Ian Fleming: A Reminiscence

by Peter Garnham

Like thousands of other readers in the 1960s, I was a faithful fan of the James Bond series. I ordered every title in advance of publication, and collected it from my bookstore - J. & E. Bumpus, Ltd., Booksellers by Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, where I had once worked - as soon as it was available. I would take the book home, eat dinner as quickly as possible, and start reading; I would not stop until I finished it that night

Rifle, pistol and shotgun shooting had been serious hobbies of mine for many years; I wrote for The Shooting Times, and worked for some years as a columnist and copy editor (we called it sub-editor) for The Field, a glossy weekly hunting-shooting-and-fishing magazine; and I had written a book about shotguns. A large part of my job at The Field involved staying in touch with English (London and Birmingham) and European gunmakers, particularly the makers of "best" rifles and shotguns such as James Purdey, Holland & Holland, Boss & Co., and Robert Churchill. I also kept up with new developments in ammunition, particularly European and American, and wrote extensively about rifle and shotgun ballistics; I corresponded often with Warren Page, then the Guns Editor of Field & Stream. I did quite a lot of competition shooting and ballistics work.

The weaponry in the Bond books, of course, was of particular interest. Bond's personal pistol, a .25 Beretta semi-automatic, always seemed inadequate to me, but the sheer authority conveyed by his other accoutrements was (as Fleming intended, I later discovered) successful in persuading me to suspend my critical faculties.

However, a pistol-range conversation at the Marylebone Pistol Club with a chap called Geoffrey Boothroyd, who I seem to remember worked for I.C.I. (Imperial Chemical Industries, Britain's largest ammunition manufacturer) resulted in a sort of petition to Ian Fleming that resulted in Bond's changeover to the 7.65mm Walther PPK, a nice little weapon that packs quite a lot more punch than the .25 "ladies' gun".

This episode didn't result in my meeting Fleming; Boothroyd did meet him then, I'm pretty sure, and "Armourer Boothroyd" made an appearance in at least one of the books. But it did open my mind to the idea that Fleming was amenable to constructive criticism.

After leaving The Field and attempting unsuccessfully to support myself in Paris as a freelance journalist, I returned to London and was hired as chief copy editor of Queen, a glossy avant-garde women's weekly fashion and general interest magazine with offices at 52 Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street. (Once a very stiff-upper-lip society monthly, Queen had been purchased by Jocelyn Stevens, scion of a British press baron. Having inherited about 7.5-million pounds at age 21, Jocelyn decided to become a magazine publisher; he hired Beatrix Miller of English Vogue as editor and, on the recommendation of my old boss at The Field, took me on as copy chief.) We had to fire a lot of debutantes.

We published some of the biggest names in photography and the written word, and perhaps this made me less awestruck by the Fleming/Bond mystique. Anyway, I started writing to Ian Fleming after every book appeared, gently pointing out small factual errors. He suggested that it might be more productive if I made these comments before the book was published rather than later, and he sent me a galley proof to read. I read it at lightning speed, noted some errors, and wrote to him on September 7, 1962. He wrote back:

4, Old Mitre Court
Fleet Street, E.C.4.
Ludgate Circus 8655


llth September, 1962




Dear Mr. Garnham,

Thank you very much for your letter of September 7th and I agree entirely with the two most perceptive points you have raised. Please amend accordingly.

You obviously have an extremely sharp eye for this sort of stuff and I rather fancy the idea of you becoming my proof reader in chief. As you know my books are extremely factual and I keep on slipping up through having a lazy memory and no files to consult.

Why not give my secretary a ring some time and walk down the street to my office, which is just opposite Fetter Lane, and let's have a talk?


Yours sincerely,
Ian Fleming

I did, we did (on Tuesday, September 18, at 4 p.m.) and during the next two years I became rather more than his proof reader; I was researcher, fact checker, co-conspirator and proof reader. At the time I started to work for him, the first Bond movie, Dr. No was about to be released; perhaps Fleming felt that Glidrose Productions could grow beyond the point where he and one secretary could manage it alone. But this is pure speculation on my part.

This was the way we worked: For about 10 months every year he would draft his plot and begin to flesh out the various parts of the story. He would then retire to his house in Jamaica, called "Goldeneye”, and do the actual writing. The pressures of social life in London, he said, made it impossible there to concentrate on writing. His wife was very active socially, which he claimed to find rather boring, although I think at her parties he quietly enjoyed being called "Commander," which was probably his wife's (not his) idea. Anyway, upon his return from Jamaica his secretary would type up a clean copy of the manuscript, and make two carbon copies; I got one.

During the 10-month work period he gave me lists of things to do: Check individual objects, find things that would facilitate some aspect of the plot, or even provide the factual underpinning for whole scenarios. Sometimes I would give him thick slabs of research results, such as the sub-tropical "poison garden" I had so much fun creating with help from the staff at the British Museum of Natural History and other specialists.

Even the most ivory-tower academic would respond enthusiastically to a call for assistance from Ian Fleming, as did captains of industry, foreign potentates and people in the less visible areas of government and military service. The appeal of his stories crossed all boundaries of class, education, occupation and income level.

I recall how thrilled he was by my "discovery" of a small poisonous fish of the genus synanceia horrida, (stonefish) a new species of which had been identified by an ichthyologist just returned from an Asian field trip; it had a row of 13 short spines on the dorsal fin (down the center of its back), lurked in the shallow muddy water of river crossings, and killed any mammal unlucky enough to step on it by injecting (through its spines) an extraordinarily fast-acting central nervous system toxin. Its prey was killed almost immediately, after a short period of evidently painful convulsions. The ichthyologist was thrilled, too, when I told him that "his" fish might emerge from its murky environment to stardom in a Bond adventure, but it never did.

I would read and check the manuscript, looking for what Fleming called errors of transmission - mistakes that had crept in between my research and his writing - and finally I checked the galleys or page proofs before the book went to press. Our system worked well.

I fact-checked one already-published book for him, Thrilling Cities, that was either being reprinted, revised or (quite possibly) published in another language; I don't recall the exact circumstance. (Fleming loved to collect the foreign language editions of his books; the more obscure the language the more he liked it.) I had a lot of fun making sure that the ferry from Hong Kong to Macao was really called the S.S. Takshing, that the Kodokan Academy really existed in Tokyo and that sort of thing, and that Hamburg's redlight street (district, really) was properly spelled Reeperbahn (Ropemaker's Walk). I travelled to some of these places. Quite a trip, as they say.

And so it went with us, even after I went to work for Her Majesty's Government at the Central Office of Information and other places. But Fleming's health declined and, much too soon, he died in 1964. I did not attend his funeral. I got the idea in my head, perhaps erroneous now I look back, that his wife would treat me as a mere employee", and I was too upset to feel sure of handling that situation well. The following year, 1965, HMG posted me to New York.

But I did go on to have a whale of a fight with his publisher, Jonathan Cape, because I wanted to rewrite the ending of his last book (The Man With The Golden Gun), then in manuscript form, to have Bond finally, irretrievably, die. It seemed appropriate to me that Bond should die with his creator. But Cape obviously had their eye on future profits and I was forced to yield to their lawyers. It got pretty nasty for a while.

I read one of the subsequent books, and was reminded of Fleming's comment to me after we had watched the first Bond movie (Dr. No) at a press showing in a Leicester Square cinema. He strode out as the end credits rolled, said not a word, hailed a taxi, and sat silently as we were driven back to the pub across from his office. He got out, paid the cab, walked into the pub and ordered a couple of drinks, took a swig, and finally addressed me: "Dreadful. Simply dreadful." We never mentioned the movies after that.

Although I parted from Cape on somewhat unfriendly terms, they had once tried to line me up with Len Deighton, another author whose work I admired (and still do, along with John le Carre’s). But Deighton was not very interested - I understood he did his own research and enjoyed doing it, unlike Fleming - so that never came to anything.

Working for Ian Fleming was tremendous fun. He had a nicely droll sort of wit, was always courteous in the extreme, and was genuinely pleased, I like to think, to have someone who was happy to work "behind the scenes" of his books doing something he felt was important. He was a true gentleman, a product of his background and generation, the sort of man you won't find very often these days; and more’s the pity.

(c) 1995-1996 Peter Garnham

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