“I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.”
ian fleming
It is April 1953.
Britain’s newest monarch is about to be crowned.
Sir Winston Churchill is Prime Minister and Dwight D. Eisenhower is the US President.
Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth has just won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The Stargazers’ ‘Broken Wings’ is the UK number one.
And a new author called Ian Fleming is about to introduce a pop culture phenomenon.
Double O-Seventy years ago, on 13 April 1953, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book Casino Royale was published by Jonathan Cape.
And he himself designed the cover. It was a quick fire hit and surprised the author’s critics, peers and friends. In the fourteen publications that followed, Ian Fleming forged a new, post-war cultural hero, presented a new jet-set era of confidences, sexuality and intrigue, and also crafted a genre of his own.
As Commander Bond marks his seventieth anniversary, I asked an elite squad of continuation authors, historians, representatives and writers to celebrate literature’s golden spy on behalf of Yahoo Entertainment UK.
The mission was simple.
What is the best Fleming work and why? And what is the best Fleming line from any of his writings?
The responses are brilliantly varied, and collectively shed light on the pulses, drives and popularity of Ian Fleming and James Bond 007, but also the subsequent readership and Bond fandom.
I spoke to Ian Fleming Publications’ Corinne Turner and Lucy Fleming, Bond continuation authors Raymond Benson, William Boyd, Jeffrey Deaver, and Kim Sherwood, Young Bond‘s Steve Cole, Bond historians John Cork and Jeremy Black, comic-book artist Giorgio Spalletta, Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, Fleming actor Mark Burgess, and Bond screenwriter Robert Wade.
