Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Finding Forgotten Fleming Works

Wealthy British writer Ian Fleming died from a heart attack more than 60 years ago, yet he’s suddenly back in the news, thanks to the discovery of two different works he left behind.

The first is a short story titled “The Shameful Dream,” which appears in the latest edition of Strand Magazine. As the Associated Press explains, that tale dates back to 1951, just two years prior to the publication of Fleming’s first James Bond spy novel, Casino Royale. It focuses on a character named Caffery Bone, who is “the literary editor of Our World, a periodical ‘designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,’ its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.”

Bone is more than a bit anxious at the prospects for this encounter, fearing Lord Ower is preparing to dismiss him, as he has done to so many others on his payroll. “For Lord Ower sacked everyone sooner or later,” Fleming writes, “harshly if they belonged to no union or with a fat check if they did and were in a position to hit back. If one worked for Lord Ower one was expendable and one just spent oneself until one had gone over the cliff edge and disappeared beneath the waves with a fat splash.”

The quarterly Strand says “The Shameful Dream” finds Fleming “dryly amused by power and its excesses,” casting “a wry eye on the world of newspapers and tabloids, and a media tycoon whose flair for cruelty carries unmistakable shades of Blofeld and Fleming’s other iconic villains—calculating, merciless, and unsettlingly absurd.”

You can order a copy of that issue, the magazine’s 75th, here. Also inside is “Reading at Night,” an obscure Graham Greene yarn that was his “sole venture into the supernatural-themed genre.”

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In the meantime, The Spy Command reports that UK journalist-novelist Jeremy Duns “has found an Ian Fleming-penned pilot script for a proposed television series to be called James Gunn—Secret Agent.” Duns describes Gunn as “an American secret agent operating in Jamaica using a boat as his base, pretending he is looking for treasure” while pursuing a powerful gang boss called Dr. No (a likely precursor to the Dr. No from Fleming’s 1958 novel of the same name).

Bill Koenig goes on to write in The Spy Command that this 28-page script was the result of efforts by U.S. TV producer Henry Morgenthau III “to develop a show to be called Captain Jamaica beginning in late 1955. Morgenthau contacted Ian Fleming concerning the project, according to Duns. Eventually, Fleming wrote the outline and script.” Sadly, by the end of 1956, the Gunn project was shelved.

Duns offers a two-part article on his Web site that supplies additional background on James Gunn and tells more about both the pilot’s storyline and the nine-page outline Fleming wrote for the proposed spy series. Part I is here, with Part II being available here.

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