This year’s SAMLA Conference takes place between November 3-5 at the Westin Peachtree Plaza, Atlanta, Georgia and this year, the topic is ‘From Russia with Love At 60: Serious Spy novel or popular escapism?‘. Once again Oliver Buckton chairs the event, which proves to be a classic. Friday November 3 10:00AM-11:30AM Elyn Achtymichuk, University of Saskatchewan…
Article by Dannielle Shaw ‘One reads him for literary delight and for the pleasure of meeting an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind’. Vita Sackville-West on Peter Fleming. The hybrid role of soldier-travellers and traveller-intelligencers has long been a complementary but complex pairing. Peter Fleming was a soldier-writer, a travel-writing soldier, and a serving…
Article by Graham M. Thomas The dedication in You Only Live Twice reads, ‘TO Richard Hughes and Torao Saito BUT FOR WHOM ETC…. Richard Hughes and Torao ‘Tiger’ Saito were two friends of Fleming’s. Both were journalists, both had accompanied Fleming on his travels through Japan, and both had now been metamorphosed into characters in…
Article by David Salter In 1953 “Clubland Heroes”, by Richard Usborne was published. This seminal work – “A nostalgic study of some of the recurrent characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper” – has become the go-to reference work for anyone interested in English thrillers of the immediate pre First…
Article by Michael Connick There is no doubt that government officials of the Soviet Union, and especially those in the KGB, viewed Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories as dangerous anti-Soviet propaganda. Both the books and films were banned in the Soviet Union. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the official newspaper of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, blasted…
Article by Mike Ripley I first met Reg Gadney five years ago, at a rather hectic Christmas party for regular freelance contributors to The Guardian. I knew the name, of course, from numerous excellent spy thrillers (more than a dozen) and as a scriptwriter, especially for his award-winning adaptation of Minette Walters’ psychological crime novel…
Article by ©Julian Parrott, 2017 There isn’t much of Ian Fleming’s Jamaica left these days. Perhaps there never really was. Fleming’s Jamaica was only a momentary period in his own nostalgic yearnings for an ideal of the British Empire. Jamaica was an idyll where he could ignore the Empire’s inexorable death throes and home-nation decline.…
Article by Michael Connick Firearms and weapons tactics are something of specialty for me, so I have great interest in the weapons used by James Bond. Accordingly, I decided to write this article discussing the various firearms used by Bond in the Fleming novels. If this is well received, I might do the same for…
Article by Jeff Quest Wolfe, Nero Wolfe. Although now largely forgotten, 40 years ago there was no bigger detective than Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. Wolfe, who first appeared in 1932 had an unprecedented run with a nearly yearly appearance on bookstore shelves until Stout died in 1975. Wolfe, a gigantic man with a mind just…
This week we sent in one of our top field agents David Craggs, to talk with Crime Writer’s Association winner Mick Herron, about his ‘Slough House’ series of spy novels. Mick’s rise to the top of spy fiction aficionados reading pile is remarkable, so we wanted to find out what his secrets are, if indeed…
In the original typescript to Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, held at the Lily Library in Indiana, there is a very interesting “Author’s note” prefixing the manuscript. Fleming wrote that on his second visit to Japan, he followed “as closely as prudence would allow, in the footsteps of James Bond.” He was accompanied by the…
Article by Frieda Toth For armchair traveling, you can’t beat Bond, and there’s no more delightful pastime than retracing the steps of a fictional hero, especially knowing that there is no bad guy trying to kill you during your vacation. In 1955, Diamonds Are Forever took James Bond to Saratoga Springs, New York. Here, Bond…
