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‘Shaken, Not Stirred’

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Join us as we take a look at the role drinks play in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

It begins in the very first 007 adventure, Casino Royale, with the immortal line, ‘shaken and not stirred’ and The Vesper martini, christened in honour of Bond’s great love, Vesper Lynd. From then on, strong, carefully crafted drinks are at the heart of every 007 story. 

Ian Fleming was very particular about the finer details of his hero’s lifestyle. As well as Bond’s drinking habits, his clothes, weaponry, cars and food are all described with precision, a narrative trait which is perfectly highlighted by his instruction on how to make the perfect martini.

Diamonds Are Forever

‘The waiter brought the martinis, shaken and not stirred, as Bond had stipulated, and some slivers of lemon peel in a wine glass. Bond twisted two of them and let them sink to the bottom of his drink. He picked up his glass and looked at the girl over the rim. “We haven’t drunk to the success of a mission” he said.’

The particular attention that is paid to how eggs should be scrambled, how a car should be customised and how best to serve vodka, are all testament to the writer’s own preferences. Though many have debated how much of Ian Fleming there was in James Bond, there has always been agreement amongst fans that Fleming shared his own tastes and enthusiasms with his character. Along with the advocation of particular brands, these strokes of realism provide a layer of truth and help to bring the fantasy of James Bond’s world to within the readers’ reach. ‘All these small details’, Fleming wrote, ‘are ‘points de repère’ to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.’

Goldfinger

‘James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.’

In a feature titled ‘London’s Best Dining’ for Holiday magazine, Fleming provides a tip for American tourists on how to sample a decent martini, showing how much it mattered to him beyond the pages of his novels.

‘It is extremely difficult to get a good martini anywhere in England. In London restaurants and hotels the way to get one is to ask for a double dry martini made with Vodka. The way to get one in any pub is to walk calmly and confidently up to the counter and, speaking very distinctly, ask the man or girl behind it to put plenty of ice in the shaker (they nearly all have a shaker), pour in six gins and one dry vermouth (enunciate ‘dry’ carefully) and shake until I tell them to stop. You then point to a suitably large glass and ask them to pour the mixture in. Your behaviour will create a certain amount of astonishment, not unmixed with fear, but you will have achieved a very large and fairly good Martini.’

Paying attention to exact details are crucial skills for any spy who wants to complete a mission successfully and safely. The life of a secret agent is one of daring action and life-threatening peril.  James Bond’s preference for the finer things in life suggests that when the moments of danger have passed, pleasures should be indulged. Enjoying the very finest dover sole and a glass of chilled champagne provides 007 with a reward and pushes his experiences to the height of sophistication and quality, in those brief respites from danger.

Live and Let Die

‘There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent… occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death.’

As well as enjoying the pleasures of drinking, alcohol serves to ease the conscience of a cold blooded killer such as 007, and provides moments of relief in a life of violence and upheaval. Drinks play a soothing role in the James Bond novels and offer a well-earned splash of luxury after a long day spent navigating the dirty business of spying.

Discover 50 cocktails inspired by the characters and plots of the 007 novels in Shaken: Drinking with James Bond and Ian Fleming, created by the team at award-winning Bar Swift in London’s Soho.

The Story Behind: The Casino Royale Graphic Novel

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Love Casino Royale? Discover the graphic novel. Adapted by Van Jensen, with stunning artwork by Dennis Calero and a cover by Fay Dalton, this visual delight is a fantastic addition to the James Bond library.

When Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was first published in 1953, it struck a chord with its readers. Britain was reeling from World War Two, rationing was still in force and the nation’s global importance was on the wane.  Audiences reached for Casino Royale to indulge in escapism and to believe in the vision that, behind the scenes, Britain was still a major player. The fanciful yet brutally real world Fleming created was entertainment in its purest form.

 The first time we meet James Bond, he is not what one might expect.  We join him in a French casino at 3am where the air is stale and the mood is sombre. Far from being the slick superhero familiar to film audiences, he is a dark and brooding character on the edge of his nerves. The faded glamour of the casino at Royale-les-Eaux perfectly enhances the ‘dirty business’ of spying and creates a low-lit and moody setting for the tense power play that unfolds across the baccarat table. 

Bond’s mission is to attack the Soviet machine, SMERSH, by bankrupting one of their agents, the avaricious and ruthless man known as Le Chiffre. The two men go head-to-head in a battle of wits but little does Bond know that his enemy holds the trump card all along. The calm elegance of the casino contrasts perfectly with the violent battle between the two men, and the unpredictable charm of luck runs through the heart of both the cards and the game of espionage.

Adapting Casino Royale into a graphic novel is no mean feat. Readers of the original will attest that the thrill of the experience comes as much from the pace of the plot as Fleming’s lively style. The graphic novel as a medium demands that images conjure the atmosphere and that the nuances of character must be shown in expression and language rather than relying solely on description. So, the first challenge of this project was to create a script that would encapsulate the essence of Fleming’s novel without overloading the artwork with too much text.

With this in mind, writer Van Jensen began by selecting Casino Royale’s most crucial scenes and dialogue to construct a comprehensive and accurate script. Alongside this, there would be two further elements to make the project as faithful to the original as possible. The first of these comes directly from Fleming, whose narrative voice presides and his unique turn of phrase is preserved in order to accentuate the actions and atmosphere. For example: ‘Like an octopus under a rock, Le Chiffre watched him from the other side of the table’, or the novel’s famous first line: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’. Fleming’s gift for sensual description and characterful attributions to inanimate objects, such as describing playing cards as, ‘inert like two watchful pink crabs’ are key to successfully evoking the spirit of the original.

The second element is what Jensen has coined ‘Bond View’, in which, during the course of a scene, we see Bond’s analytical mind highlighting dangers and commenting on the people, objects and setting around him. These additional captions appear in white text outside of the word balloons, arranged close to their subject in the panel. Again, they take their cues from Fleming, translating Bond’s world-view into a visual form. This includes the quick calculation of risks, the habits and observations of a trained secret agent, and the preferences and opinions of Bond the man.

Of course, all of this rests on top of new original art by Dennis Calero. A master of shadows and dramatic lighting, his style sings to the tense, atmosphere of the novel, and the paranoid and careful life of a spy at work. The moment Bond sets foot in Royale-les-Eaux, he is under scrutiny and in danger, and the visual tone is a constant reminder of this. When combined with colouring by Chris O’Halloran, the book achieves a visceral quality that fits perfectly with Fleming’s Bond. Violence is felt as well as seen, the sensory overload of the casino is palpable, and the narrative crescendos explode into mesmerising spectacle.

The graphic novel of Casino Royale is a faithful adaptation, with a new dimension and fresh energy.  Although the original story was conceived in a very different time for a very different audience, this version aims to transcend the years and deliver the same tension and power that enraptured readers all that time ago.

 

 

Opinion: The Importance Of Colonel Sun

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Writer Tom Cull discusses Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun, the story behind the novel and its relationship with the film, Spectre.

‘So James, I am going to where you are, the inside of your head.’

So says Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the 2015 film Spectre. He proclaims that he is the architect behind the many ghosts of Bond’s past and if this line echoes for you, then you probably recognise it from the very first James Bond continuation novel, Colonel Sun, written by Sir Kingsley Amis CBE under the not-so-secret pen name of Robert Markham.

In 1968, four years after Ian Fleming’s death, Ian Fleming Publications (then Glidrose) asked Amis if he would be interested in writing a new 007 novel. He was already a popular author and shrewdly – on the commissioners’ part – was known to be a Fleming fan.

Amis understood the high and low art paradoxes that existed in Fleming and the literary snobbery that befell him within some of his social circles. Amis’ own steadfast appreciation of wine and beer; classical music and pop, the Classics and science fiction, motivated him to take time out to write a semi-serious literary criticism of Bond entitled The James Bond Dossier.

‘There’s a whole series of absurd critical judgements on Fleming’s books that need to be set right. Bond has been turned into a lush-living, snobbish, lecherous, sadistic corrupting Fascist… But if you read with care, you will notice for instance, that there is a strong, consistent moral framework to the books: Toughness, loyalty and persistence are the touchstones.’

This, coupled with Amis’ choice to teach Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold to students at Tennessee University demonstrates a lack of genre snobbery on his part. By delving this deeply into Fleming’s oeuvre, he was essentially attending a sort of Bond finishing school for authors. His first official mission would come quickly: Colonel Sun.

What works about Colonel Sun (originally called Dragon Island) – and which is true of the best continuation novels – is that Amis does not overtly impersonate Fleming, fall into pastiche or simply try too hard to match the originator’s style. Amis understood his own limitations in writing Bond as he documented in What Became of Jane Austen and other Questions in 1968. He couldn’t match Fleming for his great knowledge of technical minutiae, but he held detailed knowledge on diverse subjects – Lee Enfield rifles for instance – and more importantly, he understood the ideology of Bond.

You may wonder also if Amis’ own brand of humour worked its way into the novel as Fleming’s did. In part yes, but it is different from Fleming’s. Whereas Fleming’s dialogue often had a sense of the absurd and theatrical, Amis’ conversations have a more conversational rhythm and lightness of touch, seen for instance during Bond and Ariadne’s debate on Capitalism vs. Communism. The character of Litsas offers most of the light relief, as did many of Fleming’s supporting characters, but Bond does not play for laughs.

We also find a lower tech Bond, good with his fists and basic weaponry; Amis’ Bond was for men, not boys. Many of Fleming’s tropes are still there though. He plays golf (at Sunningdale) with Bill Tanner; drives a Bentley; lunches at Scott’s, that sort of thing.

Yet, Amis acknowledged the need to provide the reader with reassuring touch points to avoid any immediate dissonance with a fervent audience. Few of these things Amis did in his private life either:

‘Golf – a game I hope fervently to go to my grave without once having had to play – was there in the first sentence.’

M is given an expanded role and the backdrop is a reassuringly exotic: the Greek Islands. And like all of Fleming’s best novels, we get a brilliantly insidious master villain – the Chinese Colonel Sun Liang-Tan. Kingsley’s son, the novelist Martin Amis approved:

‘Apart from the odd repetition or slightly inept term, the style is excellent. Just like Fleming.’

Paperback book cover for Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis.

The torture in Colonel Sun is arguably the book’s pièce de résistance. Sun literally gets inside Bond’s head. In the chapter titled ‘The Theory and Practice of Torture’, Bond is strapped to a chair in a cellar and Sun provides Bond with what is almost an education on torture methods.

‘When an American prisoner in Korea was deprived of his eyes, the most astonishing thing happened. He wasn’t there anymore. He’d gone, though he was still alive.’

Readers who felt squeamish during Fleming’s Casino Royale torture scene will certainly want to brace themselves here.

‘So James, I am going to penetrate to where you are, to the inside of your head. We’ll make our first approach via the ear.’

But what caused Amis to station his Chinese super-villain in Greece? For one, Amis was conscious of not re-treading old Fleming ground, so Jamaica and the USA were out. Yet he needed to match Fleming’s expert attention to detail, so a sojourn to the friendly islands of Ios and Naxos gave Amis enough time to gen up on the scenery and local food and drink, to add enough of what he coined ‘The Fleming Effect’. Bond eats manouri cheese; drinks light Mamos retsina and also Votris, the ‘only drinkable’ Greek brandy according to Litsas.

As for choosing a Chinese villain, Amis was again keen to avoid re-hashing any of Fleming’s villains, save perhaps for Dr. No who was Chinese-German, as Amis recanted:

‘Red China as a villain is both new to Bond and obvious in the right kind of way.’

Obvious perhaps, because by 1965 relations were strained between China and the rest of the world – and in particular Russia during the Sino-Soviet split, resulting in border clashes. Amis would have been conscious of this and also of how attitudes in Britain during the ’60s were changing. Another shift from the Fleming formula was to team 007 up with a female Russian agent. A whisper of From Russia with Love but with the notion that the Cold War against the Soviet Union was thawing as Bond suggests to Ariadne:

‘If they’re telling you there that the United States is world enemy number one, they need to catch up on their studies. The Kremlin knows perfectly well that the main threat isn’t the West any more, but the East. Surely that’s not news to you?’

Amis was brave enough to mould his own Bond while paying homage to its creator. With Colonel Sun, he set the benchmark for future continuation novelists and proved that Fleming’s Bond universe does welcome guests.

Tom Cull runs Artistic Licence Renewed. He knew iconic Bond cover artist Richard Chopping well as a child and Tom’s great grandfather hired a young Ian Fleming to work at the family bank Cull & Co. between 1933 and 1935.

The Writer, The Spy And The Silver Beast: John Gardner’s 007

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John Gardner’s first published book was the autobiographical Spin the Bottle (1964), and while he never returned to non-fiction writing, he set out to bring reality, the real world, and a sense of verisimilitude into his work – especially to his fourteen original James Bond novels.

Gardner cited his eleventh Bond novel, 1991’s The Man from Barbarossa, as the best of his 007 adventures. Crucially, this is the story most grounded in then-current events, with Bond thrown into the very timely Middle East conflicts, as well the book correctly anticipating the close of the Cold War. Despite the thrilling, inventive narratives in his stories, Gardner was no fantasist. In his hands, the world’s most famous secret agent fought for Queen and country in a world readers could relate to.

Book cover for The Man From Barbarossa by John Gardner

Having previously worked as both a stage magician and Royal Marine officer amongst other jobs, John Gardner was a hands-on man and it was important to him that the gadgets in his 007 stories be grounded and plausible. In the acknowledgements to 1981’s Licence Renewed Gardner states

“I would like to point out to any unbelievers that all the hardware used by Mr. Bond in this story is genuine. Everything provided by Q Branch and carried by Bond – even the modification to Mr. Bond’s Saab – is obtainable on either the open, or clandestine, markets.”

For his tech research, Gardner spent his own time and money speaking to those in the know and actually getting to handle and experience the equipment on the bleeding edge of covert operations.

“One of the things that he wanted to do right from the word go,” explains John Gardner’s son, Simon, “was to make sure that at least 90% of the gadgets were real and could be obtained.

“At the time he was using a place on South Audley Street called Communication Controls Systems Ltd (CSS) and those were the ones he did a lot of work with. He wanted to show that someone like Bond would have, as he put it, ‘trade craft’. I think he wanted to try and get Bond to become a real person as opposed to this kind of fantasy character: he was trying to bring him back to the reality of espionage. There were a lot of fans who didn’t like that. They simply wanted to see the Bond of the films… He said, if I’m going to do Bond I want to try and do it as much my way as possible, which means that the trade craft has to be right and the gadgets have to be believable. That was his starting point.”

It is the aforementioned Saab that is one of John Gardner’s most famous contributions to the 007 canon. Motoring and James Bond’s licence to drive has always been an essential and beloved part of the adventures and the decision to put him into the Swedish automobile classic turned a lot of heads in 1981. The very first sentence Gardner writes Bond into in Licence Renewed, has him driving the mid-size, four-cylinder car.

“James Bond shifted down into third gear, drifted the Saab 900 Turbo into a tight left-hand turn, clinging to the grass shoulder, then put on a fraction more power to bring the car out of the bend.”

007’s car of choice was named ‘The Silver Beast’ and was of course equipped with special hidden features, such as bulletproof glass, rotating licence plates, tear gas ducts, steel-reinforced bumpers, hidden compartments for handguns, a mobile phone and much more. In the prose, Gardner namedrops CCS as the company who personalised the car for Bond but to further underline that the world of James Bond was now ‘our world’, Saab went ahead and created The Silver Beast themselves. This one-of-a-kind machine made the regional news, with John himself showcasing its bespoke additions.

Not only was this a wonderful marketing opportunity but it spoke to how so many fans of 007 see the character – as aspirational. You may not be taking on globe-trotting missions, but you can drink the drink, wear the suit and now buy the car!  

Gardner was tasked with bridging the gap between an idealised pop culture version of James Bond circa the early 1908s and a readership that was very different to 1953 when Casino Royale was published. In total he would write fourteen original Bond novels, plus two movie novelisations, landing him a spot in the Guinness World Records. “History is moving pretty quickly these days” said Ian Fleming and – like so many situations Bond finds himself in – John Gardner was in the right place at the right time, making him the perfect author for 007 in 1981.

The Gold Standard: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger

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Writer Tom Cull talks about Goldfinger, a book full of iconic images, characters and scenes.

It is with little surprise that Anthony Horowitz chose to begin Trigger Mortis just at the point where Bond wraps up the case in Goldfinger. By his own admission, Horowitz has loved this particular Bond novel since childhood.

‘Goldfinger has Bond himself, tired and cynical after a dirty assignment at the start of the book. The sequence at Miami airport as he watches the sun set and considers the vicissitudes of fate is writing of the highest order.’

Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger is perhaps overshadowed in popular culture by the overwhelming success and iconography of the film adaptation. However, it is the novel that provided two of the greatest villains of all time in Auric Goldfinger and his henchman Oddjob, and of course one of the best Bond girls, Pussy Galore, who features in Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis. Perhaps occluded due to Gert Frobe’s excellent performance, is the fact that Auric Goldfinger’s Fort Knox plan speech was taken almost verbatim from the novel.

Book cover for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, featuring an illustration of a skull with a rose in its mouth.

While her name might have raised eyebrows, Pussy Galore is in more ways than one Bond’s equal rather than a mere gender stereotype. She is a gang leader, a ‘trapeze artiste’. She is also impervious to Bond’s charms, until, as The Moneypenny Diaries author Samantha Weinberg puts it, ‘it suited her.’ Weinberg also noted that another tough woman in Goldfinger, Tilly Masterton, finds ‘her heart beating faster for Pussy Galore than it did for 007.’ These are no pallid damsels in distress.

Whereas many of Fleming’s other novels have an atavistic feel that speaks to the influences of thriller novelists of the early part of the century, Goldfinger is distinctly and unequivocally Fleming. Despite SMERSH’s existence as the omniscient threat in Goldfinger, Fleming is not bound by the Cold War or the Soviet apparatus that he so painstakingly captured in From Russia With Love, his fifth novel. The plot actually takes a back seat in Bond’s Aston Martin DB Mark III, whilst wonderful set pieces take the driver’s seat. Fleming overcomes these plot frailties by delivering memorable scenes with glorious self-indulgence and glee. Even with no hitherto interest in golf, readers cannot help but be enthralled by the gamesmanship between Bond and Goldfinger at the Royal St. Marks course.

‘As soon as Bond had hit the shot he knew it wouldn’t do. The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same as the difference between a beautiful and a plain woman – a matter of millimetres.’

Book cover for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, featuring silver detail on the hood of a yellow car, against a blue background.

It is perhaps no accident that the novel is best remembered for its individual scenes, since many were ideas that Fleming had originally conceived as short stories and plot devices for other project. Since many of them did make it into the novel, Goldfinger is one of Fleming’s longest endeavours, and as often is the case, Fleming drew on personal experiences in order to create these timeless characters and events. The modernist architect Erno Goldfinger, whose buildings Fleming abhorred, lent his name to Auric Goldfinger. Alfred Whiting, the golf pro at Fleming’s beloved Royal St. George’s golf course, became Alfred Blacking, a Royal St. Marks caddy. As in Moonraker, Fleming’s familiar setting of Kent is the backdrop, for Bond’s early encounters with Goldfinger. Yet whereas Moonraker lacks some international glamour, Fleming made up for this deficiency in Goldfinger by staging the action in a number of exotic and unfamiliar locations including Miami, Geneva, and Kentucky.

Goldfinger, published on 23 March 1959, was Ian Fleming’s 7th James Bond novel and was a great success which hit the top of the best-seller list almost immediately. Fleming was clearly proud of this effort and took on various promotional activities in order to show it off. The book also came complete with another outstanding Richard Chopping dust jacket cover, this one showing a skull with gold coins for eyes biting a rose. Chopping himself considered this piece to be his finest work in the series.

Paperback book cover for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming.

Critically, Goldfinger was better received than some of Fleming’s previous efforts. Even Anthony Boucher of The New York Times, who was Fleming’s arch-nemesis and a constant critic of James Bond, said ‘the whole preposterous fantasy strikes me as highly entertaining.’ In his 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, Anthony Burgess perhaps unexpectedly selected Goldfinger as one of his honoured entrants, while O.F. Snelling, a friend of Fleming and the author of Double O Seven James Bond: A Report, perhaps puts it best when he writes that,

‘Ian Fleming walked an extremely shaky tight-rope across a pond of very thin ice when he wrote Goldfinger. What with its characters and situations, Goldfinger is the most bizarre example in a generally somewhat extraordinary output. But it is also, I submit, at the same time one of the best.’

Goldfinger sees Ian Fleming and his most famous creation at the height of their powers. Upon publication, the book also provided a welcome sense of escapism during a particularly tense portion of the Cold War. Take the time to relive Bond’s classic adventure.

Tom Cull runs Artistic Licence Renewed. He knew iconic Bond cover artist Richard Chopping well as a child and Tom’s great grandfather hired a young Ian Fleming to work at the family bank Cull & Co. between 1933 and 1935.

Interview: Young Bond Author, Steve Cole

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Meet Young Bond author Steve Cole, as he shares his experience writing the series and being part of the 007 universe.

How did you choose the title for your last novel, Red Nemesis?

Lurking somewhere between inspiration and desperation is the titling department of my mind! For the synopsis it was named On Moscow’s Orders as a counterpoint to Charlie Higson’s final Young Bond, By Royal Command. Then for the first draft it was called Dance With Death, which ultimately felt a bit too generic. Fleming’s Bond titles have a wonderful, tantalising quality to them, you want to know what they’re about. I made a list of possible titles and Red Nemesis really seemed to sum it up, the idea of how importantly and dangerously the Soviet Union will figure in Bond’s life. It also syllabically matches book three, Strike Lightning, just as Heads You Die matches Shoot to Kill. So that appealed to the nerd in me.

Book cover for Red Nemesis, a Young Bond book by Steve Cole.

Red Nemesis has a grimly dramatic Russian edge, was this a homage to From Russia with Love or were there other points of inspiration for this direction?

From Russia With Love is my second favourite 007 novel (after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and I thought it would be fun to get Bond to Russia, himself. Also, of course, it’s the last book of my arc and I wanted an iconic and suitably dangerous location. You don’t have Moscow as a setting second or third in the cycle; it’s the big one and I always planned it as a location for the conclusion. Stalin’s Russia looms in the modern imagination as a truly horrifying place, so to throw young James into its jaws ups the stakes.

Why did you decide to delve into some of the sadder parts of Bond’s past – particularly the death of his mother and father when he was eleven years old?

When you have a character as magnetic as James Bond I think you want to know what’s shaped him in life. The death of his parents obviously affected Bond deeply, and my first thought when plotting was to have someone exploit that incident to their own advantage. As Red Nemesis is the last of my Young Bonds I wanted to push James a little further towards the adult world of espionage and spy-play that lays before him. What better way to pull him into that world than the adults now missing from his life? 

This book provides Bond with the chance to deal with his father’s unfinished business. Anya, his ally in Moscow, finds herself in a similar position; so, the influences of fathers and fatherlands are key themes and add a bit of personal weight to the story.

Mimic is a wonderfully creepy villain and one of our favourites in all of the Young Bond books – what was your inspiration?

I actually conceived a Mimic-like character when planning Heads You Die, though ultimately he didn’t quite fit into the villains’ set up: there wasn’t enough for him to do. I didn’t forget him though. He was nearly a bodyguard in Strike Lightning too! It just seemed very creepy to have someone who could impersonate anyone, particularly when communication was so much more primitive – that voice on the crackling telephone line or the wireless broadcast, is it really who you think it is? That person crying for help, are you sure it’s them? So for my final book, I made his talents – both verbal and physical – more integral.

Book cover for Strike Lightning, a Young Bond book by Steve Cole.

It feels like you had great fun coming up with the clues for James to follow – how did you think of them and was it as enjoyable as it comes across?

It can be tricky, when setting a cryptic puzzle for your hero, to know just how devious to be! It’s not really any fun unless you can allow your reader enough clues to try to work it out themselves. You don’t want to make things too easy but the puzzle can’t be too contrived either. The challenge was to make the clues personal to James, so that in the end he is the only one who can really work things out. But no one wants the hero to solve things too early, so I tried to set things up so that even when James has figured out one cryptic clue, it leads to another mystery.

How do you feel about your time with Young Bond?

The time seems to have zipped past in a patter of nervous heartbeats. I’ve so enjoyed my time with Bond: I’ve worked with so many lovely people, heard from so many nice 007 fans and visited so many cool places over the course of these four novels. It’s been a challenge like no other. I’ve cared passionately about it, I’ve given it my best and I shall miss it. But it’s part of a writer’s brief to reinvent their job as the years push onward.

Who has been your favourite Young Bond character to write about?

Discounting Bond himself, I suppose I enjoyed writing about James’s friend, Hugo, in Shoot to Kill and particularly Heads You Die. He brings a different perspective to the storytelling and reveals a different side of James – I enjoyed teaming them up. Kitty Drift from Strike Lightning is a favourite. Wonderfully straightforward, she wears her heart a little self-consciously on her sleeve. She’s resourceful and witty and passionate about what she does.

Kitty Drift is a character from Strike Lightning, part of the Young Bond book series. Kitty is shown here as a trainspotting young girl at the rail station, with binoculars and red bobbed hair and glasses.

Which of your Young Bond adventures have you enjoy writing the most?

I can’t really single one out as I enjoyed each in different ways. But I really had fun going full throttle with Red Nemesis, where the stakes are perhaps their highest and James is given frightening glimpses of both his father’s past and his own future. Being able to write scenes that touch at the heart of a character like Bond is a great privilege.

What other projects are you pursuing and what would you like to achieve next?

I think like most writers, parts of my head are always pursuing other projects without permission! I’ll see what they come up with. I am currently thinking of some standalone projects but love series fiction too; you’re not just writing a book, you’re making a continuing world that readers can revisit, time and again. I always used to be known as the Astrosaurs guy, and I guess now I’m known as the new Young Bond guy, so I’m happy to wait and see what the next book label will be.

Find out more about Steve Cole here.

Interview: Anthony Horowitz

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We meet British author Anthony Horowitz to talk literary inspiration, Ian Fleming and James Bond. Anthony has written three official James Bond continuation novels, Trigger Mortis (2015), Forever and a Day (2018) and With a Mind to Kill (2022), all of which draw on original material by Ian Fleming.

What was the greatest challenge involved in writing a Bond novel?

I’ve been a James Bond fan pretty much all my life and I suppose the greatest challenge, for me, was meeting my own expectations. It’s not just that he’s such an iconic character. I think people forget just how good a writer Ian Fleming was. He came up with amazing set pieces, wonderful action sequences, memorable characters. How could I possible write as well as him?

Black and white photograph of author Anthony Horowitz. He is a smiling middle aged white man wearing a suit jacket and baseball hat.

Why did you to choose to keep Bond in his original time period?

Bond represents a particular sort of man at a particular time. He is the ultimate spy at a time – the Cold War – when spying mattered most. He brings with him all the best values that we associate with the Second World War but he has the coldness and ruthlessness demanded by a new atomic age. He is an amazing character who epitomises the age he lived in, which is why, for me, it was critical to keep him in his original timeline.

How did you conjure up Trigger Mortis‘ wonderfully sinister Jason Sin and his Korean War backstory?

Getting the villain right in a James Bond novel is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Make him too monstrous, too extreme, and you risk slipping into parody. And yet he/she has to be somehow larger-than-life. At the end of the day, what matters most, I think, is that the villain should be real and believable. It struck me that although both Hugo Drax and Goldfinger employed Koreans, there had never been a major Korean villain in a James Bond novel. Looking at the history of Korea, I stumbled upon the massacre at No Gun Ri. At that moment, I knew I had my villain, a man with every reason to hate the West.

Book cover for Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz.

In Fleming’s James Bond books are there any phrases you wish you’d written? Or that you feel particularly embody the spirit of a Bond novel?

There are dozens of lines and phrases that I wish I’d come up with myself. That was Fleming’s genius. The 007 designation, the licence to kill, the names of the characters (M, Miss Moneypenny), the unforgettable titles – it’s impossible to do better.

Do you have a favourite phrase/sentence of your own from Bond series?

My favourite line in Trigger Mortis – because it really does capture Fleming’s style, is the line that opens Chapter 24. ‘Rain swept into London like an angry bride.’ I’m not sure what it means. Or why it works. But when I read it, it makes me smile.

Book cover for With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz.

How has the process of writing Bond differed from that of your revival of another British literary legend, Sherlock Holmes?

There’s not much comparison – except that I have an equally healthy respect for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock is so much more distant that I didn’t feel quite so nervous writing about him. Late Victorian England is easier to characterise than the 1950s. I’d add that in the end I enjoyed writing the books equally. If you’re going to write a continuation novel, it helps to love the world into which you’ve been invited.

Which authors have influenced you the most and inspired you to become a writer yourself?

Obviously, Doyle and Fleming. I read both of them when I was a boy, dreaming of being a writer. Other influences were Charles Dickens and Tintin’s creator, Hergé.

Discover more about Anthony Horowitz here.

The Story Behind: The Man With The Golden Gun

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Writer Tom Cull talks about The Man with the Golden Gun, the last of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels.

Eight months after Ian Fleming’s death, The Man with the Golden Gun was published. The birth of the final James Bond novel was difficult and its merits within the canon are still debated among aficionados.

Although Fleming had on many occasions claimed that he was finished with writing Bond books, he had completed the first draft of The Man with the Golden Gun by March 1964. After once again undertaking a Bond novel despite his rapidly deteriorating health, a word to his editor William Plomer at Jonathan Cape, rings with an eerie finality:

‘This is, alas, the last Bond and, again alas, I mean it, for I really have run out of both puff and zest.’

Along with Fleming’s reservations, the artwork for The Man with the Golden Gun also initially proved difficult. Once again Richard Chopping collaborated with Fleming on the dust jacket. Finding Scaramanga’s golden Colt .45 pistol too long to confine to a single panel, his artwork extended to the back of the jacket. Apparently, booksellers were not enamored with the experiment because it required them to open the book in order to display it properly. Now of course, it is regarded as a masterpiece of book jacket design and one of the few still affordable as a first edition.

Fleming’s Gambit

Despite this lack of “puff and zest”, the opening to The Man with the Golden Gun is as good as anything Fleming ever wrote. In summary, the opening is: fantastical, surprising, implausible, and tense. Classic Fleming.

The Service learns that a year after destroying Blofeld’s castle in Japan, Bond suffered a head injury and developed amnesia. Having lived as a Japanese fisherman for several months, Bond traveled to the Soviet Union to learn his true identity. While there, he was brainwashed and assigned to kill M upon returning to England, and during his debriefing interview with M, Bond tries to kill him with a cyanide pistol. Thankfully, the attempt fails.

The psychological tension between Bond and M is palpable in Fleming’s final Bond novel. We know that something’s not right, but we’re not entirely sure what it is until the meeting takes place and we see Bond attempt to assassinate his superior, whom he had previously “loved, honoured and obeyed.”  Without question, this unspoken, taut hostility between the two men is only successful because The Man with the Golden Gun explores Bond’s psychology more than any other Bond book.

Spy-thriller writer Charles Cumming, who wrote the introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of The Man with the Golden Gun, reflected on this opening sequence:

“Given the author’s fragile condition, The Man with the Golden Gun is a remarkable success. The opening sequence is as good as anything Fleming ever received; I particularly love Moneypenny’s ‘quick, emphatic shake of the head’ as she desperately tries to warn Bill Tanner that something is amiss with Bond.”

After recovering from the episode, Bond is dispatched to Jamaica to assassinate Francisco Scaramanga, a.k.a., The Man with the Golden Gun:

“‘Bond was a good agent once,’ said M. ‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be a good agent again.’”

The Golden Misfire?

Fleming died before the manuscript could go through the usual process of a second draft and revisions.  If Fleming had had his druthers, he might have delayed the publishing of The Man with the Golden Gun, as Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett stated:

“He hoped he might be able to rework it when he was in Jamaica the following spring. But Plomer disabused him of that idea, telling him that the novel was well up to standard.”

Kingsley Amis, a confirmed Fleming fan, was asked for his opinion of the manuscript, but it’s debatable how many of his suggestions, if any, were used. “No decent villain, no decent conspiracy, no branded goods…and even no sex, sadism or snobbery” were just some of Amis’s objections.  His main criticisms concerned Scaramanga, whom he labeled a “dandy with a special (and ineffective) gun”.  To the celebrated novelist this seemed a bit thin considering Fleming’s usual prowess for creating well-drawn and memorable villains.  Amis was also concerned with the lack of what he called ‘The Fleming Sweep,’ Fleming’s signature use of rich detail.

With more hindsight, Amis tempered his earlier criticisms of The Man with the Golden Gun in a later collection of essays entitled What Became of Jane Austen.  According to Amis, there is no doubt that the lack of follow-up on plot points, such as why Scaramanga hires Bond as his trigger-man, is due to an uncharacteristically unconfident Fleming.  Amis suggests that the Bond-as-trigger-man  idea might be the responsibility of “an earlier draft perhaps never committed to paper, wherein Scaramanga’s hiring of Bond is sexually motivated”.  Amis goes on to muse that Fleming could have been in critical retreat after too many bashings, and chose not to pursue this idea.  However, according to William Plomer in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Fleming, he “can’t think that Ian had any qualms about ‘prudence.’”

Part of Amis’ ire was the result of holding Fleming to such a high standard, and Amis maintained that beneath all the dash and flair (and plot inconsistencies), there was “formidable ingenuity and sheer brainwork” in Fleming.  I tend to agree, and if The Man with the Golden Gun were to come out today by a new thriller writer, it would likely receive an overwhelmingly positive reaction.  However, in the context of Fleming’s oeuvre and his standing with the critics of his day, The Man with the Golden Gun never stood a chance.

Yet despite all the negative criticism at the time, history has been a little kinder.  Of late, The Man with the Golden Gun has undergone critical reappraisal, with acclaimed novelist and Bond continuation author William Boyd arguing for the book as one of Fleming’s “realistic” novels (rather than “fantastical”) in the introduction to the 2012 UK edition published by Vintage.

“Fleming’s Bond novels are full of implausibility and coincidences and convenient plot-twists – narrative coherence, complexity, nuance, surprise and originality were not aspects of the spy novel that Fleming was particularly interested in, and The Man with the Golden Gun is no exception.  And indeed Scaramanga’s eventual drawn-out demise is almost low-key, by Fleming’s standards, and as well written – in a brutal, deadpan sense – as anything Fleming achieved.”

Charles Cumming has even better things to say about Scaramanga:

“When 007 and Scaramanga are sizing one another up at the hotel, we are treated to dialogue worthy of Raymond Chandler.”

The Final Curtain

It is apparent that Fleming’s work rate and ingenuity were failing as we witness the end of him and his creation in The Man with the Golden Gun; a novel filled with unintended verisimilitude. After creating and defining a genre, it was mission accomplished for Fleming and Bond well before this novel and Fleming’s old enemy – boredom – was lurking in the wings years before the first sentence of The Man with the Golden Gun had been written.

‘[Bond] decided that he was either too old or too young for the worst torture of all, boredom, and got up and went to the head of the table. He said to Mr. Scaramanga, 2I’ve got a headache. I’m going to bed.”‘

The Man with the Golden Gun is also fittingly about Fleming’s relationship with his beloved Jamaica and the disintegration of British colonialism. Bond and Felix Leiter are awarded the Jamaican Police Medal for “Services to the Independent State of Jamaica”, which is a blunt nod to the end of British imperialism in Jamaica in 1962. In a final effort to hang on to the old vestiges of the British Empire, Fleming takes potshots at the new world power, the United States, and the perceived “Americanization” of the Cold War West. In his recent book Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born, author Matthew Parker underscores these jabs at America by highlighting how the American-accented Scaramanga is depicted as a keen promoter of tacky Americanized resort hotels with “tropical jungle” dining rooms.

As if he were well aware that he had one figurative bullet left in the chamber, Fleming seized the chance to set the record straight about his creation in The Man with the Golden Gun. Namely, Fleming set out to dispel the notion of Bond as a snob by offering him the ultimate in status symbols – a Knighthood from the Queen. Bond declines, explaining to M: “I am a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant.” One could read this as Fleming’s grand send-off to his critics, or one could see it as Bond’s defiance alone. Either way it presents the literary end for Fleming’s Bond and the very real finale for Fleming himself.

Tom Cull runs Artistic Licence Renewed. He knew iconic Bond cover artist Richard Chopping well as a child and Tom’s great grandfather hired a young Ian Fleming to work at the family bank Cull & Co. between 1933 and 1935.

The Story Behind: Diamonds Are Forever

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Writer Tom Cull takes us on a deep dive into Ian Fleming’s trans-continental thriller Diamonds Are Forever.

‘Bond put down the piece of quartz and gazed again into the heart of the diamond. Now he could understand the passion that diamonds had inspired through the centuries, the almost sexual love they aroused among those who handled them and cut them and traded in them. It was domination by a beauty so pure that it held a kind of truth, a divine authority before which all other material things turned, like the bit of quartz, to clay. In these few minutes Bond understood the myth of diamonds, and he knew that he would never forget what he had suddenly seen inside the heart of this stone…’

Ian Fleming said of Diamonds Are Forever in an interview with the Daily Express in 1956, ‘I’ve put everything into this except the kitchen sink. Can you think of a plot about a kitchen sink for the next one? Otherwise I am lost.’

And indeed he did. Whereas some of his books relied heavily on his imagination, this vastly under-rated fourth novel published in 1956, required lots of first-hand research and travel. Fleming’s twin love of travel and ‘things’ were indulged to their fullest potential in this novel. The central plot revolved around diamond smuggling – a hot topic at the time – and like many, he was enchanted by their lustre, permanence and chatoyance:

‘When jewels have chatoyance the colour in the lustre changes with movement in the light, and the colour of this girl’s eyes seemed to vary between a light grey and a deep grey-blue.’

He was also fascinated in the power and allure of these jewels that could provoke people, even of good standing, to smuggle them. In his book The Man With The Golden Typewriter, Fergus Fleming describes how in 1954, while coming home from Jamaica, his uncle saw an advertisement in American Vogue that read ‘A Diamond is Forever’. He reported on this for one of his Atticus columns in The Sunday Times commenting in his piece upon the fifth largest diamond ever recorded at the time on June 20th.

Fleming’s enthrallment with diamonds would need to be tied to a thrilling narrative to become the core of the new Bond novel; one possible source of inspiration for the plot was the true story of a former geologist for De Beers who, while prospecting in a forbidden zone in Namibia, had managed to hide a container of some 1400 diamonds. On December 21, 1952, a small aircraft landed on the diamond-strewn beach in the forbidden zone, whereby the geologist got out of the plane and retrieved the cache of diamonds that he had squirrelled away six months earlier. The geologist and his pilot were spotted and arrested.

The opening chapter of Diamonds Are Forever– ‘The Pipeline’ – is very reminiscent of this true-life event and brilliantly describes the details of a smuggling operation conducted by the Spang brothers. As Fleming later told the Daily Express in 1964, “I always study the best authorities on a particular subject.” These authorities included De Beers themselves and former head of MI5 Sir Percy Sillitoe of the International Diamond Security Organisation, who later would help advise him on his non-fiction work The Diamond Smugglers. De Beers allowed him to watch the cutting and sorting of the diamonds, and Sillitoe’s name would make it into the novel as M tells Bond in chapter 2, ‘”You probably saw in the papers that De Beers took on our friend Sillitoe when he left MI5, and he’s out there now, working in with the South African security people.”’

After confining Bond to a domestic English setting in Moonraker, both Fleming, Bond, and apparently their readers, were ready for some foreign travel. What better excuse for Fleming to visit his old Eton chum Ivar Bryce? Bryce who was now in Vermont at Black Hole Hollow Farm with his new wife, the millionairess Josephine Hart.

Bryce had played an important role in Fleming’s life as a friend, confidante and business partner, while his regular summer excursions to this idyllic spot in the Green Mountains of Vermont gave Ian the kind of relaxation and adventure that fed his imagination. He and Bryce would take road trips in Bryce’s Studillac car to various places, notably across the border to New York state to Saratoga and the famous racetrack and mud baths. The resort was a favourite of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt known for its healing properties that helped his polio, as Fleming alludes to in his novel: ‘People drift up to take the waters and the mud baths for their troubles, rheumatism and such like, and it’s like any other off-season spa anywhere in the world.’

In chapter 10 entitled ‘Studillac to Saratoga’, Fleming beautifully describes the atmosphere at the racetrack, ‘It’s probably the smartest race-meeting in America, and the place crawls with Vanderbilts and Whitneys.’ And the scenes with Bond and Felix Leiter could well be describing Fleming and Bryce.

The American artist and literary Bond fan Gerald Wadsworth commented on the accuracy of the US setting.

‘When Bond and Felix Leiter drive up to Saratoga Springs in the Studillac, Bond is treated to an exercise in American car culture – a black Studebaker convertible with a Cadillac engine, special transmission, brakes and suspension, designed by Raymond Loewy, and could run circles around Corvette’s and Thunderbird’s of the day. Their route to Saratoga was detailed, not unlike when Bond would travel through Europe. Roads, highways, turnpikes and various elements of local laws would be routinely described to the reader.’

Another one of their gang was Ernie Cuneo, whose name features heavily as an undercover cab driver, Ernie Cureo. No argument who this was based on. Famous gangster Lucky Luciano also gets a mention, who later featured again in Fleming’s Thrilling Cities travelogue.

Fleming’s fascination with American gangster culture would feature in a few of his novels (Goldfinger, for example), but in Diamonds Are Forever, he placed it at the fore in the form of the Spang brothers, Wint and Kidd and Shady Tree. The setting, style and tone of this novel reads more like one of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novels; indeed, as the great man noted himself, Fleming’s proficiency for setting was one for his most unique strengths, ‘Fleming can go to a town for the background of a new novel, and in three days he will have mapped up every detail of that town.’

Fleming was not immune from criticism however, and his friend and peer Chandler knowingly jibed Fleming for forgetting to ‘have a glass of iced water on the table while he wrote about Las Vegas.’ In Chandler’s well-qualified review in The Sunday Times, he criticised the book for a certain amount of padding, which Fleming disagreed with: ‘I find technical details of a place like Las Vegas so fascinating that I put them in over-generously.’ He went on. ‘I quite admit to my tendency of overloading my books with Baedekerish information, but Chandler is wrong in thinking this was ‘padding’ which I abhor in other writers.’

Chandler did however finish his review with a resounding endorsement of Fleming’s ability to please his American audience, saying in the Sunday Times on 25th March 1956,

‘I have left the remarkable thing about this book to the last. And that it is written by an Englishman. The scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other writer who has accomplished this.’

Hardback book cover for Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming, designed by Michael Gillette.

Finally, and not least, is the wonderful Tiffany Case (a nod to Tiffany & Co. presumably), who is one of the very few women that earns an extended stay at Bond’s Chelsea flat. A diamond in the rough herself, if you will forgive the pun, Tiffany has a troubled past and gets mixed up with the Spang brothers in their diamond smuggling racket. Tiffany and Bond are kindred spirits in many ways; loners who struggle with attachment which leads to some particularly reflective conversations about love and marriage. Fleming’s writing here perhaps reflected by his own cynical views on matrimony by this time, a few years into his own marriage with Ann Fleming.

“Are you married?” She paused. “Or anything?”

“No. I occasionally have affairs.”

“So you’re one of those old-fashioned men who like sleeping with women. Why haven’t you ever married?”

“I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.” Tiffany Case thought this over. “Maybe there’s something in that,” she said finally. “But it depends what you want to add up to. Something human or something inhuman. You can’t be complete by yourself.”

Diamonds Are Forever is unique in the Bond canon as it is one of the most true to life stories Ian Fleming wrote. Take the road trip with him once again.

Tom Cull runs Artistic Licence Renewed. He knew iconic Bond cover artist Richard Chopping well as a child and Tom’s great grandfather hired a young Ian Fleming to work at the family bank Cull & Co. between 1933 and 1935.

Interview: Artist, Kevin Walker

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In 2005, Kevin Walker was commissioned to draw the character of a 13-year-old James Bond for Charlie Higson’s first Young Bond adventure, SilverFin. He went on to illustrate a graphic novel of SilverFin in 2008 and cover art for the Young Bond books in the USA. We catch up with the British comic book artist to talk about his process and experiences in the Young Bond world.

Have you always been a James Bond fan? 

Absolutely, Bond is one of those iconic characters, you can’t miss. I came to the novels quite late, but I certainly watched all the movies from a young age. Young Bond was my chance to become a fairly prominent part of the whole James Bond universe.

Which is your favourite Young Bond book?

My favourite of the series is Charlie Higson’s Double or Die. I love the whole setting, with the analytical engine and the communist enemy, the whole feel of it being like one long chase in grim weather. It’s the one where James trashes his Aunt Charmian’s Bentley.

Where did you get your inspiration for the James Bond Origin comic covers?

I can’t take all the credit for that. I was asked to come up with Bond pin-ups that were reminiscent of WWII propaganda posters, and I didn’t want to go too close because the image still has to work as a cover. That’s how I came up with the idea of using the same formal layout design on each illustration.

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What’s your process for creating a cover and how does it differ to illustrating comic strips?

It’s actually the same process: rough sketches, finished pencils, inks and colours, with consultation in between each step. The difference is you don’t have to worry about continuity and narrative flow. You’re trying to tell a story in a single image. You can see the evolution of a piece of cover art here.

Three images showing the evolution of a piece of comic book cover art by Kev Walker. The pictures show a young man in WW2 London on rubble.

Which Young Bond action scene did you most enjoy illustrating? 

It’s where James confronts Mimic in the slum apartment, from Steve Cole’s Red Nemesis.

Where do you work?

I have a converted attic where I’ve been working for the last 10 years. A comfy chair and a table pitched at just the right angle, good lighting, a fan in summer and a heater in winter. I used to be able to work with music, but now I can’t. Any repetitive beat and I stop working and start listening to the music instead. I stream a lot of stuff – documentaries, any weird drama that I can listen to in the background while I work.

 Who inspired you to become and artist? 

The ones that made me want to become an artist in the first place were people like Ralph McQuarrie, Chris Foss, just masses of influences from all over the place. When you realise, as a teenager, that there are plenty of people making a living at it, you have to be single-minded, stubborn and a bit selfish to focus on doing it, despite all the naysayers that tell you you’ll never get a job in art… like my art teachers when I was 12 (and I have that in writing).

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to become a full-time artist?

The trick is to keep doing the things that make you happy, always keep looking, and don’t be afraid to try new things.

 Kev is known for his work on 2000AD and Warhammer comics, Marvel and Magic: The Gathering. Find out more here.