As against Casino Royale, a novel that he wrote from memory and the soul, Live and Let Die was a professional affair. Set in New York, Florida and Jamaica, its plot centred on the smuggling of pirate treasure and had at its heart Mr Big, a Jamaican gangster working for the Soviet Union, who used voodoo rituals to enforce his reign of terror. Agent 007 was despatched to investigate. Moving from the nightclubs of Harlem, to the swamps of Florida, to the Jamaican lair of Mr Big, the book glittered with exoticism. It included Felix Leiter, Bond’s stalwart CIA ally, who was thrown into a shark tank before being returned, half-dead, with the warning note ‘He disagreed with something that ate him’. It also featured ‘Solitaire’, the latest in a series of beautiful women whom 007 would rescue from jeopardy.2 The final scene, in which Bond successfully planted a limpet mine on Mr Big’s boat, before he and Solitaire were dragged behind a paravane across coral reefs, to be saved at the last moment by the mine’s detonation, was a masterpiece of sensation.
The book was researched with a diligence that would become Fleming’s hallmark. He had already explored Harlem’s nightlife on a trip to America in December 1952; information on gold doubloons and Spanish treasure was supplied by Spink, London’s premier coin dealers; and the scenes in Florida were taken from his own visit at the beginning of 1953. (As he wrote on the flyleaf of his personal copy, with an ill-disguised shudder, ‘St Petersburg [Florida] is just like I say it is’.) Jamaica, meanwhile, was all around him.
Although Fleming spent much of his time swimming the coral reefs off Goldeneye, the underwater sequences in Live and Let Die were given verisimilitude by a Sunday Times assignment shortly after his return to Britain. On 5 April 1953 Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘we are going on a secret mission to France for the next two weeks.’ The ‘secret mission’ was a fortnight with Jacques Cousteau who was investigating a Greek galley that had sunk in 250 BC off a small island near Marseilles. Cousteau was a daredevil after Fleming’s own heart. The father of scuba diving, and an indefatigable exponent of underwater exploration, he had a Gallic sense of style – his ship, Calypso, contained a one-ton stainless steel vat of wine from which each crew member drew at least a pint per day. The assignment excited Fleming tremendously, particularly when he persuaded Cousteau to let him join one of the dives. From a depth of twenty-five fathoms, while rescuing artefacts untouched for almost 2,000 years, he looked up through his mask at the sky. He saw the mercury ceiling of the sea, through which shone a bead of sapphire that was the sun and ‘wished I had done something like this before’.
A couple of months later, again working for the Sunday Times, he was at Creake Abbey in Norfolk with a team of Royal Engineers where, by accounts, he was the first person to use a mine detector (ERA No. 1, Mark 2, to be precise) as a tool for finding buried treasure. After a long, hot day that turned up thirty nails, a frying pan, an oil drum and a hundredweight of scrap iron he abandoned the search. He wasn’t bothered: it was the adventure that mattered. Quoting Mark Twain, he wrote, ‘“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for buried treasure,”. . . In me that particular boy has never died.’
August saw him in the French Pyrenees with pot-holer Norbert Casteret at the gulf of the Pierre St Martin cave. Casteret had made his name as a cave explorer in the 1920s and 1930s, and although in his sixties was still going strong. His day job was Public Notary, which probably influenced the single, cautious quote Fleming got out of him: ‘The whole affair is very dangerous.’ Six thousand feet above sea level, the Pierre St Martin cave lay in a spot which Fleming described as ‘mile-wide stony amphitheatre that might have been blasted by an atom bomb’. The place was not only desolate, but had a bad history. One of Casteret’s colleagues, Marcel Loubens, had fallen 1,000 feet to his death the previous year when his cable snapped. Casteret’s 1953 expedition achieved a record depth of 728 metres and opened about a mile and a half of new passages, but was unable to retrieve Loubens’ body. They commemorated him with a cross of phosphorescent paper and an inscription on the cavern wall. ‘It was the impression of this knowledge,’ Fleming wrote, ‘the awareness of the puny bodies enclosed in the mammoth viscera of this mountain that awoke in most of us, as we sat comfortably above on the surface of the world in the bright light among the Alpine flowers, a deep loathing for this great cave.’
If he had no love for ‘this gloomy antechamber to Hell’, the experience still stirred his sense of wonder. And wonder, alongside adventure, was what sparked his writing. But of the year’s events what really caught him was the devotion Cousteau commanded from his team. ‘Each dive is a new adventure,’ said one man. ‘And we will go anywhere with the Commandant.’ It was a perfect description of Bond’s attitude towards M – also of the relationship between Bond and his creator.
By now Fleming had established a routine that would set the pattern for his career. In January and February he wrote a novel at Goldeneye; over the following months he addressed Cape’s editorial points, while checking details and maybe doing more research; and towards the end of the year he reviewed the proofs. By this time he had amassed enough material for a new book and when he flew to Jamaica the creative process started anew.
TO JONATHAN CAPE
Fleming was so intrigued by Cousteau’s expedition that he skipped Casino Royale’s launch on 13 April 1953 in favour of a trip to the Mediterranean. He subsequently spent several weeks in France. But when he came home he wasted no time telling Cape what to do with the commodity he had on his hands.
8th May, 1953
Since you are the best publisher in England, and I am said to be the best thriller writer since Eric Ambler, I feel it would be very unadventurous if we did not set our sights high!
We certainly seem to have got off to a good start – I seem to have hit on a formula which attracts the critics, and you have produced a handsome book and have marketed it superbly.
I am, of course, delighted and I willingly accept the fact that my income from this first book will be slight.
But one does not often score a grand slam with the reviewers, and I think it most unlikely that I will ever do so again, and I am wondering whether we would not be well advised to spend some of the profits we have made on this book on advertising it solus.
I am perfectly prepared to bear a fair proportion of the cost, and I am by no means suggesting that your profits should be milked for my benefit alone, but I do think we have some very good ammunition which it would be a pity to waste if I am to progress into the Cheyney class,3 which is presumably our ambition.
Please do not say to me “I have heard that record before”. The field of thriller writers is extremely bare. There is a vacuum to be filled and I really do not see why we should not fill it. I shall be giving my next one to William Plomer next Tuesday, and I have a plot for a third in my head. So you will see that I am a very willing horse and I am only hoping that my stable will show an equal zest!
Shyly I enclose a draft of the sort of advertisement which I think would push the book far enough to create a really fine platform for the next one. When the sales start to droop, or whenever you think appropriate, should we not have a modest solus campaign using something on these lines?
There are no more good reviews to come. Despite certain complications, I think the “Mail” will mention it briefly and, if I can catch Max Beaverbrook in the right mood, he may do something, but we have now cleaned up on the leading serious book critics.
Everything you say about books following their own course and so forth is obviously true about anything in the class of THE CAINE MUTINY, but that is a solid work in the great tradition and will go on selling for years. This thriller business is a fly-by-night affair – a lightweight read with a probable selling of around 10,000 copies, unless it can be pushed into the Cheyney class.
Whether this can be done with your servant’s works in the next year or two remains to be seen, but these astonishingly handsome reviews do, I think,
weigh the odds sufficiently in our favour to have a go at the best seller stakes.
The Defence rests!
TO JONATHAN CAPE
A week later, having secured the offer of a three-book deal, Fleming threw emollience to the winds and told Cape what he thought of him and his royalties.
15th May, 1953
I am very mystified by your writing paper. Why does your typist have to type “from Jonathan Cape” over the address each time? And why don’t you have this warning engraved into the letter-head? However –
Alas, I cannot manage lunch on Wednesday. I am taking the day off to joust in the Old Etonian Golfing Society’s Annual meeting.
But perhaps I could come round at some convenient time – What about Tuesday afternoon? – when you could summon your cohorts, and we could all confer. Please let me know if this would suit.
It is very nice of you to offer me a contract for three future books and, in principle, I would like to be tied to your apron strings. I have had two tempting flies thrown over me obliquely by publishers who go in for this sort of book, and I would be much happier if I were out of temptation.
But, only yesterday, I was talking to a Cape author rather younger than myself, who had been granted a flat 20% on his first book with you.
This was a severe blow to my “amour propre”, which could only be healed by someone acting with equal generosity towards my own productions.4
The truth is that in order to free myself to write more books for you, I simply must earn more money from them. My profits from “Casino” will just about keep Ann in asparagus over Coronation week, and I am praying that something may be forthcoming from one of the reprint societies, or the films, to offset my meagre returns from what has turned out to be a successful book.
This is not a moan, or a petty display of ingratitude for your splendid handling of the book. It is just the usual statement of the author’s point of view.
Thank you for your helpful suggestions on the question of advertising. I am sure a careful campaign will be helpful to both of us. Would it really be fair for me to pay 50% of the cost? A comparison of our respective profits on a sale of, say, 10,000 copies, might, I hope, suggest to you that the ratio could be more generous to the author.
Whether we go for the higher, or lower, figure, I must leave to your judgement and your views on the whole question of advertising this type of book.
Michael Joseph’s [the publisher] remarks the other day were rather negative on this point!
When we meet, do you think we could examine suggested campaigns on the two levels, and your proposed text for the campaign?
I think the media we should include are THE BRIDGE WORLD or whichever is the leading card players’ journal, with a good solus position in THE FINANCIAL TIMES. The latter might be very helpful, but we would need to stock up the City booksellers before it appeared. If they appeared reluctant, perhaps we could venture to supply them on a “Sale or return” basis.
Although you may not know it, the name of my family firm in the City, Robert Fleming & Company, has magical properties.
THE MOTOR or THE AUTOCAR might also be useful if we plugged the motor-chase. Their readers eat this sort of stuff up.
Finally, I hope you think all these suggestions are helpful and that you do not despise this extra shoulder behind the wheel of this and future books.
But I do hope you will sympathise with my financial aspirations which, I am afraid, are serious.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER, 29 Linden Gardens W.2.
On the same day Fleming castigated Cape for his niggardliness William Plomer put the following critique of Live and Let Die in the post.
15th May, 1953
My Dear Ian,
The new book held this reader like a limpet-mine & the denouement was shattering. I have had palpitations & “tensions” from the moment I began the story & they show no sign of diminishing now that I’ve finished it.
If I’m any judge, this is just the stuff – sexy, violent, ingenious – most ingenious – & full of well-collected detail of all kinds. The Harlem nightclub – the scene of the fight among the fish-tanks – & the excellent stuff about St Petersburg, Fla. – these are among the things I enjoyed best. Obviously you’ll have to go through the typescript with your fine-tooth-comb for superficial grooming, e.g. I think you oughtn’t to use a word like “feral” or an expression like “sensual mouth” more than once in a book of this length.
What I particularly like is the Bond’s-eye-view of America. It is very rare nowadays to get any kind of book with fresh observation of the ordinary or extraordinary details of American life by an English eye. The whole thing is done with great dash & one believes in it most of the time as one believes in a highly disturbing dream. I shall now put in a glowing report on it, & I hope there won’t be too much Wet Blanketry in other quarters. It is now high time you got busy on the next book. . .
Live and Let Die seems to me just the title for this one – better than Paravane Lost, for instance.
There will be a heavy mortality among your “oldster” readers, from sheer agitation – I speak as an oldster myself, with one foot in the boneyard. Meanwhile I take off my hat to the Supersonic Buchan.
Wm.
FROM JONATHAN CAPE
24th July, 1953
Dear Ian,
The matter of the agreement for THE UNDERTAKER’S WIND5 seems to have been hung up. However, here is an agreement which I think you will find satisfactory. The riders which are typed in and attached will need to be initialled by you, also the deleted clauses. So will you besprinkle this with your initials, or get whoever signs on behalf of Glidrose to do so, sign the agreement and return to me. I will then send you a duplicate carrying my signature, and also duly initialled.
Publishing for you has its particularly interesting side. This agreement, and the one for CASINO ROYALE, will serve as historical exhibits when in a hundred years’ time the Editor produces a new edition of Mumby’s history of PUBLISHING AND BOOKSELLING.
Conning over your proposed agreement with The Macmillan Company [in the USA], I was interested to see the very modest scale of royalties which you are evidently prepared to accept from your American publishers. Perhaps it is not so easy to be tough at three thousand miles distance, and working through an agent.
To which Fleming gave a tart response on 29 July: ‘Yes, the royalties I accepted from Macmillans were very modest but then they have given me a present of $750 which is rather more, I guess, than I shall recoup on the English edition. If it is a success in America you will be surprised how tough I shall be over “Live and Let Die”!’
TO D. J. CROWTHER, ESQ., Messrs. Spink & Son Ltd., 5–7 King Street, St. James’s, S.W.1.
29th July, 1953
I am very sorry to trouble you again with my light-hearted affairs but I am afraid the names of the coins you chose for me will, after all, not fit in. The dates are wrong, due to a slip of my own.
Would you be very kind and choose me four more with the following characteristics: romantic or exciting names; gold, worth to the collector between £10 and £20; and minted between about 1550 and 1650. There should definitely be one minted around 1650.
In fact I could really use the ones you gave me if you will add to the number a suitable coin minted around 1650.
Please forgive me for bothering you like this. Your reward will be a thriller containing everything except the kitchen sink.
TO GEORGE H. HAWKES, ESQ., “Truth” and “Sportsman” Ltd., Keystone House, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, E.C.4.
Hawkes was the London representative of an Australian magazine publisher. Australia had recently hosted an atom-bomb test which, along with the toxic aftermath of the Korean War, may have led Fleming to suggest his books were an antidote to ‘the future of the world’. No less pertinent was his mention of America’s racial tensions.
22nd March, 1954
Thank you very much for your letter of the 19th, and I am delighted that you l
ike the book. From all accounts it is just what people want in order to keep their minds off the future of the world!
The American rights have sold handsomely, which is rather remarkable as they generally fight very shy of anything touching the colour problem, however remotely, and they don’t generally like to accept “Americanese” used by English writers.
I should think it’s just the stuff for your full-blooded readers and because of my eight years’ relationship with your Group, I have told Cape’s to refuse all other enquiries from Australia until your people have made up their minds.
By the way, the “Star” wished to make it their “Thriller of the Month” but stipulated that we should put on a paper binder to that effect, which Cape’s were not willing to do now that the book is already out for review and appearing Monday week.
TO VARIOUS, undated, 1954
A sample of the many letters that Fleming wrote to drum up publicity for the American edition of Live and Let Die.
TO MR. MALCOLM MUIR,6 Newsweek, 152 West 42nd Street, New York 36, N.Y.
Here is the second volume of my autobiography and I hope that you and Mrs. Muir will enjoy it.
If you feel it wouldn’t scarify the readers of NEWSWEEK I would be vastly grateful if it could find its way to your Literary Editor for mention if a dull week comes along.
I am sorry to keep missing you when I come through New York, but I hope I will catch up with both of you again this year.
TO MRS. FLEUR GARDINER COWLES,7 Cowles Syndicate, 488 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N.Y.
Here is the second volume of my collected works and you were so sweet about giving CASINO ROYALE a fine send off in LOOK that I wonder if you would continue to make my fame and fortune by passing LIVE AND LET DIE with your blessing, to the Literary Editor.
If not, I should be proud to have the book go into that very handsome waste paper basket of yours.
TO RT. HON. SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, K.G., Chartwell, Westerham, Kent
The Man with the Golden Typewriter Page 4
