Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon--2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle that led Noël Coward, a frequent guest at Goldeneye and no puritan himself, to describe the Fleming household as “golden ear, nose and throat.”The London Times had its own take on this exhibit last month.
Fleming, who saw 40 million copies of his books sold in his lifetime but died before the Bond franchise went stratospheric, had no literary pretensions. He described his first Bond book, “Casino Royale,” as “an oafish opus,” and offered further disparagement in a 1963 BBC radio interview. “If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive,” he said. Asked if Bond had kept him from more serious writing, of the kind achieved by his older brother, Peter, a renowned explorer and travel writer, he replied: “I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.”
• The historical thriller Child 44, much talked about here in the recent past, is apparently favored to win author Tom Rob Smith the Desmond Elliott Prize for first novels. That, according to Publishing News (via Euro Crime).
• Although it sounds as if its focus could be either on Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky or on George W. Bush and John McCain’s dubious defiance of international torture, in fact, Washington, D.C.’s brand-new Museum of Crime and Punishment takes a rather theme-parkish approach to recounting America’s history of headline-grabbing law breaking, both factual and fictional. As Marc Fisher observes in The Washington Post, “A museum of crime that explored why [American] culture is so fascinated with bad boys could be a rich and rewarding place. But this museum is satisfied to show off artifacts such as John Dillinger’s getaway car, paintings by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy and a machine gun actually used by Al Pacino in the 1983 movie ‘Scarface,’ and leave the whys and wherefores to some college sociology class.”
• Speaking of historical crime, the blog Nobody Move! reminds us that it was “On this day in 1934 [that Depression-era outlaws] Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and gunned down by a posse led by (semi)retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.”
• Lawrence Block is writing a memoir?
• Derringer Award-winning short-story writer (and “forgotten books” proselytizer) Patti Abbott is interviewed by Lonnie Cruse in Poe’s Deadly Daughters. Meanwhile, Julia Buckley asks Marcus Sakey (At the City’s Edge) about his “breathtaking looks,” in Mysterious Musings, and Ayo Onatade of Shots rings up the pseudonymous Ariana Franklin for a chat.
• After some concern over the future of NBC-TV’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent (which I think is the best of the three related Dick Wolf series now airing), NBC-affiliated USA Network has ordered 16 episodes of the show for next year. With luck, that means more Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe, the series’ best detective team (again, in my humble opinion).
• Following up his recent post about the death of screenwriter-novelist Zekial Marko, Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis notes the fact that Marko’s brother was novelist-artist Kenn Davis. In addition to writing eight books featuring African-American gumshoe and night-school law student Carver Bascombe, Davis also penned (with John Stanley) a 1979 novel, featuring leading man Humphrey Bogart, that first got me interested in what’s often called “celebrity crime fiction”: Bogart ’48. As that book’s back jacket explains it, the story involves “a nightmarish screenplay about to become a desperate reality of murder and suicide ... a chilling plot to blow up the Academy Awards ... a long black Packard and cold, watching eyes ... the immortal Bogey, the unrivaled Peter Lorre, a ravishing starlet named Norma Jean Baker and a pounding race against time.” Wow, just typing that makes me want to crack open the novel and commence reading all over again.
• I’m a bit late in calling attention to this (I think Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain was the first to mention it), but Print Magazine has put together a splendid collection of book, periodical, and poster designs that all use the backs of human legs--mostly women’s legs (and often very shapely women’s legs)--to frame their central images. I illustrated an early Rap Sheet post (about “rebooting” the James Bond movie franchise) with one of the examples Print cites, but had no idea that this motif was so commonplace. A gallery of limb-filled pulp fiction book covers is located here.
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