Thoughts on Ian Fleming?

I feel even Bond's chauvinism and general handling of women is misunderstood in the movies too.

While Bond definitely knows how to bed a lot of women, you also get the impression that his willingness to discard them easily comes from insecurity on his part and a lack of willingness to form meaningful connections to them--He's even compared to Pechorin from A Hero of Our Time in From Russia With Love. The movies meanwhile seem to pain this kind of chauvinism and misogyny in a more positive light.

I don't know to what extent Fleming intended this, but the entire Bond book series really seems to be a tragedy about Bond being a wannabe Byronic hero who struggles to show any humanity.

based and redpilled

>that ebonics in Live and Let Die

It works both ways. Women are fantasies in the books, but they follow a very specific archetype
>be very atractive woman but emotionally wounded
>meet Bond
>have healing sex with Bond
>ready to start a new life without him
Bond doesnt discard them, book-women simply dont need Bond anymore. See Tiffany Case, the only one that sticks with him after one book, leaves him for another man after one month.

Although it started as his power fantasy, Fleming definitively hated hated HATED Bond as it went along. He was bored by Bond as a character and Fleming knew that he couldnt change him, because it would alienate the readers. That's why the latest books have such a strange structures (FRWL two halves, YOLT being a travelogue, TSWLM has a woman POV...).

Even when he tried to make a darker Bond in OHMMS and YOLT, he eventually ended rebooting him in TMWGG back to pulp hero, because Fleming knew what make better sales.

Birth-pangs of a Thriller

(W. H. Smith’s Trade News, March 31, 1956)

By Ian Fleming

I can remember more or less why I started to write thrillers. I was on holiday in Jamaica in January 1951—I built a house there after the war and I go there every year—and my mental hands were empty. I had finished organizing a foreign service for Kemsley Newspapers and that side of my life was free-wheeling.

My daily occupation in Jamaica is spear-fishing and underwater exploring, but, after five years of it, I didn’t want to kill any more fish except barracudas and the occasional monster fish, and I knew my own underwater terrain like the back of my hand. Above all, after being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it.

So, as I say, my mental hands were empty, and although I am as lazy as most Englishmen are, I have a Puritanical dislike of idleness and a natural love of action. I decided to write a book.

It had to be a thriller because that was all to be a thriller because that was I had time for in my two months’ holiday, and I knew there would be no room in my London life for writing books. The atmosphere of casinos and gambling fascinates me and I know enough about spies to write about them. I am also interested in things, in gadgetry of all kinds, and it occurred to me that an accurate and factual framework would help the reader to swallow the wildest improbabilities of my plot.

Dare Not Look Back

Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, Casino Royale dutifully reproduced itself. I re-wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired (and how right I was) at the mistakes in grammar and style, the repetitions and the crudities. I obstinately closed my mind to self-mockery and “what will my friends say?”, savagely hammering on until the proud day when the last page was done. The last line in the book “The bitch is dead now” was just what I felt. I had killed the job.

Then I started to read it. And I was appalled. How could I have written this bilge? What a fool the hero is. The heroine is the purest cardboard. The villain is out of pantomime. The sex is too sexy. And the writing! Six “terribles” on one page. Sentences of screaming banality. I groaned and stubbornly started correcting.

When I got back to London, I did nothing with the manuscript. I was too ashamed of it. No publisher would want it and, if one did, I would not have the face to see it in print. Even under a pseudonym, someone would leak the ghastly fact that it was I who had written this adolescent tripe. There would be one of those sly paragraphs in the Londoner’s Diary! Shame! Disgrace! Disaster! Resign from my clubs. Leave the country.

One day I had lunch at the Ivy with an old friend and literary idol of mine, William Plomer of Jonathan Cape’s, and I asked him how you get cigarette smoke out of a woman once you’ve got it in. “All right,” I said. “This woman inhales, takes a deep lungful of smoke, draws deeply on her cigarette—anything you like. That’s easy. But how do you get it out of her again? ‘Exhales’ is a hopeless word. ‘Puffs it out’ is silly. What can you make her do?”

William looked at me sharply. “You’ve written a book.”

I laughed. I was pleased that he had guessed, but embarrassed. “It’s not really a book,” I said, only a sort of boys’ magazine story. But the point is,” I hurried on, “I filled my heroine full of smoke half way through and she’s still got it in her. How can I get it out?”

A new identity!

I needed only slight pressure from William. He was a friend and would tell me the horrible truth about the book without condemning me or being scornful or giving away my secret. I sent him the manuscript. He forced Cape’s to publish it. The reviews, from The Times Literary Supplement down, were staggeringly favourable. People were entertained, excited, amused. I wrote “Author” instead of Journalist in a new passport.

And so it went on. I took Michael Arlen’s advice: “Write your second book before you see the reviews of your first. Casino Royale is good, but the reviewers may damn it and take the heart out of you.”

More adventures

In 1953, in Jamaica, I wrote Live And Let Die; in 1954, Moonraker, and then, last year, Diamonds Are Forever.

When I sent the manuscript of Diamonds Are Forever to William Plomer, I said: “I’ve put everything into this except the kitchen sink. Can you think of a plot about a kitchen sink for the next one? Otherwise I am lost.”

This time William couldn’t help me.

Now I am off to Jamaica again with a spare typewriter-ribbon and a load of desperately blank foolscap through which James Bond must somehow shoot his way during the next eight weeks.

>12 fresh eggs

For one servings?

I always felt that Casino Royale would have been better off as a stand alone book, and it's interesting to see Fleming thought something similar. The last line of CR is unironically one of my favourite in all of literature, so it's interesting to see the psychology behind it.

Dark Bond was far more interesting to me than pulp Bond. I really wish more spy thrillers dealt with troubled characters like that.

This is the exact Gordon Ramsay recipe, only thing different that he adds sour cream

Hes the guy who invented james bond. Aside from that, little is known about the fellow.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

really?

He was a spy nigger

Writing was literally his side job

Am I getting trolled

He always has lovely descriptions of birds and fishes.

you have to eat all the eggs

Attached: hey.gif (498x266, 1.39M)

The books are enjoyable kino.

>he strikes me more as a sociopath with serious trust issues
MI6 in human form.

>serious trust issues
Well, you'd have trust issues too if half of your staff turns out to be russian spies