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The Story Behind: Ian Fleming The Journalist

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Writer Tom Cull takes a stroll through London and examines Ian’s career as a journalist, before he found fame with fiction.

On a quiet Sunday in the City of London, I re-traced some of Ian Fleming’s old haunts during his journalism and banking days, including what used to be the Reuters building at The Royal Exchange. It occurred to me that it was here that Ian Fleming got his first taste of writing professionally. Throughout his career, journalism formed an important part of his research and inspiration, before finally becoming a way to remain ‘part of the action’ after the war.

His well-documented two month break in Jamaica to write his James Bond novels was a feat of discipline and economy; writing quickly and accurately and never looking back, trusting totally in his technique. Many writers, including the prolific Raymond Chandler, found this timetable astonishing. He asked Ian in an interview in 1958 how he could write so quickly with all the other things that he did, and remarked that the fastest book he ever wrote was in three months. So, from where did Ian Fleming acquire this skill?

For this we must go back to Monday October 19, 1931.

Fleming was given the responsibility of updating over 500 obituaries, work which his editor-in-chief described as ‘accurate, painstaking and methodical’. But soon, his superiors realised he could be of better use in the field. He was sent to Austria to cover the Alpine Motor Trials (Coupe des Alpes) in the summer of 1932 and thrived on the excitement of it all.

When an intriguing assignment came up in Stalin’s Russia, to report on a court case involving British construction workers (tantamount to a show trial), Fleming was called up. His ‘smattering of Russian’ and the fact that the regular Reuters Moscow correspondent might have had his Russian sources compromised meant that this was Ian’s big break. It was also his first exposure to the dark underbelly of Soviet communism that would pique his interest in cloak and dagger matters and mark Russia out as the political bête noire for the West. His reporting again impressed his peers. He turned in articles on tight deadlines. Ian described his training at Reuters as giving him a ‘good, straightforward style’ and there he learned to write fast and accurately because at Reuters ‘if you weren’t accurate you were fired, and that was the end of that.’

He returned to England to an offer of a higher salary and posting to Shanghai but his earning potential was not quite what he was after. His brother Richard had entered the flourishing family banking firm and it was suggested that Ian had hoped to inherit money from his grandfather, but when this didn’t happen, he decided to go into the City for himself. Doors were being held open for Ian as a fait accompli as he conceded:

‘I loathe the idea from nearly every point of view, and I shall hate leaving Reuters. But I’m afraid it has got to be done.’

In 1933 he was offered a job at the stockbroking firm Cull and Company on Throgmorton Avenue; where he worked for two years before joining Rowe and Pitman, the company from which he was recruited by Naval Intelligence. Fleming’s brief but formative years in journalism would not be his last, as after the war he returned to Fleet Street to work for Kemsley Newspapers as their Foreign Editor, providing him with the perfect opportunity to remain at the heart of things. Another opportunity to hone his craft, collect information, or ‘gen’, and keep his hand in with old contacts from the intelligence world. His friend from SIS days Nicholas Elliott, for instance, kept in touch with Fleming and offered his help if ever he needed a ‘useful piece of information from one of his many City contacts.’

Instead of running agents, Fleming was running foreign correspondents such as Richard ‘Dikko’ Hughes, stationed in Japan, and Anthony Terry who was stationed in Berlin. Two great friends who were to provide him with inspiration and crucial cultural and geographic details for his James Bond adventures You Only Live Twice and The Living Daylights, as well as his non-fiction work Thrilling Cities.

Fleming’s page-turning style owed a debt to those early years at Reuters, which remains to this day one of the largest news organisations in the world.

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.

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 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.

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.

Opinion: Is Moonraker Fleming’s Finest Work?

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Writer Tom Cull draws the links between Moonraker and Trigger Mortis, and explores the place Fleming’s third novel holds in the minds of fans and critics alike.

One of the main of conceits of Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond novel Trigger Mortis is the Russian-backed villain, Jason Sin’s plot to deal a symbolic blow to America using a V2 rocket – a throwback to Ian Fleming’s Cold War era novels. As we know, the chronological antecedent to Mr. Horowitz’s novel is Goldfinger, but much of this new book’s DNA can be traced back to Fleming’s 1955 masterpiece, Moonraker.

Moonraker stands unique in many ways amongst the Fleming canon and indeed many, myself included, consider the novel some of his finest work.

The seeds of Moonraker had been germinating for years in Fleming’s mind after his wartime experiences. The bitter after-taste of the Nazis and their terrible bombing by their V1 rockets in 1944 had a profound effect on him, not least the death of his friend Muriel Wright, killed during an air raid in March 1944. They had met during the summer of 1935 at a ski resort in Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol.

Book cover for Moonraker by Ian Fleming, featuring bold black and white typography and a yellow and red background reminiscent of flames.

A few years later on 16th December 1951, Fleming and his now wife Ann, took over the lease of his great pal Noel Coward’s beach front home ‘White Cliffs Cottage’ at St. Margaret’s Bay in Kent. Ian loved it there and could indulge his love of golf at the nearby Royal St. George’s Club, thrash down the Dover Road on his commute to London and enjoy keeping an eye on the passing ships in the Channel.

By 1955, the Cold War was dipping to frosty temperatures. Burgess and Maclean had defected in 1951 (although not made public until 1956); in 1953 Nikita Khrushchev had become Soviet leader and the Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955. Fleming’s own commando unit – the 30AU – had been involved in the secretive targeting and capturing of Nazi scientists in 1945; work later carried out by the T-Force.  One such scientist was Wernher von Braun, a member of the Nazi party and the SS, who was credited with the creation of the V2 rocket who subsequently surrendered to the Americans to then be recruited under their program Operation Paperclip.

All in all, rich seams to mine for Fleming and Horowitz, but Fleming waited until this third book to finally get it down on paper. Now fully ensconced at White Cliffs cottage it seemed the right time, but it did not have an easy birth. Fleming explained that the novel emerged from a failed attempt to sell a film script to the Rank Organisation:

‘This was written in January and February 1954 and published a year later. It is based on a film script I have had in my mind for many years. I had to more or less graft the first half of the book onto my film idea in order to bring it up to the necessary length.’

Book cover for Moonraker by Ian Fleming, featuring a rocket against a blue background.

In the novel, Sir Hugo Drax employs fifty scientists to work on a missile based at the foot of the White Cliffs between Dover and Deal. Drax, whose name was borrowed from the wonderfully named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and Fleming’s brother-in-law Hugo Charteris, was the perfect combination of a traitorous former Nazi under the employ of the Russians, who had ingratiated himself into British society. He was believable and a threat that was close to home for British readers.

Nicholas Rankin, author of ‘Ian Fleming’s Commandos’ also sees Moonraker as the perceived threat in the “British reliance on German scientists and German technology – even in motor cars, British was best.” And so perhaps began Fleming’s penchant for overt branding (or product placement in today’s parlance) still seen as a powerful rallying cry for politicians and the 007 film franchise. In Moonraker he pits Bond’s Bentley against Drax’s Mercedes. No prizes for guessing the winner but the meta-branding effect works and you remember the car Bond drives.

The setting, villain and the particularly British Bond girl all give Moonraker the noir-ish feel of a detective novel in the vein of Eric Ambler or John Buchan. It also gave a more realistic insight into the everyday life of a secret service agent:

‘It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had duties of an easy going senior civil servant – elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockfords; or making love with rather cold passion to one of the three similarly disposed married women; weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.’

It could be a day in the life of former senior civil servant Ian Fleming…

Even the distractions of the Bond girl are ancillary to this mission, which as a result gave us the most believable Bond girl of all in Gala Brand. Gala is engaged to be married, which offers a fresh challenge to Bond. There are real moments of pathos and wistfulness in Bond’s relationship with Brand resulting in some of the most romantic prose Fleming ever wrote, but even he knows when he’s beaten and has to ‘take his cold heart elsewhere.’

“’I was going to take you off to a farmhouse in France,’ he said, ‘And after a wonderful dinner I was going to see if it’s true what they say about the scream of a rose.’

She laughed. ‘I’m sorry I can’t oblige. But there are plenty of others waiting to be picked.’”

A steel dagger even to Bond’s cold heart.

Book cover for Moonraker by Ian Fleming, featuring an illustration of a rocket, and a white woman looking shocked.

In Susan Hill’s introduction to the Vintage edition of Moonraker, she considered the book the only one Fleming used to ‘tackle a subject of real and serious contemporary concern.’

Why is it only the favourite book of Bond aficionados rather than the casual reader? Responses to the novel are mixed with some readers bemoaning the lack of exotic locations. ‘We want taking out of ourselves, not sitting on the beach in Dover.’ (Matthew Parker, Goldeneye. London: Hutchinson 2014). Audiences at the time can be forgiven for this gripe off the heels of the highly exotic Live and Let Die.

The novel is estimated to have been set in 1953, which was a confusing time for Britain transitioning out of an Empire that Fleming’s novels in general reflected. He presented a conflicting view of the world, on the one hand a conservative traditionalist and on the other a libertarian. Historian David Cannadine said in his 1979 paper James Bond and the Decline of England, ‘Bond’s England is unashamedly the England of post-war Conservatism.’ And make no mistake about Moonraker. Fleming sent Bond to do a job on behalf of the Free World, ‘the West’ or even England in the fight against communism.

“The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.”

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.