The Moments of Bond

Abstract

Ian Fleming always maintained that he wrote Casino Royale in order to take his mind off his impending marriage, as an amusing diversion rather than a determined attempt to become a best-selling writer. Similarly, when, towards the end of his life, Fleming tried to categorise his work, he argued that ‘while thrillers may not be literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature”,’ and cited, as his models in this respect, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.¹ Although it is clear Fleming always kept a weather-eye on the market for popular fiction, this does not seem to have been the market he had primarily in view when he first started writing. Indeed, he was somewhat surprised when it became clear that the Bond novels appealed to a wider readership than he had anticipated. In a letter to CBS in 1957, he wrote: In hard covers my books are written for and appeal principally to an ‘A’ readership but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks both in England and America and it appears that the ‘B’ and ‘C’ classes find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experience and in part incomprehensible.²