Crap Towns author Sam Jordison got into the action yesterday at The Guardian book blog:
As the 100th anniversary of his birth approaches, it’s tempting to characterise Ian Fleming as The Man With the Golden Pen, as a calculatingly commercial author of absurd misogynistic fantasies. Even his own wife Ann icily described him as “hammering out pornography” when he spent his disciplined three hours a day writing the books in their Jamaican home.Later in the piece, though, Jordison loses me--and possibly you--when he says that “just like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, Fleming is slowly being adopted into the literary fold.”
The Bond books were often fun, the storytelling competent, and a few really good films have been based on those tales. But let’s face it, folks, as a writer Fleming was never in the same league as Chandler and Hammett.
The Guardian blog piece is here.
READ MORE: “Pornography and Light Sadism with Ian Fleming,” by Hugo Williams (The Times Literary Supplement).
3 comments:
In the books that established his reputation, Fleming portrayed Bond as a very believable, well rounded character. That's all I can ask of any writer. It was the movies, for the most part, that stretched plausibility and turned Bond into a caricature.
Some of Fleming's books are better than others. That's true of Chandler and Hammett, too.
It's the books I was talking about. The movies have been... well... movies. The "creative" result of a collective. For my taste, the books are a bit raw and a bit lurid (as in bright colors; bold strokes). And, on a certain level, comparing Fleming with Chandler and Hammett isn't even fair. The latter were actually writers. Fleming? He wrote like a spy.
And if anyone turned Bond in a caricature, it was Fleming himself. As I understand it, after Connery was cast -- with great success -- as Bond, Fleming began writing the character to fit him. Though, in fairness, it may just be because Connery came to represent Bond, even to Bond's creator. Or, as I've often thought, (cynic that I am) it could be that Fleming had his eye on the bottom line. Let's face it: you gotta sell a lotta books to finance a Goldeneye.
I agree the Bond books aren't as polished as Hammett's and Chandler's best known work, but several of the fourteen Bond books delivered the plausibility and depth of character I look for in any fiction. Writers have no say whether future generations consider their work "literary."
If Fleming did start writing Bond to fit Connery, the effect was minimal. The first Bond movie premiered in 1962, and Fleming died in '64 having seen only two Bond movies.
Fleming also tired of Bond. One of the later books, THUNDERBALL, was ruled to be partially plagiarized from a failed film project. In the last book Fleming completed, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, Bond survives a harrowing ordeal but has no memory of his past life.
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