Fleming’s Pornography

Expect Bondmania to move to fever pitch between now and May 28, when James Bond creator Ian Fleming -- who died in 1964 -- would have turned 100 years old.

Crap Towns author Sam Jordison recently got into the action at The Guardian book blog:

As the 100th anniversary of his birth approaches, it’s tempting to characterise Ian Fleming as The Man With the Golden Pen, as a calculatingly commercial author of absurd misogynistic fantasies. Even his own wife Ann icily described him as “hammering out pornography” when he spent his disciplined three hours a day writing the books in their Jamaican home.

Later in the piece, though, Jordison loses me--and possibly you--when he says that “just like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, Fleming is slowly being adopted into the literary fold.”

The Bond books were often fun, the storytelling competent, and a few really good films have been based on those tales. But let’s face it, folks, as a writer Fleming was never in the same league as Chandler and Hammett.

The Guardian blog piece is here.