James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan
(‘Bond awoke in his own room at dawn and for a time he lay and stroked his memories’) and a testicles-oriented torture scene were not mainstream stuff in 1953.
Fleming’s first foray into novels was not without its difficulties. After his long-term friend William Plomer – an editor at Jonathan Cape – had prised it out of his reluctant, self-deprecating hands, it was submitted to Mr Cape himself. While Plomer and his colleague Daniel George thought a lot of the manuscript, it would seem that Cape agreed to publish it only as a favour to Peter Fleming, a Cape author. Ian Fleming also had to agree to extensive revisions, which delayed its publication.
Once publication was imminent, Fleming set up Glidrose Productions, a company in which he and his wife owned all shares and to which he assigned his Bond literary rights, the type of manoeuvre common in a period marked by rising top-rate income-tax levels. In a gesture whose extravagance was worthy of some of the villains he would create for his character, Fleming also ordered a gold-plated typewriter.
Casino Royale was published on 13 April 1953, housed in a sedate jacket designed by Fleming himself, featuring an arrangement of valentine hearts dripping blood. It attracted some sparkling praise in the book-review sections. That The Sunday Times described Fleming as ‘the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler’ would have impressed no one aware of Fleming’s connection to the paper, but the plaudits for the new book were widespread: ‘a first-rate thriller’ (Manchester Guardian); ‘an extremely engaging affair’ (The Times Literary Supplement); ‘Fleming tells a good story with strength and distinction’ (The Listener).
Fleming would continue to pick up garlands but not, for a while, spectacular sales. Yet Casino Royale’s print run of 4,750 would not, from Pearson’s recollection, have dismayed the author. ‘That was one of the oddities about the whole Bond phenomenon,’ Pearson says. ‘Jonathan Cape … was a very upmarket, rather smart publisher, not the sort of publisher who normally did thrillers, and he saw them at that time as very much upmarket thrillers. Very much a private, closet activity which he indulged in largely for reasons of his own psychology and the rest of it. I worked for him for six months on The Sunday Times before somebody said, “Oh, Ian writes books, you see.”
‘I got Live and Let Die, which I thought was very good. I said to him, “Ian, I never realised you did this sort of thing. I think Live and Let Die is marvellous, it would make a marvellous film.”
‘“Film, dear boy? Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “These books are caviar for the general, not for the hoi polloi.” He didn’t say “the hoi polloi”, but that’s what he meant – they wouldn’t have a mass impact.’
This suggestion is borne out by a letter Fleming wrote in 1957 to CBS television in which he said, ‘… my books are written for and appeal principally to an “A” readership but … it appears that the “B” and “C” classes find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experience and in part incomprehensible.’
Pearson adds of his conversation with Fleming, ‘I think already he was trying to film Casino Royale and he was very keen to make some money out of the books, but he never envisaged them being at that stage what they became.’
Live and Let Die, published on 8 April 1954, would have made far more sense than Casino Royale as the inaugural James Bond novel. It is bigger, more exotic and more action-oriented than its predecessor and contains many of the elements that would come to be Bond hallmarks. Perhaps significantly, it marked the point where Fleming did not simply write from personal knowledge – as with Casino Royale – but immersed himself in research beforehand.
Universal Export – mentioned as a cover name for the Secret Service for the first time – dispatches Bond across the Atlantic because coins that look as if they may be the fabled treasure of the pirate Bloody Morgan are mysteriously finding their way to the United States from a small, isolated island within British colony Jamaica. Their passage has apparently been arranged by Buonaparte Ignace Gallia, whose initials give rise to the name by which he is commonly known: Mr Big. While Le Chiffre had been a fairly vanilla villain, the symbiotic physical and mental monstrousness of Mr Big would transpire to be the usual mould for Fleming’s baddies. The author would almost always use ugliness or disfigurement as a shorthand for evil. Mr Big is an unsettlingly huge and grey-tinged man. He commands obedience by playing on the terror of voodoo in the American black community, allowing a rumour to thrive that he is the Zombie of Baron Samedi, the Prince of Darkness. The British government are particularly anxious to stop his distribution of the gold coins because it bankrolls Soviet activity: somewhat implausibly, Mr Big is an agent of SMERSH.
Bond is initially told by the American law-enforcement services not to go stirring up trouble and that their policy, until the time is appropriate to strike, is ‘Live and let live’. Replies a quizzical Bond, ‘… I have another motto. It’s “Live and let die”.’ This phrase has, via Bond’s vast cultural popularity, become arguably more famous than the motto of tolerance of which it’s a vengeful inversion.
Bond cuts off the source of the coins in Jamaica and rescues Solitaire, a beautiful and allegedly clairvoyant Haitian pet of Mr Big’s. Through Bond’s resourcefulness, the latter is subjected to the fate of being eaten alive by sharks Mr Big had intended for him.
On its first American printing the chapter ‘Nigger Heaven’ was renamed ‘Seventh Avenue’, but the modern-day reputation the book has for antiquated racism smacks of manufactured outrage. Racist though he – or at least his character – often was, Fleming is shown in Live and Let Die to be in possession of opinions about black people that these days would be described as politically correct. Jazz-loving Leiter proffers the a-few-rotten-apples argument when he says, ‘In any half a million people of any race you’ll get plenty of stinkeroos.’ It is stated that Bond knows Jamaica well as a consequence of a long assignment there just after the war and had come to ‘love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people’.
Despite the air of authenticity created by the likes of an opening three-dozen pages that read a little like a slow-burning police procedural, Live and Let Die is riddled with illogicalities and even comic-book occurrence. For instance, Bond’s planting of a mine for the assault on Mr Big’s fortress seems less logical than a raid that might glean Soviet-related information. Meanwhile, the credence Bond seems to give to Solitaire’s supposed clairvoyance is odd when she never definitively demonstrates her power.
Continuity howlers include the fact that an escape from death sees Bond crying his ‘first tears since his childhood’ (in fact, he wept at Vesper’s death in Casino Royale – and, one would assume, at the treatment of his testicles in the same text) and the statement that Bond has shared ‘so many adventures’ with Felix Leiter (he only met the American in the first book and has been on leave since).
As before – and as ever – there is a certain flatness of tone brought about by the fact that Bond is neither excitable nor warm. One doesn’t love this character.
Stylistically, though, Fleming is sure-footed. Particularly lyrical are the passages that draw upon this keen snorkeller’s deep knowledge of the sea, such as the depiction of the mysterious, creepy, multi-coloured, multi-tentacled aquatic life Bond has to negotiate on his way to plant the mine. The action sequences are consistently good. When Bond is discovered after breaking into the Floridian worm-and-bait shop that acts as a cover for Mr Big’s activities, we feel we are right in the middle of the resultant gun battle (‘a shot whammed between his legs into a pile of conchs, sending splinters of their hard china buzzing round him like wasps’). This same scene results in the book’s most