Writing the Ian Fleming novels

NY Times:

Any writer who has struggled to “do the words” would take heart from the self-effacing assessment written for himself by Ian Fleming, the raffish Englishman born 100 years ago this month who became one of the most successful authors of his time through the creation of the world’s best-loved spy, James Bond.

Fleming died in 1964, at 56, of complications from pleurisy after playing a round of golf in Oxfordshire though he had a heavy cold. But the real culprits were years of smoking up to 80 cigarettes a day, and a fondness for drink. Perhaps because of the difficulty he found in resisting life’s indulgences, he adopted a strict writing routine in his last 12 years, the period in which he wrote more than a dozen Bond novels that spawned the multibillion-dollar film franchise.

Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon — 2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle that led Noël Coward, a frequent guest at Goldeneye and no puritan himself, to describe the Fleming household as “golden ear, nose and throat.”

Fleming, who saw 40 million copies of his books sold in his lifetime but died before the Bond franchise went stratospheric, had no literary pretensions. He described his first Bond book, “Casino Royale,” as “an oafish opus,” and offered further disparagement in a 1963 BBC radio interview. “If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive,” he said. Asked if Bond had kept him from more serious writing, of the kind achieved by his older brother, Peter, a renowned explorer and travel writer, he replied: “I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.”

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Of his Bond plots, Fleming, ever prosaic about his talent, said, “I extracted them from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero and a villain, and there was the book.” For M, Bond’s irascible, domineering secret service overseer, he had as a model Rear Adm. John Godfrey, his wartime intelligence chief; old school friends, golfing partners, and girlfriends also metamorphosed into Bond characters. Even his villains had real-life antecedents.

Auric Goldfinger, “a misshapen short man with red hair and a bizarre face” in Fleming’s description, had the author’s “flat golf swing” and the surname of a prominent Hungarian-born British architect, Erno Goldfinger, whose penchant for concrete tower blocks Fleming abhorred. Rosa Klebb of Smersh, “a dreadful chunk of a woman” and “a toadlike figure” to Fleming, had her likeness in Maj. Tamara Nikolayeva Ivanova, a notoriously sadistic K.G.B. agent. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, “with lips that suggest contempt, tyranny and cruelty,” got his name from a Fleming schoolmate at Eton. Odd Job, Goldfinger’s enforcer and “a uniquely dreadful person,” drew his deadly missile of a bowler hat from Fleming’s knowledge of the nefarious uses to which British intelligence services made of everyday headgear.

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President Kennedy was a Fleming fan too.

I am currently listening to a book on CD version of Mitch Silver's In Secret Service, which has as its plot within a plot a supposed Fleming manuscript about a conspiracy between King Edward VIII and Hitler. The story bounces between the 30s and 40s and the present time with interesting intrigue. It is quite good and probably better written than Fleming's works. I think it would make an interesting movie.