In the tenth volume in The Folio Society’s endlessly popular James Bond collection, Fleming sweeps the reader up into the thin and dangerous atmosphere of the Alps in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond and his enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld come face to face for the first time in this second book in the ‘Blofeld trilogy’…
Review by Jeffrey Susla While Matt Sherman’s Playing Games With James Bond comes in at a modest 132 pages, it ranks with the best of the Bond trivia books. Sherman, an expert on collecting James Bond memorabilia and organizer of several Bond collector weekends, has created what Rosa Klebb would call, a “labour of love”…
Review by Jeffrey Susla Ian Fleming found much pleasure in drinking. That much is obvious when encountering the attention paid to the variety of drinks that James Bond orders around the world on assignment. And James Bond, like his creator, finds solace in alcohol. In Thunderball, Bond’s medical report states that he drinks half a…
Article by Jeffrey J. Susla In 1963, Ian Fleming’s “How to Write a Thriller” appeared in the May issue of Books and Bookmen. According to Fleming, “There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.” So, during…
Article by Mark Simmons. Vice-Admiral Norman Denning said of Ian Fleming the ‘ideas man’ who worked at Naval Intelligence, that many of his ideas, ‘were just plain crazy’ yet there were a few ‘that made you think before you threw them in the wastepaper basket.’ One that was not dismissed was the creation of what…
This month Gerry Wadsworth dove into the short story Octopussy looking for treasure… Put yourselves in the shoes of Major Dexter Smythe, Royal Marines (Retired).… You’re living the life of luxury off stolen Nazi WW2 gold bars by selling bits of them to Chinese import/export merchants. You live on the island of Jamaica in a…
![Red Grant by © George Almond [courtesy of www.007magazine.com]](https://literary007.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/1148830_10151614947083106_339189802_n.jpg?w=220&h=126&crop=1)
It’s no accident that the best novels often have the best villains, and in Ian Fleming’s canon, this is no different. They lay bare humanity’s worst traits and push Bond’s resourcefulness to the nth degree. Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the…
The dust jackets of the first three James Bond novels are well known to any serious first edition collector. Their seminal influence and value are most talked about, but less well known is the man behind the artwork, Kenneth Lewis. Someone who knew the late Lewis well is rare book dealer and long-time Ian Fleming…
After a chance encounter, Paul Kenny was driven to learn more about the man whose name is synonymous with Bond and his Bentley. We caught up with Paul to understand more about his journey to publication and one of Ian Fleming’s oldest friends, Amherst Villiers. What inspired you to write a book on Amherst Villiers?…
James Bond will never have a reputation in the intelligence or spy writer community as being a great spy. He was a secret agent with a license to kill, should he need to use it. This is not to say that Bond does not do any intelligence gathering or was not skilled in counter-intelligence. But…
Article by F. L. Toth Among Bond and Fleming aficionados, it is almost as much fun to cluck our tongues affectionately at his mistakes as to delight in what Fleming does right. Fleming creates sumptuous feasts, but, some say, the author really didn’t know food all that well. His product placement is riddled with incorrectly…
This week, courtesy of the paintbrush of Gerald Wadsworth is the lesser know Ian Fleming short story “Risico”, from Ian Fleming’s short story collection For Your Eyes Only. An escape to Venice sounds ideal right now! The Inspirations In creating imagery for this painting, it seemed logical that a Venice canal scene should dominate the painting.…
Newly published by The Queen Anne Press, are the notes that John Pearson made in 1965 while researching The Life of Ian Fleming. They chart not only Fleming’s life – with details that never made it into the finished biography – but John’s own journey while investigating his subject. As such, they form less a…
Never meet your heroes they say. Well, in some cases it’s no bad thing. For Ian Fleming, it was a thrill to meet ‘the real James Bond’, whose name many argue was the inspiration for his titular hero, taken from the birding book – Birds of the West Indies. A new book about this meeting…
Article by Alice Dryden It’s a terrible thing, being a collector. You start off sensibly, with a few well-chosen items, then suddenly find yourself hoarding all kinds of tangentially-related tat. So it was that I walked past the window of one of my local charity shops, spotted a Revell 1:24 scale Bentley 4,5L Blower model…
On April 12, 2020 we lost one of the greatest racing drivers and Britons in Sir Stirling Moss aged 90. In a quite remarkable life in which Moss cheated death a few times, he crossed paths with Ian Fleming and inspired a short story that would find life again in Anthony Horowitz’s novel Trigger Mortis.…
In the dedication for Ian Fleming’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ it reads: ‘for SABLE BASILISK PURSUVIANT and HILARY BRAY who came to the aid of the party’ But who is Sable Basilisk? This is in fact, was based on “Rouge Dragon” in the College of Arms. Rouge Dragon was the title of heraldic researcher…
Article by Graham Thomas John Betjeman (1906 -1984) was Poet Laureate, a lover of English churches but was not a spy and, so far as is known, did not come across Fleming during the War. (Unlike other literary figures.) Eventually, he and Fleming did become good friends and while there is now little in the…
[Abridged review by Monica Germana for The World of James Bond: The Lives and Times of 007, by Jeremy Black (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, pp. 280) in the International Journal of James Bond Studies, DOI: http://doi.org/10.24877/jbs.34%5D The world has been shaken and stirred, if the pun can be excused, by a number of excellent academic…
Nobody Does It Better than the Folio Society… For this edition, The Folio Society has also reintroduced Ian Fleming’s original prologue, which had been removed from all modern editions of the text. In an unusual move by the author, this short introduction suggests that the manuscript had been left on his desk by Vivienne Michel,…
It can be argued that Sefton Delmer is the Godfather of what we commonly refer to as ‘fake news’. In old money, this was propaganda. Delmer’s “Black Propaganda,” was a disinformation war waged over the airwaves and mixed real news culled from intelligence sources and fake items. He even he produced a German-language newspaper called…
Article by F. L. Toth Ian Fleming was often criticized, sometimes rightly, for getting the facts wrong about the things for which he is best known, such as fine food, guns, wine, and bath products of all things. He seems, in fact, to have been the most annoying of dilettantes: the man who learns just…
From the first publication of Fleming’s James Bond novels in the 1950s, up to the troubled and controversial production of No Time To Die – the 25th Bond film–the persona and milieu of Bond has attracted scandal. Lambasted in 1958 by Paul Johnson for “sex, snobbery, and sadism” Fleming’s novels attracted still more notoriety when…
Article by Igor Solarisov If diamonds are forever; then so are sapphires. Armstrong Siddeley Sapphires, that is. If looked after, they last a long time. Such as this 1954 six-window saloon once owned by the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming. In the spirit of its original owner’s fiction, I have agreed not to reveal…
In this new book by Mark Edlitz, The Many Lives of James Bond offers the largest ever collection of original interviews with actors who have played Bond in different media, as well as in-depth interviews with many of the diverse artists who have contributed their talents to the making of James Bond movies, television shows,…
