By Jim Wright Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), the last of Ian Fleming’s 14 novels and short story collections, is often considered the least of the lot. After all, the first edition weighs in at just 95 pages, and the title seems increasingly off-putting. That’s a shame because the two short stories of the…
Article by Frieda Toth (an abridged lecture originally for the SAMLA92 conference). It is amazing to me, in light of Bond’s tomcatting around, that so little attention is paid to his creator’s attitudes toward reproductive freedom. Although he might have resisted the labels at the time, Fleming’s work is unashamedly pro choice and pro reproductive…
Article by Jeffrey Susla In a 2011 article for The Spectator, Kate Grimond (Ian Fleming’s niece) eloquently writes how Fleming’s only story for children finally appeared in illustrated print. In “The tale of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” Grimond notes that the young Ian Fleming stayed at Higham Park in Surrey, where he learned stories about how Louis Zborowski’s…
To round off the year that was 2020, Gerald Wadsworth brings some colour to our lives in his latest homage to James Bond! A writer is always looking for some literary device to give their characters their own “voice” as well as an identity that will differentiate them from the other characters in the book.…
The James Bond universe is greater than you might think. Even if you have seen all the movies and devoured Ian Fleming’s books, there is much more to discover about 007. In his new book, Mark Edlitz talks to us about the Bond adventures that have been “lost” or unmade, out-of-print, or forgotten by even…
In his new book, Canadian historian David O’Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was, in fact, a mission, set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a ‘pinch’ policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma Machine that would permit…
A new book by Jon Gilbert, author of the Ian Fleming Bibliography, is a comprehensive account of Ian Fleming/James Bond material held at The Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo. We caught up with Jon to ask him about the genesis of the project. Following on from your own momentous effort with the Ian Fleming Bibliography,…
Article by Igor Solarisov “‘Dig that T-bird!’ I had cut it a bit fine round Queen Victoria’s skirts and my wing mirror had almost dashed the Leica from the GI’s hand. If the tourists don’t snap the Queen, at about 10 a.m. on most mornings they can at least get a picture of me and…
An extraordinary collection of Ian Fleming manuscripts, first editions and ephemera go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on October 28th, 2020. The collection is entitled ‘James Bond: A Collection of Books and Manuscripts, The Property of a Gentleman‘ Of particular interest in this archive of treasure, relates to the dust-jacket of For Your Eyes Only, which…
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.…
