Introduction

Ian Fleming is a unique literary figure, inasmuch as he is known for a single creation that has by now escaped any of the normal orbits of writer-to-subject relations. Of course, all authors' reputations eventually become condensed into a phrase or even an adjective - we call something "Dickensian" or reference a "Graham Greene hero" - so the formula "Ian Fleming's James Bond" or even just "Ian Fleming's 007" is in its way an unsurprising epitaph. His name and reputation shine brightest these days in the title sequences of movies that have sometimes a close (Casino Royale) and sometimes a very remote (all the other recent Bond films) connection to his writing.

It's an odd fate for an avid and ambitious author - one perhaps shared only by Arthur Conan Doyle, another good writer whose destiny was to be singly sublimated into his own invention. (Singly, at least, if one overlooks the truth that the Jurassic Park series is essentially derived from Conan Doyle's Challenger series, and his The Lost World.) And so, the pleasure of this collection of miscellaneous prose that Fleming produced as a working journalist - chiefly over his prime creative years, the nineteen fifties - is to be reminded again of what a fine, evocative, sentence-by-sentence writer he was. Along with Conan Doyle and his close friend Raymond Chandler, Fleming is the best instance of the writer who, without literary pretension of any kind, wrote so well that his adventure stories, whatever their distorting thinness might be as mirrors of reality, keep their claim on our imaginations even when they lose their claim upon our surprise. He talked of himself as a writer of 'suspense', but his books still shine long after whatever suspense they contained is overwhelmed by time and familiarity. We know exactly how the stories will turn out and re-read them anyway. (In truth, we knew exactly how the stories would turn out when they were written - Bond is no anti-hero, he'll always prevail - and still we re-read them.)

For Fleming was, one realises turning these pages, above all an observational writer, one who could condense sights and sounds and tastes into a handful of memorable descriptive sentences. It is the atmospherics of his Bond books that give credibility to their adventures, and his non-fiction, collected here, is pretty much a continuous distillation onto the page of those atmospheres, from London to Turkey to Jamaica and beyond. He makes moods not from self-consciously 'poetic' evocation but from an inventory of essential elements - from objects, things seen and sensed. He does it so well that every writer, in any genre, can still study his sentences and learn from them.

Fleming's life, now recounted several times in successive biographies, was one of significant adventure in the Second World War, and a vivid life as a journalist, chiefly for the Sunday Times of London afterwards. Whatever work the winds and weather of the world did on his character, he was born into a daunting family; there's a surprising glimpse of him in the art historian Kenneth Clark's autobiography, who, talking about Fleming's pretty mother who lived near a Clark family retreat in a remote part of Scotland, admits that he was scared away by "her formidably well-equipped sons, who terrified me then as much as they did when I encountered them in later life."

It is always pleasing to have a pet theory about a writer confirmed by the writer, and not the least of the pleasures of this collection is that Fleming confirms a pet theory of my own. That is, that the writing and example of Peter Fleming, Ian's older brother, was, so to speak, the missing planet X that explains the deviations and odd orbit of Ian's own. Peter Fleming, as too few readers perhaps now know, was the author of several superior travel books in the nineteen thirties - Brazilian Adventure and Travels in Tartary are the most famous - memorable for their almost Wodehousian humour and their deliberate note of self-deprecating irony. (Afterwards, he went on to write the "Fourth Leader" for The Times, the light-hearted 'extra' editorial that distinguished the paper then. Out of solidarity in anonymity - I used to do the same for The New Yorker in what was called "light Comment" - I for a long time collected "Fourth Leader" anthologies from the Peter Fleming era when one could find them in London bookstores. They rewarded the reader with high-hearted and charming sentences.)

This reader long imagined that the older brother's adventures - and his tone of light-hearted and unboastful derring-do - must have affected the younger brother's imagination of what a hero was, and indeed here is Ian, writing that, "In this era of the anti-hero, when anyone on a pedestal is assaulted (how has Nelson survived?), unfashionably and obstinately I have my heroes. Being a second son, I dare say this all started from hero-worshipping my elder brother Peter." Photographs of the young Peter, for what it's worth, look exactly like Ian's description of James Bond - with his otherwise puzzling and oft-insisted-on resemblance to the American songwriter and sometime character actor Hoagy Carmichael - more so than photographs of the younger Ian.

What is significantly different between brothers is the tone. Peter's is self-consciously ironic and self-deprecating, in the manner of the Waugh and Wodehouse twenties; Ian's is from early on, taut and essentially earnest, in the thirties and forties manner of Greene and Orwell. In all of these pieces he takes his subjects lightly, but he takes them seriously. The development of Interpol, the art of Raymond Chandler, even the Seven Deadly Sins - for all that he treats these subjects with dapper elegance, and sometimes dapper disdain, they seem to matter to him, and he wants to make them matter to the reader. Where Peter, for all that he had a 'good war' in the forties, was still very much a child of the Noël Coward moment, Ian seems to have been made by the War in ways that gave him a tougher inner iron than his brother. His memoir here of the raid on Dieppe, a legendary foul-up that may - or more likely, may not - have taught essential things for the later amphibian invasion of the coast of France, is tight-lipped and taciturn, pained in a manner that suggests a more searing experience than its unemotional tone allows - or, rather, one that its unemotional tone implicitly enforces.

Ian is modern. Though one had a sense from the Bond books that Fleming had many attitudes about foreign peoples typical, unsurprisingly, of a man of his time rather than ours, it is still cheering and unexpected to see how resolutely cosmopolitan he was. He was a fan of the nascent Commonwealth and, here, as in his Thrilling Cities, published in his lifetime, he urged his British readers to "Go East, young man" - emigrating or at least living for a time in an emerging new world he saw as more healthily energetic than a sometimes-exhausted Europe. In his list of political desires, he makes paramount the "enthusiastic encouragement of emigration, but more particularly of a constant flow of peoples within the Commonwealth." He had the inevitable prejudices of a British man of the end of the Imperial era, but any charge of significant racism is one that these pages seem to acquit him of.

But above all we read his non-fiction for echoes of his fiction, and for clues as to its hardy excellence. Ian is very much a writer of the post-war boom that, for all the rationing and the stringency of the currency export conditions, still allowed 'luxury' goods and practices into Europe sufficiently to inform his prose. He always seems to be having a good time. Fleming is known, quite wrongly, as a 'placement' writer, someone who used proper nouns of products to give credibility to his work. But this is misleading. As he explains himself, deftly, it was his concentration on all of the specific objects of sight and sound and smell, that, for him, as for any real writer, gave his work its density and its credibility; the 'product placement' was purely accidental. He writes tellingly that:

". the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 41 /2 litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond's sea island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these small details are 'points de repère' to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure. I am interested in things and in their exact description. The technique crept into my first book, Casino Royale. I realised that the plot was fantastic, and I wondered how I could anchor it to the ground so that it wouldn't take off completely. I did so by piling on the verisimilitude of the background and of the...