Damn, the covers on some of these first editions of the original James Bond novels are wicked cool. But while I have a bit of the collector in me, the price range on Ian Fleming first editions puts them way out of my league. Do you have $3,500 lying around for a first run of Diamonds Are Forever? Hey, how about 30 thousand sterling for a complete set? That’s only a little more than 58 thousand bushbucks. Not for me, I’m afraid. Not unless I get really good at baccarat.
The centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth is coming up later this month, and as should be expected the Brit publications are outdoing themselves with coverage. The Guardian has this nice rundown of the best villains from Fleming’s James Bond novels (as opposed to those in the films, though there is some overlap). This nifty Charlie Higson piece compares Fleming with his creation:
Fleming enjoyed gambling, but was cautious and none too successful. He loved fast, powerful cars, but, unlike Bond, was stopped for speeding in the United States, and his most serious accident was when he reversed into a milk float. So did he share Bond’s taste in food? The books are filled with mouth-watering descriptions of lavish and exotic meals, but Fleming was a conservative and undiscerning eater who liked nothing more than a plate of scrambled eggs. His tastes in women were closer to Bond’s. Fleming was certainly a womaniser, charming and witty but callous. Ben Macintyre quotes one of his conquests as saying: “For Ian women were like fishcakes. Mind you, he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.”
Like Bond he had a fear of commitment and marriage, preferring the safety of affairs with other men’s wives, and, like Bond, he eventually caved in and got spliced. But whereas Bond’s wife, Tracy (for once his genius with names let him down), is conveniently killed on their honeymoon, Fleming stayed married to the end of his life – though it was a troubled, plate-throwing kind of a marriage. In fact, it was probably the shock of getting married that compelled him to finally get around to writing the books he’d had knocking around in his head for some years. Soon after the wedding he decamped to Goldeneye, his villa in Jamaica, and wrote Casino Royale in about five weeks, pausing only to go snorkelling, have a smoke and down a cocktail, though not necessarily all at the same time. Like Bond, Fleming drank and smoked heavily, but he felt the effects most acutely, whereas there are only two recorded hangovers in all of the 14 books, despite Bond’s staggering consumption of booze. The first comes in Casino Royale, when, after a heavy night at the gaming tables, Bond sighs “Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again!” After this Fleming obviously decided that Bond’s appeal was that he could live the life his readers dreamed about without suffering any ill effects.
Goldfinger has the distinction of being not just one of the better Fleming novels, but also the best of the movies. Unfortunately, the Bond novel I started with was . . .
. . . You Only Live Twice, the worst of the Fleming books and the worst of the initial Sean Connery flicks, though each is terrible in its own highly distinctive way. I was barely 10 years old when the movie came out, but that was the perfect age to see one’s first James Bond movie. A rocket base hidden inside a volcano? A steel-jawed spaceship that captured space capsules in orbit? A master villain who dropped incompetent subordinates into a decorative tank full of piranhas? What’s not for a 10-year-old boy to love? It hardly mattered that the plot was ridiculous and Sean Connery was visibly bored in many of his scenes.
So I paid my 75 cents for the paperback of Fleming’s novel and learned the hard way about how little the movies had to do with the novels, and how the chronology was screwed around. After all, Fleming introduced Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Thunderball, had him kill off Bond’s new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, then had Blofeld die at Bond’s hands following a bloody swordfight in You Only Live Twice. Instead of the cool stuff from the movie, the novel had Bond grieving for his murdered wife and losing his grip on his job. After a long, wandering introduction and midsection, the novel picked up steam as Bond infiltrated the Japanese hideout of Dr. Shatterhand and discovered his suicide garden of poisonous plants (where the piranha pool also figures) but it was all a bit much for a 10-year-old.
I find that with most people, the first James Bond novel they’ve read is usually their favorite. After my bad experience with You Only Live Twice, I was well into my thirties before I tried Fleming again. I decided to work through the series in sequence, and while I enjoyed the increasingly loopy plotting and characterization in the books and stories, I still prefer the relatively low key Casino Royale.
I dunno about you, but I think the opening credits of the recent film version of Casino Royale very knowingly incorporate elements of the jacket design, which Fleming himself suggested to his publisher.
