The Man with the Golden Typewriter

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  Presumably this means it is already impeccable.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  29th September, 1952

  Dear Jonathan,

  Many thanks for your letter of September 22nd, although it casts rather a cold douche on my adventurous spirit.

  I suggested a first printing of ten thousand because it was a figure you agreed to when we discussed the point.

  My own feeling is that the life of a book of this sort is not long, and that it is most important to make the maximum use of any initial impulse it may get from reviews.

  For various reasons this book should be reviewed far more heavily than most and I am naturally anxious that this send-off should not be wasted.

  I agree with you that sale or return is not satisfactory, but I think we can rely on Smith’s displaying the book well, which I expect you will agree is very important.

  Anyway, when the time comes I am sure you will be as anxious as I to get another edition printed very quickly if the initial reception appears to be favourable.

  On the subject of American publication, Harcourt Brace are very anxious to see the manuscript, as a result of their Mr Reynal hearing of it from a friend of mine.

  Assuming that Scribners are not the right publishers for it in Jamaica, do you think Harcourt Brace would be right? I am not quite clear why serial and film rights should be handled through your office. What is the object of this? And I am not quite clear what “joint control” means in your paragraph five.

  Personally, I should have thought that a flat 10% to the publisher on all rights would be fair.

  I don’t want to have to employ an agent,8 although I am everywhere advised to do so and, for the sake of happy relations between us and an absence of subsequent argument, I hope you will agree to a round figure.

  Regarding your paragraph six, whether I am in England or not, I am constantly available by cable through my office.

  I should think I will be back in England by about March 20th. Will that allow sufficient time for arranging reviews, etc. if publication date is April 15th?

  Perhaps we should discuss this point before I leave for Jamaica.

  I shall look forward to tossing for the eighteen copies, and I only hope your Trade Manager is as pretty as your secretary!

  About the next book, so be it.

  So far as our contract is concerned, I shall ask you to sign this with the company which owns the copyright and other rights of this book and I will send you its name in a few days’ time.

  I am this company and will be signing for the company, so it is merely a question of adjusting the wording of the contract.9

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  20th October, 1952

  Dear Jonathan,

  If you don’t think my chapter headings are terribly old-fashioned, I will do my best to provide some when I can get my duplicate typescript back. Unfortunately Paul Gallico10 has borrowed it with Hollywood in mind and I shall probably not see it back before the end of the week.

  I am not in favour of reducing the price of the book to 10/6d. Hardly a novel is published today under 12/6d. and I think it would be a mistake for your first “thriller” to seem to be given away. Moreover, it would whittle down still further my already meagre financial expectations from the book.

  I have designed a jacket of exquisite symmetry and absolute chastity and I am using my visual features studio here to prepare the finished product which should be ready today. When it is I will speak to Michael Howard.

  I bet your other authors don’t work as hard for you as I do.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  21st October, 1952

  Dear Jonathan,

  I have arranged to see Michael Howard on Friday afternoon and in the meantime here is a possible jacket.

  I think the idea is good, namely that the nine of hearts which plays such an important part in the book should provide the basic design and that the meaning of this card in gypsy lore should appear somewhere, as it is also perhaps appropriate to the general theme of the book. I also like the colour scheme.

  On the other hand, the hearts as shown are a little too lush and perhaps too heavily outweigh the Fry’s Decorated which I have used for the type.11

  I have shown it to Leonard Russell12 who is delighted with it, but suggests that the title should be made much stronger and the hearts correspondingly reduced. We both think the ribbon design round the central heart could be improved.

  I have also found the original draft of the book and have done some chapter headings from it. On the whole I think your idea of using them is a good one.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  29th October, 1952

  Paul Gallico asked to read the manuscript and here is his verdict which he has sent from Rome:-

  “The book is a knockout. I thought I had written a couple of pretty fair torture scenes in my day, but yours beats anything I ever read. Wow!

  It’s a swell thriller, and I am confirmed in what I told you at the Savoy that it is more than just a thriller and deserves a better publisher than just one known for the thriller-type of book. I am now talking of U.S. publishers. It goes in frankness and detail far beyond any American-type thriller and could have a big sale.

  May I write to Swanson13 in Hollywood about it? I can tell him from earnest conviction that here is a rip-snorter which would make a marvellous movie. No-one has EVER had the bright idea to couple gambling with espionage and economic sabotage and this gimmick of yours would film marvellously. Yeow, what tensions can be built up for that game of baccarat. It’s a hell of a scene and you’ve done a first-class job. My heartfelt congratulations. Get out of that office, kid, and write because you can.

  Am returning the MSS to you under separate cover.”

  Perhaps you will find this encouraging.

  If you agree, I suggest we choose Harcourt Brace as the first possible American publisher. Is there any news of their Mr Reynal arriving?

  I had a most helpful conversation with your excellent Mr Michael Howard and I am falling in with his various suggestions for the jacket and so forth.

  I very much like the specimen pages and I am much impressed that page proofs can be expected within a few weeks.

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD, 30 Bedford Square, London, W.C.1.

  Casino Royale came out on 13 April (not, as Fleming had hoped, on 15 April to coincide with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II), an Easter launch that would set the pattern for all future Bond books. The first print run of 5,000 copies sold out within a month, and as Cape geared up for a second run of 2,000 (which went equally swiftly) Fleming exhorted them to print even more.

  22nd April, 1953

  Dear Mr Howard,

  In the course of the innumerable editions of “Casino Royale” which will now, I presume, flow from your presses, could you please correct a rather attractive misprint on page 96, line 13, and make the “Ace of Spaces” into the “Ace of Spades”?

  Incidentally, although I know this won’t wring anybody’s withers, a friend of mine told me this afternoon that he had tried three bookshops, including Hatchards, and that they had all run out of the book.

  Of course, it is better this way than that their shelves should be bulging with unsaleable dozens but, as I told Jonathan, obviously it is no good getting plenty of reviews if the book is not available.

  So please tell Jonathan with my compliments, that he might as well swallow his pride and print the 10,000 he originally said he would.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  3rd June, 1953

  Dear Jonathan,

  Thank you very much for your letter of May 29th.

  I am very surprised to hear you have already spent £200 on advertising “Casino Royale”. Could you tell me how this is accounted for, as I have only seen two solus advertisements and brief mention amongst other Cape books.

  Regarding further advertising, I simply don’t think it is fair to ask me to go fifty-fifty.

  I accepted your cut in my royalties under 10,000
copies. I accepted your reduction in the price of the book. And I accepted the fact that you halved the print from the original 10,000 agreed.

  Is it not now your turn to be generous, particularly as you say in your letter of May 14th that you think that the splash of advertising might now be useful?

  Regarding the next book, I am having twenty-percents dangled in front of my eyes from another quarter which has not even read the manuscript. I expect this is what usually happens in the publishing world when a new author has an initial success, but it will be obvious to you that I cannot ignore such terms if I intend to make money out of writing books.

  To be specific, I have in mind 15% to 5,000 copies, and 20% thereafter.

  Perhaps we could have a final discussion on the problem before I leave on June 11th.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  9th June, 1953

  Dear Jonathan,

  Many thanks for your letter of June 8th, and I am so sorry that the doctors are trying to get their claws on you. Personally I should have said that you were as strong as the Cape of Good Hope, and I am sure they will also agree with me after examining the structure.

  Thank you very much for the details of the “Casino” advertising. As to the future, I will be happy to put up £60 if you will put up £140.

  If this is acceptable to you, perhaps some sort of a scheme and some text could be prepared to try and get the book moving again before everyone goes away in August.

  Regarding the new book, I am terribly sorry but I am afraid I must remain adamant on 15% to 5000 and 20% thereafter. I would certainly agree to you having the first offer of the subsequent book, but I could not commit my muse further than that.

  I shall quite understand if you feel that these terms are not acceptable to your firm, and I can assure you that there will be no hard feelings on my side if you turn them down.

  With very best wishes for an early escape from the London Clinic, where I can only tell you there was one pretty nurse in 1935. Alas, she will be twenty years older by now, but perhaps there are some new recruits.

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  6th October, 1953

  Many thanks for your royalty report for CASINO ROYALE.

  In due course would you please ask the Accountant to make these and all other future cheques out in the name of Glidrose Productions Limited and send them to me at 16 Victoria Square.14

  Incidentally, I must come over sometime and toss your Sales Manager double or quits on those extra copies, and see if I can’t reduce the debt balance by a few shillings.

  FROM JONATHAN CAPE

  21st October, 1953

  Dear Ian,

  I understand that you and Michael Howard matched each other on Friday afternoon to see who should pay for the first eighteen copies of CASINO ROYALE which you bought. I haven’t heard where the gambling took place, but it would be fitting if it was in the Café Royal, but as it was in the afternoon it would probably be the wrong time. I hope such an operation, which is entirely against my principles, did not take place in the hallowed precincts of Thirty Bedford Square! I don’t know on what basis you were tossing, but Michael tells me that it resulted in a cost to you of eight more copies than you actually had. It has been suggested by Michael Howard that you and David [Cape] might have a poker game when it comes to charging your copies of LIVE AND LET DIE.15 I am as much against this as I am against any other form of gambling. It goes entirely against my Quaker origins. However, I realise that time moves on and things are not what they were. O tempore! O mores!

  TO JONATHAN CAPE

  28th October, 1953

  When I think how you fought against my suggestion that I should toss your firm double or quits for the author’s copies of CASINO, I wonder you are not ashamed to accept those eight copies!

  There is something mysterious about the way the law of averages was set at naught in the office of Michael Howard, and the next time I come over to your gaming rooms in Bedford Square I shall bring my own coin.

  TO AL HART, The Macmillan Company, New York

  Al Hart, Fleming’s editor at Macmillan,16 was concerned about the book’s more explicit passages.

  27th November, 1953

  On the whole you have been kinder to me than Naomi [Burton]. We had a splendid argument about the relative impropriety attached to the front and back of a woman. She was sweet but firm and I have been as pliant in her shapely hands as I have been in your calloused ones.

  It was fine to see you and to take up so much of your time to get answers to my idle questions.

  Alas, I shall only be in New York for, at the most, three days in January, but I will get in touch and hand over the strings of my promotion machine.

  TO AL HART

  7th December, 1953

  Many thanks for your note and in return I am making you a present of the attached letter from Paul Gallico who, as you can see, gives us two or three splendid quotes, of which “the best gambling thriller I have ever read” and “fabulously exciting” seem the most desirable words.

  I also enclose for you to retain the letters to members of my “apparatus”.

  I have addressed these where I was able to do so but perhaps your secretary could fill in the gaps.

  These are intended to be retained by you and then forwarded with a copy of the book to the addresses early in March or as appropriate.

  I fancy most of them will come off so I hope you will ensure that the machine doesn’t start working until there are sufficient copies on the bookstalls, since I imagine that in America as here people’s memories are apt to be short. I should be sending you on another one to the News Week people in a day or so.

  I am sure you have never had an author who takes so much trouble over such a puny masterpiece!

  I am longing to see a proof of the cover which sounds most exciting. Alas, I shall not now be coming through in January so it would be angelic if you would put one into the post for me.

  You are very lucky indeed having a newspaper strike and I only hope you don’t have a bookstall strike around March.

  TO N. LINGEMAN, ESQ., 14 Eaton Terrace, s.w.1.

  ‘Being entirely bi-lingual,’ wrote Mr Lingeman, ‘I feel like starting a private war against the all too prevalent use of incorrect French terms in English writing.’ He raised several matters, one of which concerned a gangster who said ‘Allez!’ instead of ‘Allez-y!’ or the more colloquial ‘Vas-y!’. Separately, he wanted to know if Fleming had worked alongside William Stephenson17 during the war.

  18th January, 1956

  Thank you very much for your letter of January 15th and I am delighted that you and your wife enjoyed the books.

  I quite agree with you about accuracy in foreign languages and I pride myself on being a stickler on all matters of factual detail. It did occur to me to write “allez-y” but I thought this a trifle prosy in the mouth of this tough character. I thought he would dispense with the “y” and just bark out the one word. Perhaps I was wrong but I gave thought to the question.

  Yes, I was a frequent visitor to Rockefeller Centre during the war. As a matter of fact I am flying off to New York this afternoon and shall be seeing “Little Bill” tomorrow or the next day.

  TO F. A. TAYLOR, ESQ., Landfall, Instow, Nr. Bideford, N. Devon

  Another francophone reader wrote to advise Fleming that, rather vitally, he had got the title wrong.

  3rd April, 1959

  Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me and I can see you are a stickler for the French language.

  So am I.

  The points you make are legitimate but, to take “Casino Royale” first, the name of the town was Royale les Eaux and the owners decided to use the final ‘e’ so as to identify the casino with its town. This was deliberate.

  Crime de la Crime was said by an illiterate gangster and is a clumsy joke of his on the expression Crème de la Crème. If he had said crime du crime it would have meant equally little and the joke would not have come off.

 
But thank you nevertheless for the mild rap over the knuckles.

  2

  Live and Let Die

  ‘You should clear a wide space round January 16th–20th and write the dates in toothpaste on your shaving mirror,’ Fleming told his friend Ivar Bryce. ‘We shall be flying over and then taking the Silver Meteor on the night of the 20th to St Petersburg, Florida, where I want to inspect a live worm factory. We then fly from Tampa to Jamaica.’ Work on the second Bond novel had begun in earnest.

  Fleming was on a roll at the start of 1953. His marriage was still fresh, he had an infant son and the family had recently moved into a new London home, 16 Victoria Square. He was holding down a steady job at the Sunday Times. He ran his own publishing company, Queen Anne Press. And, best of all, in James Bond he had found an outlet for both his imagination and his restless ambition.

  The novelist Michael Arlen had advised him not to hesitate: ‘write your second book before you see the reviews of the first. Casino Royale is good but the reviewers may damn it and take the heart out of you.’ Heeding his words, Fleming completed Live and Let Die before its predecessor had even been published. As with Casino Royale, he wrote it in his Jamaican home, Goldeneye, and did so with such discipline that he managed to cram it into the gaps of his wife’s busy social calendar. The island was awash with literary and artistic grandees that year, but while Fleming could handle a certain amount of socialising he resented any disruption to his writing schedule. Not only did Ann’s father and his new wife come to stay, but so did the artist Lucian Freud who arrived in pursuit of his latest inamorata armed with little more than a ten shilling note. His capital being deemed insufficient by the port authorities, he was permitted entry only on Fleming’s intervention.

  ‘Ian’s temper quite remarkable considering the heat and provocation,’ Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh after they had stood surety for Freud to get through immigration. She described their stay as ‘a time of sunshine, black slaves, and solitude save for occasional intrusions by celebrities’. Their friend Peter Quennell,1 who wasn’t there, imagined it more accurately: ‘The Commander groans quietly under the horror of his unwanted guests.’ Nevertheless, Fleming typed on resolutely and when he and Ann returned to London in March he had the first draft in his briefcase.