The Squid Who Loved Me

“A shining example, really, of the uneasy contract between the public and private (Ian) Fleming is the story about him flinging a squid at the novelist Rosamond Lehmann when she was staying at his home in Jamaica. In the version told by the writer Peter Quennell, Fleming did this to frighten Lehmann into leaving early since he was expecting the arrival of another lover. Lehmann’s less well-known account sheds a more satisfying light on the story.

“Lehmann came across the squid on the kitchen floor; Fleming had speared it, intending to have it for dinner. ‘As I looked at it,’ she recalled, ‘I suddenly caught its eye. It seemed to stare at me, and I felt for some reason that this was a creature every bit as intelligent as we were and that it was suffering terribly. So I persuaded Ian to throw it back in the sea. 

“He grumbled a bit and said, ‘How typical of a soft old pseudo-liberal like you. You may think nature is beautiful, but it is very cruel, very ruthless. Just you see. As soon as we throw the squid back, all the other creatures will go for it. Just you see.’ 

“So we did throw it in, and it was quite extraordinary, for suddenly this odd, grey, inanimate creature began to light up in the water until it was quite phosphorescent. Then it swam away as we watched and Ian was completely speechless. It was an incident I always intended to write about, but never have.”

— Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

That Dear Beast Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming and Noel Coward

“Dear Beastie —

“This is just to inform you that I have read ‘Dr. No’ from cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed every moment. But as the gentleman in ‘Oklahoma!’ sings about Kansas City: ‘You’ve gone about as fur as you ken go.’

“I am willing to accept the centipede, the tarantulas, the land crabs, the giant squid. I am even willing to forgive your reckless use of invented verbs — I inch, Thou inch, He snakes, I snake, We palp, They palp, etc. But what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England.

“This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue. I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s! I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap, what could you have been thinking of?

“I am snaking off to New York on Thursday where I shall be for two weeks, and then I inch to Cannes.”

— That was a 1958 letter from author and performer Noel Coward to his friend and Jamaican neighbor Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming and Noel Coward had an odd but strong friendship. Coward once extricated Fleming from a particularly awkward sexual entanglement, demanding and getting Fleming’s new camera and tripod as payment. Coward scolded Fleming over the bedroom farce, saying, “You, my dear, are just on old cunt teaser.”

The actor and director Roy Marsden, who starred as a British spy in TV’s ‘The Sandbaggers,’ observed, “Coward, of course, fancied Fleming like mad. Coward himself never admitted to being homosexual — he always said there were still one or two widows left in Worthing who didn’t know.”

Biographer Peter Quennell said Coward “…treated Ian as he might have treated a difficult social beauty or a wayward prima donna, and often criticized the extremely unfeeling use to which he put his great attractions.”

The Artistic License Renewed website not that Coward “…was famously offered the part of Dr. No in the eponymous film and remarked, ‘No, no, no!’ Nevertheless, he still enjoyed being around production, naturally taking a shine to Sean Connery.”

For his part, Fleming was one of the few people permitted to talk back to Coward, and at one point told him, “Don’t be a silly old bugger.”

Coward replied, “We don’t talk shop here, dear boy.”

Sean Connery and Noel Coward

 

Reading and Plotting and Writing

My favorite books as a teenager included Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. The canny creator of The Talented Mr. Ripley wrote a book that is equal parts inspirational, autobiographical and advisory.

I read an Effingham library copy when I was in high school and it took me decades to find a hardcover copy of my own. She made me want to be a professional writer.

Other favorites included The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I have since escaped their dark, Neptune-like gravitational pull, but I will never forget them. Rand’s philosophy offers useful hymns to individualism — particularly for the young, when they most need to hear them. But unfortunately, despite her self-congratulatory trumpeting of reason, Rand confused her own whims and passions with facts, much to the detriment of the political economy and moral bearings of the U.S., as it turned out.

Then there was Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming. The second of the James Bond novels remains the most vivid in my mind, with its evocation of New York circa 1953, with its tough heroic action, with its vulnerable, clairvoyant heroine, with its Freudian-daddy villain’s horrifying schemes of vengeance, with its lyric Silver Meteor train ride from Manhattan to St. Petersburg and those offhanded observations of Bond’s that seemed to express the height of sophistication when you were a teenage boy.

The problem isn’t getting the caviar you want, you know. It’s getting the proper amount of buttered toast to spread it on.

Ian Fleming took an eager sensual pleasure in life that ended his life early, but that can still sweep us along with its zest. The real Bond — as real as any Bond can be — is there, in Fleming’s novels.

Breakfast with Bond

“James Bond’s favorite meal of the day was breakfast,” Tom Weiss wrote. “It was also the favorite meal of Ian Fleming, 007’s creator. Fleming made breakfast not only ‘Bond’s favorite meal of the day,’ but also ‘an important part of Bond’s day.’ This was not mere rhetoric. Among the five hundred meals mentioned in the entire Bond oeuvre, 115 were breakfasts, eighty of them described in appetizing detail.

“When Bond was at home, breakfast consisted of a single perfectly boiled egg, toast with jam, and coffee. It ‘was always the same’ (From Russia with Love). Of course, as a gourmand, Bond could not have an ordinary egg, or just any old jam or coffee — he had exacting standards. The egg came from a French Marans hen, was speckled brown, and boiled for three and one-third minutes. The toast was whole wheat, usually two thick slices with Jersey butter, and there would be three confitures available: Tiptree “Little Scarlet” strawberry jam, Coopers Vintage Oxford marmalade, and Norwegian honey. When in London, the coffee had to come from De Bry on New Oxford Street, and was served only in Menton china…”

“When faced with death, what did Bond eat for breakfast? In Live and Let Die, desperately trying to stay out of the clutches of Mr. Big and his henchmen, Bond ordered room service at the St. Regis in New York: pineapple juice, cornflakes, shirred eggs and bacon, toast with marmalade, and a double espresso. When it arrived, it dawned on him that he had ordered the hearty breakfast of a condemned man. This marked one of the only times Bond had cereal, and the only time he ate shirred eggs. Most of the time, he preferred his eggs scrambled, not shirred.”

By the way, I can see why James Bond stayed in shape. By American standards, Bond’s typical breakfast in his plane-tree’d flat off the King’s Road is nothing much. By postwar English standards, it was lavish.

James Bond Meets Synchronicity

James Bond encounters synchronicity in Ian Fleming’s novel Moonraker:

“Startled at the great crimson words, Bond pulled in to the curb, got out of the car and crossed to the other side of the street to get a better view of the big skysign.

“Ah! That was it. Some of the letters had been hidden by a neighbouring building. It was only one of those Shell advertisements. ‘SUMMER SHELL is HERE’ was what it said.

“Bond smiled to himself and walked back to his car and drove on.

“When he had first seen the sign, half-hidden by the building, great crimson letters across the evening sky had flashed a different message.

“They had said: ‘HELL is HERE… HELL is HERE… HELL is HERE.’”

What Bond didn’t know was that Sir Hugo Drax was at that moment preparing the clandestine launch of a nuclear missile at London.

Audio Book 8: Death Echoes for Bond

You can probably thank Bill Paley for For Your Eyes Only.

During the summer of 1958, CBS commissioned Ian Fleming to write a TV series based on James Bond (partly inspired by the success of the 1954 one-shot CBS television adaptation of Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale).

Fleming wrote outlines for several episodes before CBS dropped the idea. CBS Chairman of the Board Bill Paley’s biographer Lewis J. Paper reported that Paley “…rejected any suggestion that the network make use of Ian Fleming’s stories about James Bond, believing that the American public would have no interest in the escapades of a British spy.” Not Paley’s best moment.

In 1959, working at his home Goldeneye in Jamaica, Fleming adapted four of the TV plots into short stories. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett noted that “…Ian’s mood of weariness and self-doubt was beginning to affect his writing,” as evidenced in Bond’s internal monologue of thoughts.

The short stories became Fleming’s 1960 Bond book, For Your Eyes Only.

The title story, according to Wiki, was originally called Man’s Work and was “…set in Vermont, where Fleming had spent a number of summers at his friend Ivar Bryce’s Black Hollow Farm, which became the model for von Hammerstein's hideaway, Echo Lake. The name of the villain of the story, von Hammerstein, was taken from General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (1878–1943), one of Hitler’s opponents. Fleming also considered calling the story Death Leaves an Echo and based the story on Rough Justice, which was to be episode three of the television series.”

The other stories in that collection — Quantum of Solace, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity — are not included in this BBC adaptation, but two later stories are.

The Property of a Lady was written in 1963 as a commission for Sotheby’s for use in their annual journal. Fleming was disappointed in the tale, a bit of business about a double agent who is to be paid by KGB through the auction of Peter Carl Fabergé’s “Emerald Sphere.” Of more enduring interest was The Living Daylights, published in 1962 as Berlin Escape. Bond gets a surprise, and is inspired to bitter moral musings, when he is assigned sniper duty to help British agent 272 escape from East Berlin by killing a KGB assassin codenamed Trigger. 

Audio Novel 4: James Bond in Sin City

Signet paperback art by Barye Phillips

Bond versus the American vulgarians — that’s Diamonds Are Forever, Ian Fleming’s fourth 007 thriller, published in 1956 and inspired by a Sunday Times article on diamond smuggling.

For this young American reader, the USA wasn’t as exotic a setting as a casino “near the mouth of the Somme” or Jamaica or even England, and loudly dressed American gangsters seemed laughable next to the elegant, imposing menace of Le Chiffre or Mr. Big or Sir Hugo Drax.

That said, it’s a perfectly serviceable Bond adventure, charged with Fleming’s early verve, a couple of chilling gay killers named Wint and Kidd and a likeable, tough, brassy heroine, Tiffany Case. A survivor of gang rape who works as a smuggler for the Spangled Mob, Tiffany becomes the second woman with whom Bond falls in love during the course of the novels. We learn only later that Tiffany, finding Bond too difficult to live with, returned to the U.S. with an American military officer, whom she probably married.

The novel includes a sybaritic setting, Las Vegas, that seems perfect for Bond from the moment when, with some amusement, he steps off an airliner to breathe pure oxygen from one of those American gizmos.

Never out of print, the novel got an early boost in November 1956 when the man from No. 10, Sir Anthony Eden, made a much-advertised visit to Fleming’s Goldeneye estate to recuperate following the Suez Crisis. It was adapted into a comic strip in 1959-60 and, in 1971, became the basis for Sean Connery’s last “official” film as 007. Jill St. John joined him, making an excellent Tiffany Case.

Here it is as a BBC radio drama starring Toby Stephens as 007. 

Nice to Have You Back, Mr. Bond

Spectre is the James Bond film I had hoped and expected to see after Casino Royale in 2006, one that retains the dark edginess of the 21st century 007 but is peppered with the crowd-pleasing conventions accumulated in a half-century of films about Ian Fleming's Cold War counterspy.

The sexy winks at the previous films are too numerous to count, but subtle enough not to get in the way of the action and the angst. Daniel Craig is as good as ever, less driven this time and therefore relaxed enough to echo some of Sean Connery's welcome wryness. SPECTRE itself, of course, is a long-lost adversary from Fleming’s novels and Connery’s films. It stands for the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, an acronym I’ve had memorized for a half-century.

Christoph Waltz and Andrew Scott are terrific super villains, with Waltz archly expert at the cat-and-mouse game and providing us with a menace as timely as the possibility of nuclear blackmail was in 1965. The credible nightmare for the 21^st century global police state surveillance, which was also the looming threat in the last Captain America movie.

But like most Hollywood action films now, the emphasis isn’t on the public menace, but on the personal vendetta. Heroes and villains in fantasy adventure films used to fight simply because the lives of millions were at stake. Now they invariably do so because of daddy issues or mommy issues or sibling rivalry issues. The fate of millions seems to be a distinctly secondary consideration, when it’s not entirely irrelevant. If the world is blowing up or Godzilla is attacking, many of these 21st century heroes are solely concerned with saving their child, and everybody else can go to hell. This, I suspect, is yet another result of having an American culture that has preached me-first and me-only for decades.

However, Sam Mendes' direction is lush and romantic, with scene after scene like a succession of paintings, though I sometimes wish he'd work on his pacing. All in all, a completely enjoyable afternoon out with Bart Rettberg, Matt Mattingly, Jake Cole and Paul Beals.

Drinking with James Bond at a Sidewalk Cafe

James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet’s. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. A  fine a l’eau is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A quart de champagne or a champagne a l’orange is all right before luncheon, but in the evening one quart leads to another quart, and a bottle of indifferent champagne is a bad foundation for the night. Pernod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its licorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical-comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing, an Americano — bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel, and soda. For the soda he always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.”

— Ian Fleming, From a View to a Kill

Audio Novel 11: Bond's Triumph and Tragedy

While the first James Bond film, Dr. No, was being filmed in Jamaica, Ian Fleming was nearby in his house Goldeneye writing the 10^th Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

In spite of — or because of — Fleming’s popular success, some condescending critics took shots at him. Although he laughed the remarks off, they must have smarted, and Fleming continually tried to develop his protagonist and refine his writing. In OHMSS, for the first time, Bond reflects on childhood memories and not only finds a woman he can love, but marries her.

Preceded by Thunderball and followed by You Only Live Twice, this middle novel in the Blofeld trilogy would establish Ernst Stavro Blofeld, SPECTRE’s founder, as Bond’s archenemy.

Published in April 1963, the book sold more than 60,000 copies in the first month. The 1969 film version stayed relatively true to the novel, featured one of John Barry’s best scores, and has subsequently acquired a reputation as one of the best Bond movies.

Here it is as a BBC radio drama starring Toby Stephens as 007.

The Press of Danger: 007 in the Funny Papers

James Bond probably owes much of his success to the comic strips.

Before the films were made, Ian Fleming's novels were popularized in British newspaper comic strip adaptations, and composer John Barry admitted that he created the iconic music for the first film, Dr. No, based only on a familiarity with the comic strip.

“I didn’t sit down and intellectualize about it, and I've never read a James Bond book,” Barry said. “I’d only seen like a cartoon strip that they used to have in the Daily Mail in England. So I knew it was about a spy. I knew roughly what the essence was, but I never saw the movie. I just wrote the damn thing, you know.”

Remarkable, by the way, how much the comic strip 007 resembled Sean Connery, who had yet to be cast.

The Spy Who Came In to Read Bond

Sean Connery as 007 in "From Russia With Love;' Richard Burton as Leamas in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — portrayed by film actor Richard Burton — remained cold to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, at least at first.

“Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about nine and read a book of Ian Fleming’s called ‘You Only Live Twice.’ A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food, drink, national morals, etc., all of an excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books — I’m not sure which came first — and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics.

“I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts.’ What a contrast between that and Fleming. West’s book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth’ sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken and not stirred.’

“He has the cordon-blue nerve to attack one of my favorite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81^st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and French fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot, before you’d finished the comic strips in the Herald Tribune, or read Red Smith’s wry column.

“Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually maniacal boy scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: “Well, it’s been a hell of a bloody lark.’ And of course, to that bon viveur, woman-chasing intelligently muscled mind it had been.”
— Richard Burton’s journal, March 28, 1969
I think, by the way, the Burton is conning us just a bit here. He knew more about the literary Bond than he could have learned from that one late novel, You Only Live Twice. And although he didn't often go to movies, Burton read hundreds of paperback thrillers, so he'd certainly run across Ian Fleming before, and must have been aware that the novels came a decade before the movies they inspired.

Books: Ten I Retain

Here my thoughts on 10 books that have stayed with me ever since I read them, in no particular order:

—   Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. The canny creator of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” wrote a book that is equal parts inspirational, autobiographical and advisory. I read an Effingham library copy when I was in high school and it took me decades to track down a hardcover copy of my own.

—   Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The stoic emperor’s own advice to himself. He was perhaps the only real “philosopher-king” humanity ever saw. “Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts,” he wrote. The Buddhists would have agreed. He also said, “The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” And that may just about the best advice anybody ever gave anybody

—   The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber. Whenever you’d like to make people laugh, just start reading aloud from the great New Yorker writer and cartoonist’s short stories “The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Breaking Up of the Winships” or, my favorite, “A Couple of Hamburgers.”

—   The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I have escaped its Neptune-like gravitational pull, but I will never forget it. Rand’s philosophy offers useful hymns to individualism — particularly for the young, when they most need to hear them. But unfortunately, despite her self-congratulatory trumpeting of reason, Rand confused her own whims and passions with facts, much to the detriment of the political economy of the U.S., as it turned out.

—   Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming. The second of the James Bond novels remains the most vivid in my mind, with its evocation of New York circa 1953, with its tough heroic action, with its vulnerable, clairvoyant heroine, with its Freudian-daddy villain’s horrifying schemes of vengeance, with its lyric Silver Meteor train ride from Manhattan to St. Petersburg and those offhanded observations of Bond’s that seemed to express the height of sophistication when you were a teenage boy. The problem isn’t getting the caviar you want, you know. It’s getting the proper amount of buttered toast to spread it on. Ian Fleming took an eager sensual pleasure in life that ended his life early, but that can still sweep us along with its zest.

—   The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer. Back in 1965, the famed New Yorker cartoonist wrote the first hardcover book about the first comic-book superheroes, managing to be serious, light-hearted, witty and insightful, all at the same time. Look closely, and you can even see some problematic American cultural patterns laid bare there. “A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him,” wrote Feiffer, recalling the attitudes of the superheroes' first fanboys in the 1930s and 1940s. “Our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did — but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, L'il Abner’s, or Superman's, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell out ... Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.”

—   Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Early in the history of the novel, Austen performed at least three neat tricks at once. She created a credible romance between intelligent, charismatic characters. She perfected the practice of letting characters damn themselves out of their own mouths to great comic effect. And she explored proto-feminist territory by presenting the dilemma facing women who must make a match that will determine the course of their lives, taking into account both love and money yet taking care not to be overwhelmed by either, and all the while keeping up the “well-bred” pretense that they’re not interested in anything of the sort. A high-wire act would be a walk in the park by comparison.

—   Reason and Belief by Brand Blanshard. With careful and kindly analysis, giving religion every benefit of the doubt, the great Yale philosopher disposes of the supernatural claims of faith finally and, for a fair-minded reader, irrefutably, I’d say. An intellectual tour de force.

—   The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor). My friend and mentor Elleston Trevor split the difference between the thrills of Ian Fleming and the verisimilitude of John Le Carre in his novels about the tense, terse British “shadow executive” code-named Quiller. Trevor convincingly portrayed the way a competent professional loner operates, and something in Quiller’s edgy, first-person, adrendaline-tinged self-control rang true psychologically with readers worldwide. “I’m frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up,” Quiller reflects. “So that’s what I go on doing, to prove I’m not frightened.’

—   Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. One of my top-three science fiction authors, Zelazny here posits a colony of humans from long-forgotten “Urath” who are so advanced that they have been able to effectively transform themselves into the Hindu pantheon of gods in order to dominate the population of a planet. Whic means that one of their number, fed up with their stultifying injustice, must effectively become the Buddha. But we only learn all that gradually, lyrically. “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.”

Nice to Have Met You, Mr. Bond

The second James Bond film, released in 1963, was based on Ian Fleming's 1957 novel.

Audio Novel 5: From Britain With Love

“From Russia With Love” has the distinction of being what many consider to be Ian Fleming’s best Bond novel, what many also consider to be the best Bond film, and the novel that — when named as one his favorites by President Kennedy — propelled James Bond to permanent international stardom.

Here it is as a BBC radio drama starring Toby Stephens as 007. The British secret agent was never closer to meeting his maker and, in fact, at one point, an irritated and discouraged Fleming planned to leave him dead at the end of the novel. You’ll see how close he came.

Audio Novel 7: The Man With the Midas Touch

Art by Isdailic

Sir Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger? Why the hell not? Here's another BBC radio play of an Ian Fleming novel, this time "Goldfinger," the most famous of the James Bond tales.
The seventh Ian Fleming novel, published in 1959, became the third Bond film in 1964. The film "Dr. No" was a hit in 1962 and "From Russia With Love" a bigger hit in 1963. But with "Goldfinger," the James Bond mega-hit was born, with lines around the block for tickets and 24-hour screenings.
My friend and mentor Elleston Trevor — creator of the taut Quiller spy series — thought Fleming's novel ridiculous, and it does have a couple of implausible turns, even by Fleming's standards (why in hell does Goldfinger keep Bond around as a "secretary?")
But finally, there's really no arguing with Ian Fleming's golden touch, is there?

Audio Novel 6: The Scheherazade Sound of Dr. No

In his 1958 novel "Dr. No," the veteran gambler Ian Fleming finally tipped his hand.
Prior to this, his sixth James Bond thriller, Fleming had been pretending, perhaps even to himself, that his novels were about espionage, a field with which he'd become familiar as a naval intelligence officer during World War II. But Bond was made for sunnier wars than John Le Carre's "Cold" one, and Fleming revealed that when he sent escapist hero 007 to his own favorite destination for escape, Jamaica.
Here, the novel is dramatized as a BBC radio play, complete with John Barry music.
This is the novel in which Fleming finally makes it clear that Bond's adventures are mythic, iconic on a Joseph Campbell scale. Literally, Bond faces a Fu Manchu villain, a naked damsel in distress and a fire-breathing dragon. And the way Fleming effectively fogs over the obvious fairy tale with brand-name verisimilitude is part of what gives this story its persistent charm...

Audio Novel 12: James Bond 7777

Now here's a find — the 1964 Ian Fleming novel "You Only Live Twice" done as a BBC radio play. The thriller is much different than and superior to the film. For one thing, it opens with James Bond cracking up. 
Even in ill health in his last years, with his powers failing, Fleming was able to cook up a properly mythic plot turning on the Japanese penchant for suicide being exploited by the sadistic "Doctor Shatterhand" in his fatal paradise. 

Always reaching for a surprise for his readers, Fleming had married Bond off to a countess at the end of the previous novel, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." He opens this novel with the indomitable Bond facing a nervous breakdown because his archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld had murdered Tracy Bond within hours of their wedding. Suffering fits of emptiness and deep depression, Bond sits in the park and watches ants, waiting for his inevitable notice of termination by the British Secret Service.
And his chief M does yank Bond's double-oh number, but only to replace it with the code number 7777. M has one last-ditch, impossible mission for Bond. The secret agent will either end his life in Japan, or live twice...
Creator and creation merged frequently, and here again as this penultimate Bond novel became the last published during Fleming's lifetime.

Property of a Gentleman

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Still in his early fifties, Ian Fleming nevertheless knew that he had less than five years to live, thanks to all those vodka martinis and specially made Turkish cigarettes.

Having recently visited Japan to research his novel “You Only Live Twice,” Fleming decided to adopt a quasi-Buddhist attitude toward the luxuries Bond had bought.

So he gave his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor a navy blue vicuna overcoat. A BBC journalist once described the travel writer, scholar and soldier Fermor as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.”

Years later, when the IRA was regularly bombing London, Fermor was stopped by a police officer while walking. The officer asked for proof of his identity, joking that people frequently liked to claim they were James Bond.

Fermor casually opened his vicuna coat and displayed the label, which read, “Benson, Perry & Whitley, Cork St W1 7.9.1956 Ian Fleming Esq.” The policeman immediately summoned a car to take Fermor home.

Source: “Ian Fleming” by Andrew Lycett

James Bond Breakfasts at Tiffany's

The young Truman Capote

Ian Fleming

During the 1956 Jamaican sojourn when he was writing “From Russia With Love,” Ian Fleming’s unlikely houseguest at Goldeneye was Truman Capote.

The tall, womanizing English spy novelist and the tiny, effeminate American writer got along well. The creator of James Bond described the creator of Holly Golightly as a “fascinating companion” who told “wonderful stories all day long when we weren’t working.”

When Fleming’s young, wealthy racehorse fancier friend Billy Woodward was shot to death by his wife, Fleming dedicated a novel, “Diamonds Are Forever,” to his memory, no doubt wishing Woodward had heeded him when Woodward asked Fleming what to do about his socially inept ex-showgirl wife, Fleming replied, “Divorce her, old boy. Divorce her.” Capote fictionalized the tragedy in his novella “Answered Prayer.”

Fleming’s wife, Ann, was in England while Capote was Fleming’s

houseguest, and was amused by the notion of them staying together with Noel Coward and Cole Lesley as friendly neighbors.

“Goldeneye was the last heterosexual household,” she quipped. “What will its reputation be now?”

Source: “Ian Fleming” by Andrew Lycett