Charlie Higson Q&A with Young Bond fans
AS A LOT OF THE QUESTIONS OVERLAP I HAVE TENDED TO COMBINE ANSWERS – THE ORIGINAL QUESTIONS ARE AT THE TOP. I HOPE I HAVE ANSWERED EVERYTHING AND THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS. -CHARLIE HIGSON HOW DID I GET INVOLVED? What inspired you to start the Young Bond series? When did you find you wanted to extend James Bond's adventures to his childhood? Or Where did you get the idea to write about young Bond? What inspired you to write about James Bond? What was it that inspired you to write the Young Bond series? Were you a Bond fan from an early age? The character of James Bond was created by an English writer called Ian Fleming, who wrote most of the Bond books in the 1950s. Fleming sadly died in 1964, but a company owned by his family (Ian Fleming Publications - IFP) still look after the amazing character he created. IFP are in charge of all the Bond books now. You can only write about James Bond if they give you their permission. The idea of writing these books was not mine, it was theirs. One day, about four years ago, IFP approached me out of the blue and told me about their new project – A series of books they were planning about the young James Bond. I have always been a Bond fan. I grew up in the sixties, when the Sean Connery movies were being made and I loved going to see them as a boy. Later on, I read all of Fleming’s books and really enjoyed them, too, but I never expected that one day I would be asked to write a James Bond book. So, when I had that visit from IFP I was surprised, flattered and very excited that they were considering me to write one of the new Young Bond books. In the end they asked me to write all five, which was even better. Why did they choose me? Who knows? I had written four adult thrillers, and I have three boys (7, 11, 13) of the right age to enjoy these books, and I was a Bond fan, but… maybe IFP just liked my face! WHY ARE THE BOOKS SET IN THE THIRTIES? What are the year the books are set in? Why did you set the Young James Bond series in the 1930s? The very first ever James Bond book - Casino Royale - was published in 1953, in that book Bond is about 35. Ian Fleming went on to write thirteen other books about Bond, and his hero stayed roughly the same age for all that time, so it was quite difficult working out when he might have been born. The idea of the Young Bond books was that they should tie-in as closely as possible with Ian Fleming’s books, rather than with the films, which were made later. We decided that Bond might have been born in about 1920; so obviously he would have been at school in the 1930s. I thought it would be interesting for kids to see how life was different then (and also how it was the same). I don’t think the books would have been so much fun if they’d been set in the modern world. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOND IN THE MOVIES AND BOND IN THE BOOKS? What are your feelings on the differences between the literary James Bond and the cinematic James Bond? The Bond of the original Ian Fleming books is a much more believable person than he is in the films. He reacts to his problems just as a real person would - he gets scared and angry and sad, he falls in love. If he gets hit it hurts. If he’s wounded it takes him along time to recover. He’s not a man in a bulletproof tuxedo with a witty quip ready for any eventuality. Young Bond is based on the Bond of the books, not the films. Which means that I can write about a real boy, not a miniature Pierce Brosnan. He has the same thoughts and feelings of any boy and is not a kind of super boy. So, when he starts at a big new scary school he is at first a little nervous, for instance. That being said, I did want him to be like the adult Bond - a boy who other boys would like to be, or have as a friend. WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF WRITING THE BOOKS? How did you come about writing the Young Bond novels? And how long did it take for you to think of new villans and characters? I take about a year to write each book, and then spend another six months going back over it, and getting it exactly right. I have a lot of help from editors and proofreaders who make suggestions on how to make it better, check my facts and look for any mistakes. The book would then be published roughly two years after I started writing it. WILL THERE BE MORE THAN 5 BOOKS? Now that the Young Bond books have been such a success will you be planning to write more than five books? I read SilverFin and a preview of Blood Fever and love them are you making more Young Bond books cause I love them I heard on the forum that u are making up to five is it true? How many books are there going to be? The plan was always to do five books, and I have plots worked out for all five. The last book will finish as James leaves Eton. If there were any more books they would have to be about an older James at a different school with new friends. I don’t plan to write any more, but who knows… anything can happen. WHAT IS THE TITLE OF THE THIRD BOOK? WHAT’S IT ABOUT? WHEN WILL IT BE OUT? ETC. My question is what is the title of the book coming out in 2007? Can you reveal any information on the next book (barring the return of an older character, and it being set somewhere in London, and in the London docks)? What is the title of the third book? What's going to happen in the next book? Is there a working title for Book 3? What is the new book going to be called? I have been enjoying your series greatly and I was wondering when the next book will come out and what it will be called? Are u making any new books at the moment? Aha, this is what everyone wants to know. The third book in the series will be out in January 2007 (just realised there’s a 007 theme to the year! Hope that’s a good omen). The working title for the book is ‘Shoot The Moon,’ but as we never stuck with the working title on the first two books it’s unlikely we’ll end up calling it that. Another working title is ‘The Big Smoke’ (which is the nickname for London – where most of the book is set). I wanted to send James to a big city, as the first two books had mostly taken place in the countryside. I chose London because I live in London, I know it well and I love it. There are some fascinating unknown corners, and I wanted to do a sort of Da Vinci Code about the city, in which James has to follow a series of cryptic clues, to find out what’s going on and save the day. As usual the book didn't end up anything like I imagined it was going to be, but there is still more of a mystery/clue solving element to this book than the first two. It’s as different to Blood Fever as that book was to SilverFin. The background of the story is that an Eton master (Alexis Fairburn) has been kidnapped. He manages to send a coded message explaining what’s happened to him, and it falls into our hero’s hands. James then has 5 days to find out what’s happened to him before time runs out. As I say, the story takes place over the course of one week in December, just before Christmas. (Another working title is ‘Six Days In December’.) The missing master is a crossword fan (so he is good at making up clues) and a mathematician and the story is also about an early attempt to build a computer. There’s lots of action, several nasty deaths, a car chase, a couple of explosions, a set of evil villains, a beautiful girl, and a climax in the old London docklands (when it was still full of ships). TELL US ABOUT LONDON AND DOCKLANDS Is it true that the 3rd book will be based in London and the London Docks? In the 1930s the London docks were the biggest and busiest in the world. Docklands was known as the City Of Ships. People used to say there were so many ships in the Thames you could walk across their decks from one side of the Thames to the other without getting your feet wet. Now the whole area has been developed into a modern city (it’s where Canary Wharf and the City Airport are). The area used to be the heart of the old East End - The working class, cockney part of London. It was a really fascinating place with some very colourful characters, and I thought it would be a great setting for the climax of book 3. Other parts of London in the books are the amazing Highgate cemetery in North London, the Hunterian museum at the Royal College Of Surgeons and Regent’s Park (Bond fans will know the significance of the park). WHERE DO THE IDEAS FOR YOUR BOOKS COME FROM? How did you come up with these gripping books? It’s often very different to remember where your ideas first came from by the time you’ve finished a book, because things change so much. All I can do is put down some of the thoughts that were going through my head when I started the books… SILVERFIN Before starting the book I read a lot about James Bond, and I read a lot about his creator, Ian Fleming (who based a lot of the details of Bond’s life on his own life). I wanted to put in as much of the information I found out as I could. So obviously there’s a lot of stuff about Eton in the book (Fleming went there himself in the twenties). Fleming was a keen runner at Eton so I put a running race in. Also, as Bond has Scottish roots, and the Flemings also come from up that way, I knew that part of the book had to be set in Scotland. My boys have always loved exploring castles, so I wanted to put in a castle in. I needed some stuff about spies and spying so I came up with the idea of Uncle Max. My wife hates eels, so I put the eels in to scare her. I needed a character that wasn’t posh or privileged, so I put in Red Kelly. I wanted the plot to be about something that modern kids could understand. I know that drug taking and cheating in sports is talked about a lot these days, so I made the villain someone who was experimenting with steroids and hormones... And so on. BLOOD FEVER I had been on holiday to Sardinia a couple of times and thought it would make a great location for a book. I read a lot about Sardinian history, which gave me lots of idea for the book (the bandits, the silver mines, the nuraghic monuments etc.). I saw a picture in a guide book of this amazing cave called Tiscali, and wanted to use it in the book. I always loved stories about ancient Rome, so wanted to put in some stuff about that, (also see the stuff about Mussolini below). I wanted a villain who was also a hero, and have always loved a story called High Wind In Jamaica, where some children are befriended by a nasty pirate, who eventually sacrifices his own life to save them, so I came up with the idea of Zoltan. (I have a Hungarian friend called Zoltan, who looks very much like Zoltan in the book, but is luckily not a pirate). BOOK 3 As I say, my initial idea was to do a sort of Da Vinci Code for kids. I wanted to have James solving some weird clues to find out what was going on. But as Bond is an action hero rather than a Sherlock Holmes type, I have put in more action and less clues. But I do still think that kids like the idea of clues and codes and secrets so there is quite a lot of that stuff still in there. I also wanted to write about some of the lesser-known corners of London. I got some of this in, but, again, the adventure story took over - I didn't want it to be guidebook, after all. I wanted to write about computers and code-breaking, so this is at the heart of the book. Proper computers weren’t built until the Second World War, but people were thinking about them in the thirties. I also wanted to bring back a character from an earlier book. WHICH CHARACTER RETURNS IN BOOK 3? You’ll have to read it to find out. WHICH CHARACTERS FROM MY BOOKS APPEAR IN FLEMING BOOKS? Will any one from James Bond ever who up in Young Bond like dr.no or M? We decided from the start that we didn't want the books to be too full of in-jokes. We didn't want to have a little bald kid at Eton with a white cat and a scar (although Fleming was at Eton with a man called Blofeld!) And we didn’t want a Little Miss Moneypenny or a junior M. However, I have had fun working little bits and pieces into the books that reappear in later books. The father of the villain from ‘From Russia With Love’, for instance, makes an appearance in Silverfin. And the father of a villain in Thunderball pops up in Blood Fever. I don’t think there are any fathers in book 3, but here are a few things that crop up in later books, like the Bentley that Bond drives in Casino Royale, for example. ARE ANY CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE – RED KELLY FOR INSTANCE? Do any of the characters in the Young Bond series represent anyone in your personal life? Did you ever have a friend like Red Kelly when you were a teenager? I didn't base any of the characters completely on real people. I use bits and pieces from all over the place. I had an Uncle Max who was in the air force, but he wasn’t really very much like the uncle Max in the book and as far as I know was not a spy. My brother had a friend at school called Pritpal Nandra, but he was nothing like the Pritpal in the books. I do remember a boy I was at school with when I was eleven. He red hair and was called Kelly and was a bit wild and badly behaved. For some reason he decided to make friends with me in our final year at school, a lot of the other kids were scared of him and he didn't have a lot of friends. I remember him being quite naughty, but we had some fun adventures. DID I ALWAYS ENJOY ESPIONAGE AND HAVE SIMILAR ADVENTURES TO BOND AS A CHILD? Did you enjoy espionage when you were little? Did you embark on any similar adventures that James did? I was a quiet boy. I loved reading and was never great at sports. So I wasn’t very much like James Bond, I’m afraid. Apart from a few scrapes with Kelly I never really had any Bond style adventures. The parts in Blood Fever where James climbs onto the roof at school were based on something I did at my school (not to be encouraged, I hasten to add!). I always loved James Bond, but whether I was interested in espionage as such, I don’t know. If you think about it, Bond isn’t really a spy at all. He never does any proper spying. He is a secret agent and an assassin. WILL THERE BE EARLY SIGNS OF MI6 IN THE BOOKS? EARLY SPYING SKILLS? Since James Bond will grow up to be a secret agent, will some organisation or someone that has recognised his doings go to him and start to develop skills which will lead to what he will grow up to be? Wait and see. All will be revealed in book 5. I have been planting some seeds, but nobody will really put it all together until the last book is published. Certainly James won’t be going to work for MI6 in my books – don’t worry, he won’t become a dreaded teenage spy - and M won’t appear. But we have already seen through the character of Uncle Max that there is a history of spying in Bond’s family. Maybe someone’s been keeping an eye on him? Events in book five will mean that the secret service gets involved, but I am not going to muck about with the history of Bond that Fleming mapped out – Bond does not properly join the secret service until the Second World War. I hope that in my books we see the beginnings of the man that James grows up to be – he is brave, slightly reckless, he is a little cheeky to authority figures, he has a strong sense of right and wrong, he has good observational skills, he can lie when he has to, he is good at getting close to the villains, he can fight, girls like him... WHAT FLEMING TECHNIQUES DO I USE? Someone noted that in Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, the beginning mimics the beginning of SilverFin. Do you often use Fleming's techniques for Young Bond, or was this a one-off chance? Before writing these books I re-read all of Fleming’s Bond books to try and soak up some of his genius. I didn't try to write in his style, though, which would be impossible. I did try and make my books similar - the plots, the characters, the type of situation that Bond gets into are all based on the original books. The basic elements of a great Fleming Bond book are as follows… 1 – M gives a mission to Bond. (As Young Bond isn’t a spy, this part is obviously different in my books – but they do start with Bond finding out about problem that needs to be solved). 2 – The villain show himself and Bond meets him. 3 – Bond upsets the villain’s plans in some way – or the villain upsets Bond’s plans. 4 – The girl shows herself. 5 – Bond gets close to the villain. 6 – The villain captures Bond (he sometimes captures the girl as well). 7 – Villain tortures Bond. 8 – Bond beats the villain and his henchmen. 9 – Bond recovers from his injuries and gets friendly with the girl, then loses her. I try to stick roughly to this plan. I based the beginning of the first chapter of SilverFin on the opening of Casino Royale. I thought it might be fun, and also remind the world that Bond was created by Ian Fleming and not me. There are other bits and pieces of Fleming I've sneaked in. To list them all here would spoil the fun of finding them out for yourselves. WRITING A BOND STORY - ANY ADVICE? I am writing a Young Bond story have you got any advice? Keep it interesting as well as exciting. If it’s non-stop fighting, punching, shooting and killing it will soon get boring. You need to get to know the characters and care about them so that when the action happens it’s satisfying. You need to be able to look forward to what’s going to happen. Fleming always started his books quite slowly, filling us in on a lot of background information and detail, so that he built up a believable world for the story to take place in. This was so that he could then go completely over the top at the end of his books, and go off into wild fantasy and adventure. This is what I have tried to do in my books. NOTES ON CHARACTERS? When creating characters, do they appear fully-formed in your mind before you write them, or do you think about their history and roots and note it down for future reference? The characters change as I write them, their names change, sometimes they get swapped around or dropped altogether. I make things up as I go along, then when everything’s decided and I've got the story working, I go back and fix it all. Sometimes I’ll come up with the villain’s history afterwards, sometimes that will be the starting point. There are no strict rules to this. HOW DO YOU CREATE A GOOD VILLAIN? What kind of critique do you use for creating villans? What ideas have you had for villans that you didn't use in the novels? Explain to me what should be in a Bond villan. A good villain needs to stick in the mind, be creepy and scary and be very nasty. And there needs to be a reason why they are doing what they are doing, they can’t just doing be evil for the sake of it. Ian Fleming created the best villains – Goldfinger, Blofeld, Dr No, Red Grant, Rosa Klebb, Irma Bunt… As I said before I try to keep to the style of Fleming, so my villains are similar to his. In Fleming’s books, the villains are all older than Bond and tend to be rich and powerful. They are all in a way like father figures, or evil headmasters if you like. People who should be well behaved and are well respected, but who are secretly hatching terrible plots. Fleming partly based his villains on real people – like Mussolini, or the Satanist, Alisteir Crowley. The hardest thing is coming up with what the villains look like, and making them memorable without going down the clichéd route of having them badly scarred, or with claws for hands – although in the end you do have to do a bit of this, otherwise the villains all look the same and don’t stick in the mind. I made Lord Hellebore extremely handsome. Ugo is very pale, almost like a vampire. The villain in the third book is English for a change. WHEN DID YOU START WRITING? WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME A WRITER? What inspired you to become a writer? Did you write stories when you were younger or have you just started writing? I wrote my first book when I was 14, and carried on from there. When I was up in my room and supposed to be doing my homework I would be writing long fantasy novels. I even used to make up languages for them and make dictionaries. The sixth novel I wrote was a thriller called King of the Ants, and it was the first book I’d written that I showed to a publisher. It was eventually published in 1989, although I had started it a couple of years before then. As to what inspired me, and why I became a writer, I don’t know. I have always loved creating things. I was very keen on art at school. But writing a book you can create anything you like, from an entire world down to a pair of special trousers. If I ever read a book I liked I wanted to write a books like it, for my own amusement. Somehow though, writers have no choice. Writing is what we have to do. WHAT DID YOU STUDY AT UNIVERSITY? I was wondering what you studied at University because I want to become an author too. I went to the University Of East Anglia in Norwich, where I studied English and American literature and films. It all helped me with my later writing. WHAT ADVICE FOR PEOPLE, WHO WANT TO BECOME WRITERS? Write! That’s it, really, just write, and then write some more. Plumbers plumb, builder’s build, footballers play football and writers write. Yes, you can study how to do it (the best way to do that is to read lots of books), but in the end you just have to do it and keep in doing it until you get good at it. And then write some more. WILL THERE BE A YOUNG BOND MOVIE? Is there any chance of the books becoming films? Have you ever thought about linking up with Hollywood to turn these books in to a film? Is it true that there will be a young Bond movie soon? I hope so. We’ve certainly had a lot if interest from filmmakers. But we want to get the books established first and not rush into making films, otherwise people only know your characters from the films, and they may be different from how they are in the books. DID THIS STUFF ACTUALLY HAPPEN TO BOND, OR IS IT MADE UP? Now that’s a very good question! It’s the sort of question you study at University. Of course, Bond is a fictional character; there never was a real James Bond (well there was actually. Ian Fleming got the name James Bond from a man who wrote a book about birds of the West Indies). He was made up by Ian Fleming, and then there were all the films with Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, etc. The man has changed a lot over the years. Now Daniel Craig is going to play him and he will change yet again. I have tried to base my books on the books of Ian Fleming, and be true to any facts he tells us in his books about who James Bond was and what had happened in his life. Everything in my books fits with Fleming’s books. That being said, I don’t think Fleming ever imagined that James had such an action-packed childhood! If you want to know what Fleming told us about Bond’s childhood read the obituary of him in You Only Live Twice. But in the end I do what any writer does – I make things up. FAVOURITE BOOKS AS A KID What was your favourite book you read when you were a child? I loved reading historical fiction and especially myths and legends. I read a lot of Greek and Roman stories and Viking adventures and stories about King Arthur. I used to like the books of Roger Lancellyn Green and a female author who wrote historical adventure stories whose name I have sadly forgotten (any suggestions?) I also liked funny books, I read Asterix and Tintin and some great stories about and a mad inventor called Professor Branestawm. GADGETS PLEASE IN NEW BOOK. How long does it take to write a book? Can u put in your next book some gadgets? I'm not very good at thinking up amazing gadgets, which was why I liked the idea of these books being set in the thirties when there weren’t many amazing gadgets around! All I've come up with so far is the knife that James hides in his heel! However in book 3 there is an early computer, a pneumatic railway under London (driven by air pressure rather than electricity) and one of the villains has a combination weapon called an Apache – look it up on the internet and you’ll see what it is. Maybe one of you could e-mail in a picture if you find one. FAVOURITE BIT OF BLOOD FEVER? What Is your favorite part in the book Blood Fever? I like the boxing match in the mini coliseum. I also like the bit where Bond learns to snorkel. I remember learning to snorkel when I was a kid, and I have swum in the very same bit of sea that Bond swims in in the book. I also like the story about Ugo getting trapped in the cesspit. MILENNARIA – ARE THEY REAL? WHAT ABOUT MUSSOLINI? The research into the historical background in BloodFever and it's tie-ins with the then up-and-coming Mussolini interested me. Is the Millerna an actual cult, or was it simply created for a part in the book? If you do research into Young Bond, how do you go about researching it? I do a lot of research in the internet, but I also read history books, guide books, and books written at the time I am wring about. A woman called Susan Powell helps me to find stuff. I made up the secret organization known as the Millenaria, though it was based on the sort of organization that sprang up in Italy in the nineteenth century. I hated studying Latin at school and could never see the point of it, so I got my revenge by having a secret criminal society that spoke in Latin. There are quite a lot of similarities with Mussolini’s fascist party, which was also based on ideas from the great days of the Roman empire. I didn't want to write about Mussolini directly, because I thought it would be a bit cheesy to have young Bond meet the Italian dictator. I like mixing up fact and fiction in the books. I research as much of the background detail as I can, and make sure that the history is all correct, then I can have fun making up my own bits and pieces to add to it. I'm glad that some people think the Millenaria really existed. My original title for the books was Double M, which I liked because it has echoes of M from the adult Bond books and also of course Bond’s double O status. But the publisher thought Blood Fever sounded more exciting, and I think they’re probably right. WILL THERE BE ADULT EDITIONS OF THE BOOKS? Are you surprised by how many adults (like myself) love these books, and has there been any talk about reprinting the books in "adult editions" (i.e., new packaging that can sit in the adult fiction section -- I've seen this done with the Harry Potter books in the UK)? I'm always surprised and pleased if anyone likes my books, adult, child or chimpanzee, I‘m not fussy. I suppose a good story well told will be liked by all ages, even if the hero is a kid. (In a way I set out to write a thriller in which the central character is a child rather than to write a children’s thriller.) I think a lot of children’s thrillers are not very thrilling and a bit soppy. I wanted mine to be really exciting and quite gory and grown up. As to whether there will be an adult edition, that’s up to the publishers, if they think there is a big enough demand I’m sure they’ll put one out. THE GRAPHIC NOVEL What is the latest news with the Young Bond graphic novels? Will you be writing them? Will they be adaptations of Silverfin and BloodFever, or original stories? The first Young Bound graphic novel will be an adaptation of SilverFin, with artwork by the great Kev Walker who has done all the illustrations on the website. I might write the adaptation myself if I have time. I've always loved comics and have a big collection. I also wrote and drew a comic called Jellyhead for Viz comics many years ago. If the graphic novel is a success there will be more of them in the future, perhaps even some original stories. AUSTRALIA Would you ever consider coming down here to Australia to promote the Young Bond series? Could the 5th 'Young Bond' book be set in Australia? I think it would be a good idea. It could include Uluru and Alice Springs. Will you ever do signing in Australia in Melbourne? I love Australia. My little brother lives out in Sydney, and I've been out to visit him a couple of times. I did originally plan to set one of the adventures in Australia, as it wasn’t somewhere that Bond had been to before in the books or films, but it took so long to get anywhere in the thirties that I wasn’t sure that James would have time to get there and back in the summer holidays and still leave room for an adventure. I would love to come out there and talk about the books sometime. ADULT CONTINUATION NOVELS – HOW DOES BOND FIT IN WITH THE TIME SCHEME Are you prohibited from referencing items from post-Fleming authors? In particular, I'm thinking of Raymond Benson's High Time To Kill & the character of Roland Marquis, who's given history with Bond at Eton would make for great expounding upon in your stories while not going contrary to Fleming. Any chance of that happening? In another example, John Pearson's biography of Bond has some nice background for James with the influence of characters like Burglar, Marthe de Brandt & Maddox. Any chance of them showing up in the "future" of Bond's past in your books? What are your thoughts & Ian Fleming Publication's position on harmonizing your stories with John Griswold's Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories? Of note is a particular section called "Chronology of Events by James Bond's Age" in which Bond is born in Nov. 1921. Griswold has Bond starting Eton College in Sept. 1935, which of course doesn't fit SilverFin, which has Bond start in the spring or Lent half at Eton. Would you actually place Bond's start at Eton in the spring of 1935 (which would fit SilverFin mentioning being 2 yrs after his parents are killed (when Bond's 11)), or would you place the book in the spring of 1936, just after James would have turned 14? This is one for the adults and will get a bit technical and boring, so kids can skip it if they want to. When IFP approached me to write these books they said that all I needed to worry about were the Fleming novels. I didn't need to try and include what appears in the films, or in any of the books not written by Fleming. So I have never read any of them. This is Fleming’s Bond. So my books cannot fit in with the continuation novels. The timescale we chose is somewhere roughly in middle of what Fleming created. The dates and details of Bond’s early life change as Fleming’s books and short stories progress, because he was trying to keep Bond roughly the same age through his books. We chose 1920 as a birth date, because we thought that the early thirties were an interesting time for these books to be set. Though it’s never stated in the books, SilverFin starts at the beginning of 1933 when James is 13. Book 5 will take place in the summer of 1934. You can treat the Pearson autobiography and the Benson and Gardner books as an alternative universe, perhaps, but I would go mad trying to include everything. I particularly avoided reading the Pearson book, as I didn't want to steal anything that he had made up. John Griswold has done a great job on unravelling the timeline, but the truth is, Fleming really didn’t give a stuff about this sort of thing, he was fairly lackadaisical in his approach. I'm in the business of writing fiction and although I try to stick as closely as possible to Fleming it isn't always possible – he changed things and made mistakes as he went along so I feel I have a but of leeway.

Saturday, May 20, 2006