© Mark O'Connell / 2014With Blackwell Rum on standby (a prized brand aptly produced by the owner of the Goldeneye estate, Chris Blackwell), Matthew Parker’s lush tome Goldeneye – Where Bond Was Born : Ian Fleming’s Jamaica has been launched in fine Caribbean style. Charting the physical, political, literary and personal influences of how Jamaica and the Goldeneye estate helped shape Fleming’s writing – in particular James Bond 007 – Goldeneye – Where Bond Was Born is a rich, nuanced, highly researched and clever work. It is most accessible at the same time as being deeply complex and an intelligent survey of an island, an empire, a man, his loves and a literary and cinematic sensation.

Author Matthew Parker proudly window-shopping. © Mark O’Connell / 2014

Pitched up at London’s Daunt Books – and surrounded by fiction and non-fiction travel writing – this London launch was a fine location to wet the book’s head and for Hutchinson Books and Random House to proudly announce how Goldeneye is now a Sunday Times Bestseller. And very rightly so.

Various connected guests and scholars were in attendance – including biographer and historian Andrew Lycett (author of the 1995 defining work Ian Fleming – The Man Behind James Bond), Chris Salewicz (author, Firefly: Noel Coward in Jamaica) and other representatives from Noel Coward’s life and estate (Coward was famously Fleming’s neighbour, close friend and confidante at Oracabessa, Jamaica), Ian Fleming’s niece Kate Grimond, the James Bond Radio guys Chris Wright and Tom Sears, the Jamaica High Commissioner Her Excellency Mrs. Aloun Ndombet-Assamba and all manner of Jamaican knowledge, artwork and food kindly provided by the team at the Jamaican Tourist Board.

Personally, this bullet catcher was more than glad to be able to have a little, inadvertent chat with Fionn Morgan. Daughter of Ann Charteris, Fionn was sixteen when Ian Fleming married her mother and has a wise stance on her step-father’s life, work, loves and outlooks. She has recently written an interesting piece on Ian and his brother Peter for the The Spectator (Was Fleming as cool as his Brother) and suggested that one of the things Ian is rarely known or recognised for was that he was a great deal more “cosily domestic” than his press and reputation allows. But the night quite rightly belonged to Matthew Parker and that Ian Fleming chap who fifty years since his death can still hold sway at a London drinks party.

My review and thoughts on Goldeneye – Where Bond Was Born : Ian Fleming’s Jamaica.

Goldeneye – Where Bond Was Born : Ian Fleming’s Jamaica is available now from Hutchinson / Random House. It was published in the US in March 2015.