We tend to forget that Ian Fleming was a moonlight author, whose first novel, Casino Royale (1953), was published at the relatively advanced age of 44. As foreign-news manager at The Sunday Times, in London, from 1945 to 1962, Fleming had a busy day job. But he also had it written into his contract that he could spend two months of every winter on vacation in his beloved Jamaica. It was during one of these holidays that Fleming, nervous about the prospect of getting married for the first time, decided to write Casino Royale.
“The book had to be a thriller because that was all I had time for in my two months’ holiday and I knew there would be no room in my London life for writing books.”
Fleming’s 1956 account of how he came to write Casino Royale is one of the highlights of Talk of the Devil: The Collected Writings of Ian Fleming, which gathers together a delectable array of journalism, travel writing, short stories, speeches, and correspondence (including a fascinating exchange between Fleming and Raymond Chandler). A slightly different version of the book, edited by Fleming’s niece Kate Grimond and nephew Fergus Fleming, was originally published in 2008 as part of a special edition of complete works to commemorate the centenary of the author’s birth. This is the first stand-alone edition.
In an astute introduction, Adam Gopnik describes the “atmospherics” of the James Bond novels that “give credibility to their adventures.” A foretaste of this talent is evident in “A Poor Man Escapes,” one of the earliest known short stories by Fleming, which he is thought to have written in 1927 at the age of 19. “The Café Budapest was full,” Fleming writes. “The breath of the people and the heat of the stoves and of the kitchen had turned to moisture on the window so that the lights shone out into the street like haloed golden stars.” This story about a Viennese down-and-out who decides to poison himself now seems tragically prescient, as Fleming’s troubled son, Caspar, overdosed on barbiturates in 1975, at the age of 23.
Fleming, who had had a fatal heart attack 11 years earlier at the age of 56, was known to suffer from bouts of depression, or what his hero Winston Churchill described as “black dog.” He was also of the “Never complain, never explain” school of behavior. Still, there were a few occasions when this Old Etonian let the mask slip, and one such moment arrived toward the end of his life in a talk he gave to an Oxford student body on the art of writing thrillers. “I have no message for suffering humanity,” he said, “and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences onto the public.”
There is something eternally adolescent about Fleming—he loved his guns, gadgets, games of chance, and treasure hunts—but also a flintiness that emerged during his work as a naval intelligence officer during the Second World War. In a 1941 memorandum to Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan on creating the Office of Strategic Studies, forerunner to the C.I.A., one of Fleming’s suggestions was “to make an example of someone at an early date for indiscretion and continue to act ruthlessly where lack of security is concerned.” In another article for The Sunday Times, Fleming suggests that Gary Powers should have been hung out to dry by the Americans. “The essence of the game—for, in a way, it is a tremendous game—is that, if the spy is caught, and whatever truth is tortured out of him, he is totally disavowed by his own side.”
It is somewhere in between these two qualities that Fleming derived the personality of the spy who made him famous. “To begin with James Bond is not in fact a hero,” wrote Fleming in a 1962 article for The Sunday Times, “but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government and though he is a meld of various qualities I noted amongst secret service men and commandos in the last war, he is of course, a highly romanticised version of the true spy.”
Interestingly, at the same time as Fleming was writing his Bond novels, he bemoaned the fact that no one had yet written what he considered the “great” spy novel. He felt writers such as Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, and Graham Greene had gotten close but that no one had really captured the futility of a spy’s work, which he explained thus: “If, by some brilliant stroke of luck or craft, he discovers a vital truth, even if it is believed by his Service, it will almost certainly be disbelieved by his Government, because it is a Secret Service report.”
Without knowing it, Fleming was anticipating the emergence of a writer like John le Carré. Indeed, it is hard not to think of George Smiley when one reads Fleming’s description of a typical spy as “a lonely, nervous romantic controlled by an organisation which is hobbled by security, lack of funds, and official scepticism.”
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
