By: KatherineS,
on 11/4/2015
The durable Bond is back once more in Spectre. Little has changed and there has even been reversion. M has back-morphed into a man, Judi Dench giving way to Ralph Fiennes. 007 still works miracles, and not the least of these is financial – Pinewood Studios hope for another blockbuster movie. Hollywood roll over and die.
The post Spectre and Bond do the damage appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 8/14/2015
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/22/2015
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/7/2015
Last year, Dynamite Entertainment and Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. announced a new partnership to create several new products centered on the legendary James Bond. The two companies recently announced that Warren Ellis has been hired as the writer and Jason Masters has been brought on as the artist for the James Bond 007 comic book series.
Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “The first six issue arc of the series will be titled ‘VARGR,’ and feature the return of a young Bond to London after a mission in Helsinki, only to inherit a mission left incomplete after the death of a fellow agent. James Bond 007 will launch in comic book stores and digitally in November.”
According to Comic Book Resources, some of the other Bond-related projects in the pipeline include adaptations based on Ian Fleming’s original books and a James Bond origin story. The origin story project will take readers to a time prior to the events of the Casino Royale novel. (via io9)
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 2/16/2015
Bluewater Productions has created a biographical comic book profiling Ian Fleming. Fleming was best known as the author behind the James Bond spy novels.
Matthew J. Elliot wrote the story and Ross Bampfylde created the artwork for this 28-page book. Follow this link to view a selection of sample pages.
Here’s more from the press release: “Fleming, a British author and journalist, also served as a British Naval Intelligence author. This experience fueled stories rife with intrigue, danger, and secrets. Fleming’s eleven Bond novels rank among the best-selling fiction novels of all time, and his children’s story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, has been adapted into feature films and for the Broadway stage.”
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By: Savita Kalhan,
on 10/4/2014
“Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal.” T. S. Eliot
A couple of recent articles by writers have made me think about the process of writing and the question of theft in writing. I’m often asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” I’m pretty sure every writer gets asked this question at some point in time.
My imagination is pretty vivid, I would usually respond. So when I hear a story, or a piece of news, or someone relates an incident that has happened to them, I store it away – to perhaps use one day. My imagination will usually do the rest, amplify it, alter it, assign it to a character, incorporate it into a story line, perhaps even make it the whole crux of a plot. As William S Burroughs said, “All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?”
I’m not sure anyone would really call it theft or stealing – unless you ‘borrow’ whole sentences or paragraphs, and that’s a whole different blog! What makes stories relevant, individual and original is how the source of inspiration is used and manipulated by writers. If a number of writers are asked to use the same news item as the inspiration for a story, you can be assured that it will result in several very different stories. I ran a creative writing workshop last week where I gave fifteen students the same opening sentence. By the end of the session, each of the students had taken that sentence and continued it into a whole variety of stories ranging from ghost stories, adventure, romance, fantasy and science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard’s words: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
In a recent essay describing his creative process, Ian Fleming, said that many of the scenes in his books are drawn from real incidents that he “dolled up, attached a hero, villain and heroine to, and there was the book.”
He may have over-simplified it, but perhaps not – he used to write the first draft of a story in six weeks, which is pretty astounding. Here’s a link to the rest of his essay. It’s an interesting read. http://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/literary-ian-fleming-how-to-write-a-thriller?t&s&id=03763
My writing process has come under pressure these past few months, and my motivation and staying-power is not quite what it used to be. I’ve tried working in different places and at different times, but I have felt stuck. October is the month that that will all change. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve told myself. Fleming had a tropical island hideaway where he wrote, uninterrupted, 2000 words a day. I may not be in the fortunate position to be able to fly away to Jamaica and work four solid hours a day so that at the end of just six weeks I could have a first draft of 60,000 words under my belt, but I’m damned well going to try and get the current work in progress from draft to manuscript.
By: Anthony Horowitz,
on 10/2/2014
Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels, has been invited to write a new James Bond adventure by the Ian Fleming estate.
Currently dubbed Project One, the book will be set in the 1950s and contain previously unseen Fleming material.
Horowitz said Fleming’s hero had had “a profound influence” on his life adding: “This is a book I had to write.”
The material, an episode treatment for an unmade James Bond TV series, takes 007 into the world of motor racing.
Entitled Murder on Wheels, the treatment will serve as a starting point for Horowitz’s novel, to be published on 8 September 2015.
“When the estate approached me to write a new James Bond novel how could I possibly refuse?” said the 59-year-old, who was made an OBE in the New Year Honours.
“It’s a huge challenge… but having original, unpublished material by Fleming has been an inspiration.”
“In the 1950s, Ian Fleming wrote several episode treatments for a James Bond television series,” said Jessie Grimond, the author’s great-niece.
“But it never came to be made and he ended up turning most of the plots into the short stories that are now in the collections For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy and The Living Daylights.
“However, there are a few plot outlines which he never used and which, till now, have never been published, or aired.
“Given that Anthony is as brilliant a screenwriter as he is a novelist, we thought it would be exciting to see what he would do with one of them.”
Read the full story on BBC News
By: Kirsty,
on 12/1/2011
On 27th June 1941, in Washington D.C., Lt-Commander Ian Fleming RNVR drafted a short ‘Memorandum to Colonel Donovan’ on how to structure and staff the headquarters of his new American intelligence agency, COI, to be set up by Christmas 1941. Fleming suggested taking over a section of the FBI building and liaising closely with the Attorney-General and J. Edgar Hoover; Donovan would need to make friends with both the State Department and the FBI and enlist their full help ‘by cajolery and other means’. As Co-ordinator of Information, Donovan would have to ‘dragoon’ the War and Navy Departments into co-operation and be ‘prepared to take action quickly if they don’t help.’ Fleming recommended that Henry Luce of TIME magazine be asked to run Foreign Intelligence, a good “sapper” or military engineer should run Sabotage (a practical problem where romantics should not be encouraged), and Edgar Hoover should nominate someone to run Counter-espionage. Ian Fleming, who had a background as a Reuters news agency correspondent, thought Donovan would need a ‘Managing Editor with staff from a news agency foreign desk to receive and disseminate intelligence from a central office at GHQ’. He suggested consulting the head of Associated Press and getting staff from only one news agency to avoid jealousies and friction. There would have to be heads of country sections, liaison officers with other government departments, someone in charge of communications (‘A good Fleet Signals Officer’), someone to run matériel and transport (‘Consult American Express’) and many Field Officers (‘Pool the files of the State Department, Navy and Army, and pick the best. Appoint talent scouts to find more if necessary.’) Whoever recruited personnel should be a ‘thoroughly critical and sceptical man’. To liaise with the British Secret Service in London, Ian Fleming with his naval background naturally suggested people he knew through the Naval Intelligence Division: Commander Christopher Arnold-Foster and Captain Eddie Hastings. He wanted the closest cooperation between Britain and America: ‘Request CSS [the head of MI6] to allow your men in the field to work closely with ours’, and he advised judicious punishment pour encourager les autres: ‘Make an example of someone at an early date for indiscretion and continue to act ruthlessly where lack of security is concerned.’
Three weeks later, Fleming sent his boss Admiral John Godfrey, now back in London, a MOST SECRET cable about Donovan’s progress to date as Coordinator of Information.
1) Initial grant of ten million dollars placed at his disposal.
2) Washington personnel will be housed in Library of Congress and New York office will be at No. 2, Wall Street.
3) Skeleton staff should be at work by August 15th.
4) Information from Colonel Donovan will go direct to the President.
5) Emphasis has shifted towards strategical, economic and psychological research work and planning.
6) Propaganda in enemy countries will have a considerable role under ROBERT SHERWOOD, dramatist, working with radio corporations and Federal Communications Committee.
7) Geographical sections containing one naval, one military, one flying officer with civilian experts will be created. They will report to a Joint Intelligence Committee which will include Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of Military Intelligence, State Department. Their sources of information will be Service Intelligence departments supplemented by any fields they may be able to develop. These sections will also nominally repeat nominally be charged with Secret Intelligence Service, Special Operations 1 [propaganda] and Special Operations 2 [active operations] work
By: Kirsty,
on 11/29/2011
On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.
Until December 1941, the United States of America was neutral in the Second World War. In two years of open blitzkrieg, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe; Britain stood alone and broke, summoning aid from its overseas dominions and colonies. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered well that industrial America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 had assured victory. He needed a repeat, but the US President F.D. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously.
The first American aid to the Allied cause was spun as protecting an isolationist nation. In return for 50 old American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the USA obtained from the British Empire 99-year leases on a chain of strategic Atlantic bases: in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Between January and March 1941, there were also secret military and naval staff talks codenamed ABC – the American-British Conversations. Following these, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee in London sent the two men to Washington DC to help ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’.
The relationship of Admiral John Godfrey to Ian Fleming was like that of ‘M’ and James Bond, but also father/son. Fifty-three-year-old Godfrey had three daughters but no son; thirty-three- year- old Fleming had three brothers but no father. (Major Valentine Fleming DSO had been killed in the Great War just before Ian’s ninth birthday.) Admiral Godfrey had a brilliant mind but a volcanic temper; Ian Fleming was imaginative and imperturbable. He was a good fixer and drafted swift, crisp memos.
The two men flew KLM to Lisbon and then took the Pan Am Boeing 314 seaplane via the Azores to the British colony of Bermuda, 600 miles east of North Carolina, where the first American garrisons were building a base to help protect what President Roosevelt called ‘the Western Hemisphere’. Hamilton, Bermuda was where the British had set up the Imperial Censorship and Contraband Control Office to read the world’s mail, taken off transatlantic ships and planes. Fifteen hundred British ‘examiners’, also known as ‘censorettes’ because most were women, worked in the waterfront Princess Hotel, processing 100 bags of mail a day – around 200,000 letters – and testing 15,000 for microdots and secret ink messages, before sending on the bags on the next plane or ship. At first the USA objected to this infringement of liberty, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon realised how useful the system was when it began to reveal foreign enemy agents on US soil.
Godfrey and Fleming arrived in New York City on 25 May 1941. They stayed at the St Regis Hotel on 55th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan and soon went to meet ‘Little Bill’, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, and his American friend and ally ‘Wild Bill’, Colonel William J. Donovan.
The bullish Bill Donovan (a WW1 Medal of Honor winner and New York lawyer) had twice travelled to the war-zone on unofficial inquiry missions for the US president. All doors had been opened for him: Winston Churchill was eager for American help. Donovan had got on well with Admiral Godfrey in London in July 1940 and had met Fleming in Gibraltar in February 1941.
The other Bill, ‘the quiet Canadian’ Bill Stephenson, had been sent to the USA in June 1940 by the British Secret Service with the mission of improving relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. President Roosevelt recommended ‘t
Ian Fleming Publications has appointed Jonny Geller and Curtis Brown as the literary agents worldwide for the Ian Fleming James Bond novels as well as future Bond literary works, taking over from Simon Trewin at United Agents.
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By: Jennie,
on 3/30/2010
Although I will fail mightily at the 1% challenge, I am trying hard to cram in as many books at the end here as possible. Luckily, they tend to double count with other challenges.
When the book was published, baccarat was the game for aristocratic gambling, but not many people may have heard of it at the time, thus the big explanation was probably needed.
I wasn't exactly shocked when they changed the game to poker for the movie- it looks better on film.
That makes sense, and not being familiar with baccarat, I appreciated it, but I think there's a way it could have been done so it didn't completely disrupt the tension and building of the scene.
Also, ever since I wrote this review, I've been thinking of Jon Hamm has James Bond, which is an image I really like.