All the best tunes

On a damp spring evening in 1955, Ian Fleming returned home to find his wife, Ann, hosting a salon at their house in Victoria Square. Raucous laughter was emanating from the drawing-room downstairs. One by one, the cream of London’s literati — Cyril Connolly among them — were reading aloud passages from the Bond novels and collapsing in fits of giggles. As humiliations go, this is hard to top. Fleming may have been modest about his abilities as a writer (in a letter to Sir Winston Churchill he described Live and Let Die as ‘an unashamed thriller’ whose ‘only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader’), but that modesty was entirely false. In common with many commercially successful authors, he craved the sort of praise routinely doled out to lesser-known writers with a fraction of his sales.

The snobbery which has hampered Fleming’s literary reputation ever since was exemplified by Sebastian Faulks when he was approached to write a Bond novel to celebrate the centenary of Fleming’s birth. ‘It was like asking someone who writes complex symphonic music if they would like to write a three-minute pop song,’ Faulks responded, with magnificent hauteur. ‘I do inner lives, not underwater explosions.’ However, careful study of the Bond backlist, doubtless combined with a whopping cheque from Ian Fleming Publications, convinced the author of Birdsong that he would be wise to follow in the footsteps of another literary giant, Kingsley Amis, who had himself written a paean to 007, Colonel Sun, in 1968.