies of your books have by now been sold?
Fleming: Well, that’s a very difficult thing to discover because they’ve been translated into about thirty foreign languages. But I should say that my sales in England over the past ten or eleven books would be around 2 or 3 million, and in America I think they’re certainly that and possibly more. I think they may be well up to 4 million because they’ve gone into the New American Library Paperback Edition and been very smartly dressed up and they seem to be going like hot cakes in the States.
Plomer: You ought to be pleased about that. I should think the number of your readers in America is increasing so rapidly that it will soon overhaul your British public. Do you agree with that?
Fleming: Well, it certainly seems to look like it, rather, because the sales figures that I see from New American Library are certainly very startling indeed.
Plomer: Well, that’s good. Tell me, I wonder, what writers have influenced you…can you think of any?
Fleming: Well, I think principally two American writers, the two great masters of the modern thriller, namely Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I was very struck by both those writers, as I know everybody else is. And particularly by their extremely good style and the verisimilitude of their stories. I should say those two Americans probably influenced me more than any other. But of course in one’s childhood one used to read the Phillips Oppenheim, Sax Rohmer, and bloods of those days and I suppose they all have played their little part too.
Plomer: They were all in the tradition, weren’t they?
Fleming: Yes.
Plomer: Have you got another book on the stocks at present, and if so, can you tell me anything about it?
Fleming: Yes, I’ve finished a new, in fact the longest James Bond that I’ve written. And that’s as you know with the publishers over here now. And also a copy with my publishers in America and they seem to be fairly satisfied with it. It’s a very long story with a great deal of incidents, or various excitements, and it’s even suggested at one period of the book that James Bond may be descended from the man who named Bond Street, which I think will make a lot of people chuckle.
Plomer: Yes, that’s an interesting touch, isn’t it? Would you say you’ve broken rather fresh ground in this book?
Fleming: I wouldn’t say so. It’s set in Switzerland actually and not as most of my books are in America or the Tropics.
Plomer: Well that’s unfamiliar to us…
Fleming: Yes, and there’s a great deal of incident in the high Alps which will certainly interest people who do winter sports, and skiing and so forth. Some pretty dreadful things happen.
Plomer: Well we shall be frozen to death with excitement. What about films? You know people often think your books ought to be films. Am I not right in thinking that the first film based on one of your books has just been made?
Fleming: Yes, it has. It was filmed mostly out in Jamaica this last winter. And it’s been done by United Artists through a subsidiary of theirs over here called EON Productions, and it’s been produced by the producer of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which was a very great success both here and in America.
Plomer: Have you seen a preview of your film?
Fleming: Yes, I have, I’ve seen the rough cut and I must say I think they’ve certainly managed to hit it off very well. They’ve got a very good star as James Bond, a man called Sean Connery, a Scotsman, who weight-lifts in Scotland and boxed for the navy and a very good Shakespearean actor and so on, and they’ve got plenty of excitement and gunplay and what all in the film and I think it’ll probably be a very great success.
Plomer: Well let’s hope it will be the first of a succession of films. I’m sure we all look forward to them.
Fleming: Well, they have got an option on the remainder of my books and I think the next one—this one they’ve just filmed is Doctor No, and I think the next one they intend to do is From Russia With Love.
Plomer: With the same star in it?
Fleming: I think certainly with the same star as James Bond, but probably of course, with different subsidiary stars.
Plomer: Ah yes. Well I thank you very much for answering all those questions. I really feel now that I know just a little bit more about you than I did before.
Fleming: Well, thank you William.