The Man with the Golden Typewriter (9 page)

As for the rest, what I think will strike any reader is the absence of everybody else while Bond and Gala get to work . . . No, perhaps I'm wrong. The only readers who become sceptical may be those who, like me, wait until they've almost recovered their critical faculties before they think about it.

Perhaps it is too bad of me to add that I knew Drax would not survive the story as soon as I saw (on p. 71) that he turned on his heel and did it again on p. 86.

Apart from that and a bit of lipbiting and smiling or grinning ruefully or wryly, the book is comparatively free of clichés.

TO W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Fleming wrote to congratulate Maugham on the splendid, if not outlandish posters that were being used as part of the
Sunday Times
promotional campaign
.

10th June, 1954

This is a great day for “les amis de Somerset Maugham”. In honour of the Queen's birthday the town is being plastered with your face and the massed bands are playing for you both.

The Hallowe'en turnip [Maugham's portrait] being reproduced on the front page of the “Sunday Times” is nothing to the giant scraper-board mask which, on the top floor of this building, is gazing angrily up Gray's Inn Road towards King's Cross and down Gray's Inn Road towards Lincoln's Inn.

It reminds me of the “Black Widow” poster designed to “Keep Death Off the Roads”, but in fact the whole campaign is having an electric effect on England and people can be seen in restaurants with scrubby bits of paper and pencil jotting down Hawthorn [sic], and Ulysses.

I will gather together a great bundle of our advertisements and ship them out to you but the twenty-foot square posters would be too much for the mails and I will have to try and send a photograph.

Incidentally, they would just about paper the outside walls of your villa and I like the idea of you and Alan emerging from between your lips. It would be a good scene in a Cocteau or Dali film, and I may steal it for my fourth thriller.
⁶
(The third is with Cape's and they say it is the best but it doesn't amuse me as much as the others.)

Anyway the whole venture has aroused interest all over the world and everybody is delighted.

As part of the ballyhoo I was requested to write a light piece on my visit to you and in some trepidation I did so.

But Lord K is so overwhelmed by the importance of the occasion and so loth, I think, to allow it to be thought that it was anybody's idea but his own that he told me he thought the piece was not sufficiently “dignified”.

So I send it to you to see what you yourself think. It is difficult not to be vulgar in these sort of things but I feel I have avoided the major pitfalls.

Annie is in wonderful form and is delighted with the announcement in the “Times” this morning, although she says it isn't enough and hopes that you have at least precedence over Dame Sitwell.
⁷
She's spinning like a top through the Season and I am looking forward to enjoying her company again when she comes to rest at the end of July. She loved your letter and will, I expect, reply this week-end from St. Margaret's.

I must stop now as the chapel bells are ringing and this is too long by at least half.

FROM SOMERSET MAUGHAM

16th June, 1954

My dear Ian,

I have read your article with great amusement. I don't see that it is undignified. There is nothing I want less than to have anyone take me
for a stuffed shirt on a pedestal. The only objection I have to make is firstly you speak of my having a chef, whereas my simple, and even spartan needs are satisfied by a cook. Secondly, you speak of the poetess being offered soup at luncheon. That is something that I should be ashamed to offer any guest, drunk or sober. I look upon soup at luncheon as barbarous, detestable, uncivilized and conducive to promiscuous immorality.

If you have a moment to spare, and can tell me what sort of reaction the first article has had on the public at large, I shall be most grateful.

Yours always,

Willie

TO WREN HOWARD

29th June, 1954

Having brushed up the typescript a bit as the result of the comments of William and Daniel, I am sending it over to you.

There's one fairly long rewriting job on Chapter 22 which Daniel recommended, with which I agree, and I have simply not had time to get down to it and it doesn't in fact affect the book in any way.

I am not entirely happy with the title but nothing we have been able to think up is an improvement.

If any other readers have ideas I shall be most grateful to hear them.

TO J. B. REED, ESQ., The Bowater Paper Corporation Ltd., Bowater House, Stratton Street, W.1.

One of the dramatic set pieces in
Moonraker
involved a car chase in which Bond's vehicle was thrown off the road when Drax's henchman, Krebs, unleashed a roll of newsprint from the lorry ahead. For advice, Fleming sought out Bowater, the world's biggest supplier of newsprint and an organisation of near Blofeldian stature, which not only operated paper mills but, to safeguard against strikes, owned its own forests and ran its own dedicated shipping line.

30th June, 1954

Dear Sir,

I wonder if you would be kind enough to give me a little help in my capacity as a spare-time writer of thrillers.

In my next book a Bowater's newsprint carrier features briefly and dramatically, and I wonder if you would tell me if the following sentences are correct:

1)
“One of Bowater's huge Foden Diesel carriers was just grinding into the first bend of the hairpin labouring under five tons of newsprint it was taking on a night run to one of the Ramsgate newspapers.”

(Apart from correcting the facts, have you actually got a customer in Ramsgate or elsewhere on the Isle of Thanet?)

2)
“His head lamps showed the long carrier with the eight gigantic rolls, each containing half a mile of newsprint.”

If you would be kind enough to scribble in corrections or suggestions on this letter and return it to me, I would be most grateful.

Yours Faithfully,

He was advised that although Bowater had a client on the Isle of Thanet, they did not deliver at night. Their lorries were eight-wheeled AECs which typically carried twenty-one rolls, each containing five miles of newsprint. It was the very kind of detail that Fleming relished.

TO WREN HOWARD

9th July, 1954

Very many thanks for your letter of yesterday and I am delighted you are pleased with the book.

Your points of detail are all excellent and most valuable and they will all have attention. Any other similar comments, however harsh, will be very welcome.

Curiously enough the book was always called THE MOONRAKER until a week after I finalised it when Noël Coward reminded me that Tennyson Jesse
⁸
once used the same title.

Do you think it would matter using it again or that we ought to get clearance from somebody?

Alternatively perhaps we could call it “THE MOONRAKER SECRET” or “THE MOONRAKER PLOT” or at any rate tack on one other word.

I have the master typescript and I will tidy it up and give it to Michael at the end of the month so that it can go early to the printers.

My Autumn looks as if it's going to be rather busy and I would very much like to get the proofs corrected and off my chest as soon as possible.

I will also rough out a jacket for Michael to consider.

I will attack the contract next week.

TO WREN HOWARD

The search for a title continued . . .

15th July, 1954

What do you think of THE INFERNAL MACHINE as a title?

Or alternatively WIDE OF THE MARK or THE INHUMAN ELEMENT?

Personally, I think the first might be the one. It is an expression everyone knows but has long been out of fashion.

Despite Fleming's enthusiasm for
The Infernal Machine,
none of his suggestions found favour. At the bottom of the letter Howard scribbled a list of alternatives:
Bond and the Moonraker, The Moonraker Scare
and
The Moonraker Plot
. All were later crossed out, leaving at the end just a single word. He circled it firmly:
Moonraker.

TO MICHAEL HOWARD

Fleming took particular pride in designing dust jackets for his novels.
Casino Royale
and
Live and Let Die
had both been his and now with
Moonraker
he made a third attempt. An abstract design of pillars of flame, by Ken Lewis, it wasn't as successful as the previous two.

28th October, 1954

I have now devised the enclosed and I think it's on the right lines. Robert Harling also very much approves which, in case you don't know him, is a considerable triumph.

What do you think?

I think the author's name could be a bit larger or alternatively in a different type, and I think the motif of the background might be a little bit bolder and not quite so niggly.

But it at any rate contains the red, yellow and black, which experts have always told me are the most striking for poster purposes, so it should show up well on the bookstalls.

I await your verdict and I also enclose an alternative design on which Harling has turned his thumbs down.

The colours are wrong but I still think something could be made of the idea if you don't like the flaming one.

TO E. B. STRAUSS, ESQ., 45 Wimpole Street, London, W.1.

Eric Strauss (1894–1961) was an eminent psychiatrist who treated both Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Fleming had sought his advice on megalomania and discovered in Strauss's
Men of Genius
that childhood thumb-sucking could have baneful consequences – hence the gap-toothed Drax.

5th January, 1955

It is now exactly a year since I borrowed your “Men of Genius” and I have felt ashamed of myself for not having returned it to you before.

The Hemmung [psychological inhibition] was undoubtedly created by my desire to keep the book in my possession. It appears to be quite unobtainable and it has given me so much pleasure that even now I am loath to let it go.

However, please forgive me for the delay and thank you most warmly for your kindness in lending it to me, and in being so patient with the borrower.

A perfectly horrible man whose diabolical schemes for the destruction of this country stem, I have maintained, directly from a pronounced diastema of the centrals has resulted from your loan and will appear in my next thriller, THE MOONRAKER, of which I will send you a copy on its publication in April.

I hope you will then approve of the motivation I have provided for my villain.

Again with many apologies and my warmest thanks and very best wishes for 1955.

TO MICHAEL BODENHAM, ESQ., Director, Floris Ltd., 89 Jermyn Street, London, S.W.1.

Floris
, perfumiers and soap makers to the gentry, were ‘most interested to read your kind mention of “Floris” in your new book “The Moonrakers”'. They sent their appreciation, plus a sample of their products and ‘thanks to you for this association in a most excellent and entertaining novel'. Fleming was an enthusiastic endorser of the products used.

23rd August, 1955

Having been a life-time consumer of your products the least I could do was to pay tribute to your firm in enumerating the luxurious appointments of Blades Club, and it was quite unnecessary though very nice of you to have sent me such a fragrant bouquet in return.

My books are spattered with branded products of one sort or another
⁹
as I think it is stupid to invent bogus names for products which are household words, and you may be interested to know that this is the first time that a name-firm has had the kindly thought of acknowledging the published tribute.

Again with many thanks.

TO GEOFFREY M. CUCKSON, ESQ., Nottingham

19th September, 1955

Thank you very much for your kind letter of September 7th which greeted me on my return from Istanbul.

I am so glad you like the adventures of James Bond. They also give me much pleasure but you are one of the few of my readers who has suggested that the background work does require a great deal of trouble.

All your comments are, as a matter of fact, very much to the point and I agree that perhaps Gala should have been gagged. On the other hand the effects of the bang behind the ear she got would not, I think, have worn off within the three-quarters of an hour drive left to Ebury Street. I think you can rely on the fact that Krebs made sure she was still more or less unconscious before he and Drax helped her cross the pavement into the house.

After Bond's rather frustrating holiday abroad he immediately got involved in some further hair-raising adventures which will appear in April under the title DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, and I hope the book will bring another charming and perceptive letter from you.

TO MISS JEAN GRAMAN, 109 Sheen Lane, East Sheen, S.W.14.

On a point of German etiquette, Jean Graman told Fleming he had got his honorifics wrong. ‘While a creature like Krebs is only too possible, he would not dream of addressing his superior as “mein Kapitan”.' She proposed several alternatives along a military line – i.e. Obergruppenführer – and concluded with the words, ‘I hope this small hint will help to make your next book as authentic as possible.'

19th October, 1957

Thank you very much for your letter of October 9th and I am delighted that you enjoyed “Moonraker”.

I see your point about ‘mein Kapitan' and I had thought of various other possibilities, of which perhaps a better one was ‘mein Chef'.

The point is that this was a peacetime organisation in which military titles would have been inappropriate. It was perhaps because I was myself in the Navy that I decided to use ‘Kapitan' as being possible and also understandable to the many of my readers who do not know German nearly as well as you do.