Although there is virtually nothing new or particularly unique here, it’s the “book as event” aspect of this video that makes it of great interest.
Fascinating.
Author: Dell Deaton (page 2 of 6)
As details begin to emerge from Jeffery Deaver on his new Ian Fleming James Bond continuation novel, known today only as “Project X,” this interview with Nick Higham for Meet the Author reveals important insights.
Mr Deaver first seeks to differentiate the literary James Bond from that of the motion pictures — albeit emphasizing his love of both. The Deaver-Bond, however, will very much follow the model of Fleming’s Agent 007.
The “Project X” James Bond will be 28 or 29 years old.
When asked to recommend a book to new readers, Jeffery Deaver said Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler. Nice parallel. Ian Fleming both considered Mr Chandler a friend, and an inspiration to his own fiction-writing.
Looks like this is an ad hoc intercept of Jeffery Deaver at an unrelated book-signing earlier in the month.
Questions pertain to his new commission as Ian Fleming continuation author, writing the next James Bond novel, untitled, but known as “Project X.”
The video does a nice job of breaking in with text graphics highlighting what we can expect in the upcoming book. Mr Deaver talks about his style, including outline submissions and “thousands of pages of notes,” field research that he’s personally done in visiting the exotic destinations about which he’ll be writing. Very reminiscent of Ian Fleming and his Thrilling Cities travelogues.
Jeffery Deaver’s favorite James Bond thriller by Ian Fleming? From Russia, with Love.
Shortly after being announced as the new Ian Fleming continuation author for the literary James Bond, Jeffery Deaver gave the following interview to publisher Hodder & Stoughton (UK).
As it turns out, Mr Fleming had a profound influence on Mr Deaver, starting at a very early age. Indeed, coincident with the period at which he first decided he wanted to become an author, the Fleming style was among his guiding lights.
Several years after “Quantum of Solace” was first published as a short story in the May 1959 issue of Cosmopolitan, it would appear that Ian Fleming had in mind to brand the name even more broadly.
… I have a basic alternation to propose in our tax laws, which will call, so that it looks properly portentous on the statute books, the Quantum of Solace Clause. Briefly, this will allow tax relief to those who, as judged by an independent tribunal, have given the maximum amount of pleasure to their fellow citizens. Most beneficiaries will, of course, come from the creative arts—acting, writing, painting, music, etc.—but they will also come from sports, politics and medicine. Such a clause would, I believe, have the blessing of the general public, it would greatly encourage the arts and it would serve to keep creative ability within our shores (copy to Inland Revenue for action!).
This excerpt comes from the March 1963 issue of SHOW.
It’s actually a footnote to an article bylined to Ian Fleming, titled, “Geneva: Thriller’s Capital,” subhead: “Behind its stable facade of Calvinism, conferences and crème Chantilly, Geneva hides its murder, mistresses and mayhem. Today, of course, it’s part of the Thrilling Cities reports.
Penguin Decades is scheduled to reissue From Russia with Love in paperback this coming April.
So this seemed a good time to look back at a particular point in the original. No, not the 1957 Jonathan Cape first edition; even further back than that.
On December 7, 2009, I was once again on the campus of Indiana University at Bloomington and, more particularly, spent the day in its spectacular Lilly Library. There in its archives are preserved most of the original James Bond manuscripts — featuring the very pages as they came out of Ian Fleming’s Imperial portable typewriter at Goldeneye in Jamaica.
Back there, “Donovan Grant” started out with a somewhat different name.
Here’s how the second-to-last paragraph of Chapter 1 then-read, on what came to be hand-numbered as page 7.
“His real name was Donegal Grant, or ‘Red’ Grant. But for the past ten years it had been Kurt Granitski, with the code-name of ‘Granit.’ The letter “R” in “Red” is what typing teachers used to call “a flying cap.” And Mr. Fleming’s style was to put the closing single-quote-mark before the period in his sentence.
The two revisions we now have in publication appear on this page.
“Donegal” became “Donovan,” and “Kurt” gave way to “Krassno.” Both were written-in by hand, above the lines (available thanks to double-spacing), with upward-pointing arrows below.
At some point the script handwriting for Krassno must have been felt unclear. In the space below, KRASSNO is repeated in block-lettering, all capitals, enclosed in a circle and attached to a line referencing the paragraph to which it associates.
As I get further and further into my own original research on Ian Fleming, it’s started to amaze me at just how much biographical substance is available to the general public.
In writing my own feature article, “Discovered: James Bond’s Rolex,” published in the February 2009 issue of WatchTime magazine, I noted that Mr. Fleming (a) kept contemporaneous notes on a wealth of ideas that occurred to him, (b) was very organized in doing so, and (c) hated to let any of his material go to waste.
We may well then have this to thank for his contribution to the August 1962 Show magazine. Titled “How to Write a Thriller,” Ian Fleming addressed the “angry young littérateur” who’s “engaged in ‘The Shakespeare Stakes.'” He cracked open his own preference for scrambled eggs and the James Bond menus. And his rigid formula for creating original 007 manuscripts each year at Goldeneye in Jamaica.
Most particularly to the interests of Branding, James Bond Branding, here — he spoke to the strategic importance of product placements as strategy in service to the brilliance of his works.
For Show, he wrote, “… my plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible.”
He went on to provide examples “in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work.” Then to his fiction.
This is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate. Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside — for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed — but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground.
Ian Fleming continued, with reference to several brand names that readers of the James Bond books will immediately recognize. The parenthetical is original to Mr. Fleming.
A Ranson lighter, a 4½ -litre Bentley with Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these small details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.