Review by Jeffrey Susla It appears that with each generation, a new biography of Ian Fleming is published. In 1966, two years after Fleming’s death, John Pearson, a colleague of Fleming’s at The Sunday Times, wrote The Life of Ian Fleming. Pearson, to whom all Fleming fans are deeply indebted, interviewed over 150 individuals associated…
Article by Dick Woodgate As if in a nod to James Bond the ornithologist, Fleming’s short story, For Your Eyes Only, begins with a detailed description of a Caribbean humming bird before moving on to describe a colonial scene in Fleming’s beloved Jamaica (A little Easter egg here: The Blue Harbor Hotel is mentioned in…
Article by Oliver Buckton One of the most puzzling questions about Ian Fleming’s career as an author is why it took him so long after the end of World War II to write the first James Bond novel. During the war, his service in the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) as assistant to DNI Admiral John…
Article by Julian Parrott I don’t consider myself an author, but I may now describe myself as a writer. After thirty-plus years of producing the kind of administrative writing familiar across offices everywhere, I recently took the leap into creative fiction (although some colleagues could say that some of my admin memos and reports could…
Article by F. L. Toth Ian Fleming might not sing it out the way they did, but a good case can be made that Ian, like the Schuyler sisters, thought New York City was the “greatest city in the world.” Just look at how much space he devoted to it. Bond is known for jetting…
This year’s SAMLA 2021 conference is the theme of “Social Networks/Social Distances,” and they are inviting paper proposals on any aspects of Bond, Fleming, and Networks. This could include the way James Bond interacts with and/or distances from various spy networks, such as the Soviet noir SMERSH, the international terror organization SPECTRE, and the Cambridge…
By Gerald Wadsworth Today marks the anniversary of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, in which we find Bond on an assignment to the Caribbean to locate and eliminate Francisco (Paco) “Pistols” Scaramanga – a freelance assassin for Castro. “What to paint?”… This artistic conundrum happens a lot with Bond… even after five…
Richard Chopping was a British writer and painter, best known as the original illustrator of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, including From Russia with Love and Goldfinger – a commission that had been declined by his former friend and subsequent arch-rival, Lucien Freud. His distinctive style and immaculate mastery of tromp l’oeil led Fleming – who was a…
The eleventh volume in The Folio Society’s spectacular James Bond series sees the agent fighting not only for his life, but for his very livelihood. The last book to be published before Fleming died, You Only Live Twice contains everything that makes a Bond novel so thrilling: exotic locations, glamorous women, grotesque villains – while…
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…
