The Man with the Golden Typewriter

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  By this time the first Bond film, Dr No, was underway, and on Fleming’s recommendation the producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had hired Boothroyd as firearms consultant. For the launch party in Pinewood Studios there was talk of Boothroyd, Fleming, Sean Connery and, strangely, the entertainer Michael Bentine, erstwhile member of The Goon Show, staging a gunfight. Boothroyd offered to supply the weapons and (live) ammunition but, come the day, wiser counsel prevailed.

  Not that Fleming had much strength for that kind of shenanigans anyway. His health was deteriorating and his enthusiasm for Bond, once so energetic, was beginning to flag. The two men kept up an intermittent exchange, the chatty role being sustained by Boothroyd who informed Fleming of details such as his purchase of a ‘Queen Anne bureau with all the usual secret hidey holes. This piece of quite delightful furniture will always serve as a most pleasant reminder of our friendship.’ Fleming’s letters, on the other hand became terser and increasingly it was Beryl Griffie-Williams who took the strain. She had been privy to much of the conversation and had become as fascinated with Boothroyd’s expertise as her employer. When Fleming died in 1964 the letters stopped. Boothroyd outlived him by two decades.

  8

  Dr No

  In April 1956 Fleming wrote a series of travel articles for the Sunday Times, one of which opened with a typically carpe diem sentiment: ‘After the age of forty, time begins to become important, and one is inclined to say, “Yes” to every experience.’ The experience he had in mind was an expedition to the Bahamian island of Inagua, organised by Ivar Bryce, to study the world’s largest population of flamingos. The birds were dramatic enough, but what really caught Fleming’s imagination was the 100-square-mile lake in which they lived – a shallow, mangrove-fringed expanse ‘the colour of a corpse’, which exuded a miasma of rotten-egg decay – and the secluded, semi-feudal life of Inagua’s 1,000-strong population. The only source of employment was a salt works, overseen by a European family who guarded their fiefdom with vigour. ‘It is a hideous island,’ he wrote, ‘and nobody in his senses ever goes near the place.’ The last time Inagua had been surveyed was 1916, since when it had dropped off the bureaucratic map. Could there be a better villain’s lair?

  Initially, he used the setting as a basis for a TV script, James Gunn – Secret Agent, which he submitted to American producer Henry Morgenthau III in September 1956. When Morgenthau turned the script down, he reworked it as a novel. The plot centred on a remote, swampy Caribbean island owned by Dr Julius No, a secretive man of German/Chinese extraction who owned a guano-exporting business. Visitors were discouraged, and local fishermen returned ashen-faced, with tales of a fire-breathing dragon. Ornithologists, however, were concerned that Dr No’s activities were destroying native bird colonies. Complaints from the Audubon Society prompted an investigation, and when several members of the Secret Service’s Jamaican office were subsequently murdered, Bond was put on the job.

  It was Fleming’s most fantastical offering to date – also one of the most exciting. Dr No was an over-the-top villain in the pay of the Soviets who wore glass contact lenses (then something of a rarity), had his heart on the wrong side of his body (even more so) and was equipped with steel claws instead of hands. Behind his cover as a guano magnate, he ran a luxuriously appointed underground bunker that doubled as a jamming station to bring down American test missiles. Bond and his cohorts – Quarrel, a stout-hearted Cayman Islander; and Honeychile Rider, the abused, broken-nosed orphan of a plantation family – faced perils ranging from poisonous centipedes to flame-throwing marsh buggies. It culminated in a series of dramatic scenes in which Honeychile was pinned to a beach to be eaten by crabs, while Bond faced a sadistic obstacle course that involved crawling through a metal tube filled with tarantulas before being vented into a lagoon containing a giant squid. Having survived all of which, 007 smothered Dr No under a pile of guano.

  When Fleming flew to Jamaica in January 1957, he did so with a feeling of satisfaction. Not only did he have a solid outline for his book, but he had by now achieved such a degree of fame that in December 1956, when Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, whose wife Clarissa was a friend of Ann, sought somewhere to recuperate after the Suez Crisis, it was Goldeneye that came to mind. Ever the patriot, Fleming accepted without demur.

  Ann, however, was beginning to find Jamaica awkward. She disliked flying and travelled separately with Caspar by ship. The journey took eleven days, eight of which were spent in a gale. ‘We were tilted at the most acute angle,’ she wrote, ‘and my curtains were horizontal with the ceiling.’ As for the lower decks, they were, ‘awash with waves and broken glass and blood’. When she finally docked it didn’t help to find that Fleming was having (or attempting to have) an affair with a neighbour, Blanche Blackwell.1 Ann left early, after a show of discordance which imprinted itself so forcibly on Noël Coward’s mind that he wrote a play about it.2

  Dismayed but undeterred, Fleming continued his research. In March he visited the Cayman Islands, primarily to hunt for seashells, which he collected in an enjoyably amateur fashion, but also to see first hand the home of Quarrel. All this he used for another series of Sunday Times articles, which included a fascinating digression on the history of the giant squid. Apparently, one such specimen had been engaged in mid-Atlantic combat by the French battleship Alecton in 1869. The ship fired at it repeatedly, ‘but her cannon-balls traversed the glutinous mass without causing vital injury’. When the crew looped it with a line, the creature fell in two. From the chunk they managed to haul aboard they estimated its total weight at two tons.

  Barely had he returned home than in April he was off again, this time to Tangier, having committed himself to a series of articles on diamond smuggling for the Sunday Times. It was a subject dear to his heart and he took to it enthusiastically. He had the backing of Sir Percy Sillitoe, formerly head of MI5 but now advising De Beers, and was working with a South African agent, John Collard, to whom he assigned the pseudonym John Blaize. He wasn’t impressed by Tangier: it was raining when he arrived and continued to do so throughout his two-week stay. Nor did he think much of either the locals or the expat community whom he described in a letter to Ann as mostly, ‘buggers [who] do absolutely nothing all day long but complain about each other and arrange flowers’. Whereupon, having complained about them a bit more, he arranged three dozen roses in his bedroom and made the best he could of this famously louche destination.

  Between 1923 and 1956 Tangier had been an International City, outside the jurisdiction of any particular state, and as such had become a byword for every shade of murky dealing and home to Europe’s escapists and drifters. He caught up with David Herbert, a footloose socialite who had worked as a spy in Morocco during World War Two, and met Gavin Young, orientalist and sometime member of MI6, whom he later steered towards a successful career in journalism and travel writing. He also consorted with the columnist Alistair Forbes, whose career with the Sunday Despatch was coming to a premature close. But what drew him most was the thieves’ kitchen of Socco Chico, ‘[where] crooks and smugglers and dope peddlers congregate, and a pretty villainous bunch they are too’. He was impressed, too, by a visit with Collard to the Atlantic coast where he encountered a forest of radio masts – one of the world’s great communication hubs – where he ‘could imagine the air above us filled with whispering voices’ and where, bizarrely, the beach was carpeted with a shoal of Portuguese men o’ war blown ashore by a gale.

  Fleming’s high hopes did not survive the gauntlet of officialdom. By the time Collard, De Beers and Sir Percy had wielded their blue pencils his manuscript had lost much of its vim. The Diamond Smugglers was published by Cape in November 1957, to considerable acclaim (and an offer of £12,500 from Rank for the film rights) but Fleming was disappointed. In his privately bound copy of the book he wrote, ‘It is adequate journalism but a poor book and necessarily rather “contrived” though the facts are true’, adding gloomily, ‘It was a good story unti
l all the possible libel was cut out.’

  Nevertheless, it had been an extraordinary year. In June he had been invited to play in a golf tournament that paired professionals with celebrity amateurs. It was the first of its kind and to his astonishment he played with that year’s British Open winner, Peter Thomson, and acquitted himself admirably. The triumph was exquisite. Describing the occasion for the Sunday Times, he wrote: ‘Those treacherous crocodiles, my friends, who had come to laugh at my discomfiture, changed their tune. Now they edged up and whispered that my handicap would have to be reduced at Sandwich. I brushed them aside. The sun was shining, the course was beautiful. What fun it was playing with the Open Champion!’

  Then, in November, he sat alongside his mother during a remarkable court action that saw the ageing but still beautiful Eve being sued by an only slightly younger Parsi lady, Bapsy Pavry, over the affections of the decrepit Marquis of Winchester. The judge thought both of them silly but ruled in Eve’s favour. Press photographers were on hand to capture the defendant and her famous son as they emerged from the Royal Courts of Justice.

  In the same month he was invited by the Sunday Times to produce a series of articles about the world’s exciting places. It was right up his street and he accepted at once, thus laying the foundations for his future travel book Thrilling Cities. Marital difficulties aside, the sun was indeed shining on him and, as far as his writing career was concerned, the course seemed beautiful. Furthermore, he had an idea for his next novel. It involved gold.

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD

  Replying to Howard from Goldeneye on Richard Chopping’s final dust jacket for From Russia with Love, Fleming was impressed.

  Feb 4 – perhaps [sic]

  My dear Michael,

  I think the jacket’s really splendid. Many thanks & congratulations. We ought to win some sort of a prize.

  Have done nearly 40,000 of No 6. No idea what it’s like. Set near Jamaica, called DOCTOR NO, I think. A simple tale. It shouldn’t be longer than 60, you’ll be glad to hear.

  The policemen stationed round the property for the Edens have carved “WELCOME SIR ANTHONY” on all my trees. Who do I sue?

  Greetings to all I’m working for in Bed. Sq.

  Any news of anything?

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD

  Howard did indeed have news – to whit, Fleming’s books had sold more than a million copies worldwide.

  20th Feb, 1957

  Dear Michael,

  Many thanks for your advices.

  For your ads, how about:-

  “IAN FLEMING has written 4 books in 4 years. They have sold over one million copies in the English language. They have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese & URDU.

  No. 5 is called FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (It will probably not be translated into Russian). Jonathan Cape etc.”

  Just my ego at work! Al Hart has sold the Chinese, Thai & Urdu rights! With his & paperback figures & yours & world books & Pan – well over the mill!

  However.

  Back about March 14. One more chapter of No to go!

  Forgive scrawl.

  TO ANN, from the Hotel El Minzah, Tangier

  In a gossip-strewn missive Fleming gave his wife the lowdown on Tangier and his progress on The Diamond Smugglers. The emphasis on ‘pansies’ and ‘buggers’ possibly reflects more the milieu in which Ann moved – as did Fleming to a lesser extent – rather than any specific homophobia.

  Saturday [Easter 1957]

  My precious,

  Your letters have been lovely and have sustained me here. I simply couldn’t write before because my brains have been boiling over with writing about five thousand words a day – a terrific job. But it has been very exciting and the story is sensational – at least I think so. Please don’t say a word about it or we may be stopped publishing.

  This is a pretty dreadful place and the weather has been ghastly, freezing cold and constant wind. The paint is peeling off the town and the streets are running with spit and pee and worse. The Arabs are filthy people and hate all Europeans. My life has revolved around a place called Dean’s Bar, a sort of mixture between Wiltons and the porter’s lodge at Whites. There’s nothing but pansies and I have been fresh meat for them. David [Herbert] is a sort of Queen Mum. He calls himself Lord Herbert and has that in the telephone book. Says he can’t get them to change it as they don’t understand ‘honourable’. He’s been very sweet to me but I’m fed up with buggers. Jimmy Smith has arrived with Diana Campbell-Gray and they are staying with David and getting thoroughly depressed by the weather and the stagnation. Francis Bacon is due next week to live with his pansy pianist friend who plays at a bogus Russian restaurant. Otherwise there is Ali [Forbes] who lives secretively with his girl and is rarely seen. He has been a solace to me and we have had meals and walks. He knows he can’t write and asks me how to. Rather pathetic. He is very frank about his disabilities but desperately lazy and the only hope for him is to marry a rich woman. He knows he is unemployable. He’s now being recalled to London for ‘consultations’ and fears the worst. There’s a new editor and Eade has resigned. He’s going next Tuesday. He’s really got a sort of death wish about his job. The girl is very beautiful – a softer Barbara [Skelton] and calls him ‘Papa’. [. . .] They have a very nice modern flat looking over the harbour and I was very privileged to be invited there for drinks. He’s an endearing but hopeless character. I suggested he should put an advertisement in The Times: ‘Experienced nest-fowler offers services. Can make jokes and drive car into walls.’

  My Zulu [Collard] is an exceedingly nice man and a great boon. The town is madly intrigued by us and we have laid a false trail about a coelacanth. We even thought of carrying around a mysterious tin canister into which he would drop worms from time to time. Even my secretary, a good girl with a drunken nose, is besieged with enquiries about us. We go for immense walks along the wet windy beaches and I collect shells while he stamps on the Portuguese men of war that litter the beaches. They make a loud bang.3 Some nice shells including small Venus Ears . . . [remainder lost].

  TO WILLIAM PLOMER

  14th March, 1957

  I am now back having completed a further stint on the behalf of English literature. It will require a great deal of tidying up before it is in adequate shape for your glazing eyes, but I will keep you informed of progress so that you can set aside the necessary two or three hours in the early summer.

  Meanwhile, I came across this book in America and, as it comes from an obscure publisher, it occurred to me that it might have been missed over here.

  The stories have a nice macabre touch in many cases but some suffer from the naivete which you will know so well from your Japanese existence.

  On the other hand, it might get by as a curiosity and I told Michael Howard I would send you my copy, which herewith.

  Please let us have lunch almost immediately.

  TO WILLIAM PLOMER

  Having warned Plomer that Dr No would shortly be upon him, he now handed in the MS for The Diamond Smugglers, which he provisionally titled The Diamond Spy.

  29th April, 1957

  As I promised you in Lewes, here is another book for you to read.

  It isn’t very long – only about 40,000 words – but it will be bolstered up with plenty of dramatic photographs, maps, photostatic documents, etc.

  There is no hurry for this so far as Capes are concerned, but what I really want, of course, is your view of the stuff.

  It hasn’t been read here yet but will be this week, and the plan is that we should serialise it in September.

  This would allow Capes, if they were interested, to bring it out in time for Christmas, though probably not till early November as we would be wanting a clear run with it. Perhaps, in the circumstances, Capes would rather hold it over until later.

  Anyway, please send me one of your enchanting judgments as soon as you can.

  Incidentally, it is all absolutely true with the exception of the man’s name,
and it is very important that we should say nothing about it until September as we don’t want to have an injunction slapped on us by De Beers or anyone else, so could you please ask the others also to keep the whole project under their hats whether they decide to publish it or not.

  See you soon I hope.

  TO WILLIAM PLOMER

  7th May, 1957

  A thousand thanks for the fat and cheering bulletin. How extraordinary about the Fugu. I must go to my Plomer shelf and look up the reference. Presumably you did not consume the sex glands.

  All your comments on The Diamond Spy are noted and particularly the libel points which, of course, we will go into very carefully. I have already marked two passages for libel and I discussed them yesterday with Blaize [Collard] who is now reading the typescript with his old friend and booby, Sillitoe.

  Incidentally, Blaize had a very unfortunate time at Monte Carlo. I gave him an infallible system which nearly broke him and when he did get a number “en plein” a French tart pinched his stake and he practically started a riot.

  But curiously enough he is exactly as I have described him and an extraordinarily nice man.

  I will keep your factory informed of progress with the series but you might ask them to let me have the typescript back as soon as possible as I shall need it to work on pretty thoroughly from now on.

  My other opusculum will be coming to you around the end of this month – I hope not too soon to build up an allergy.

  TO H. W. VALLANCE LODGE, ESQ., 4, Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.

  Having transferred his literary rights to Glidrose, Fleming sought to offload as many expenses as possible on to the company. In a letter to his accountant he tried, rather wildly, to explain why his latest sports car should qualify as a tax-deductible item.

  12th June, 1957

  Many thanks for your message and here is some ammunition which you may or may not care to use in reply to the Inspector of Taxes.