Ian fleming

This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s mother, of lung cancer in 1998: ‘She died with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month.’ Adam too is self-effacing, moving in while his mother was dying, then staying on as his father’s main carer. The second of three brothers, he explains away this generous act: ‘As an under-employed freelance, I had time to spare.’ ‘Dad’, diagnosed informally as ‘demented’, was by then a retired High Court judge granted a low rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn. Adam lived in the flat’s converted attic. Adam is thorough and, it appears, fair.

When from my eyrie beneath the Christ Corcovado I looked closely at this (unusually) typed letter from Ian Fleming I saw that it was ‘dictated in his absence’ and that it must have been sent by the devoted ‘Griffie’, model for Miss Moneypenny. Scarcely surprising: five days later, on the 12th birthday of his only child Caspar, Ian — as much a father to me as a stepfather — died from a third massive heart attack. (‘I am sorry to have troubled you like this,’ he said to the ambulancemen who took him to Kent & Canterbury hospital.) That too was not unexpected. Early in 1963 I left for Rio de Janeiro, where my husband John Morgan had been posted as commercial attaché.

There is one last James Bond book from the late 1950s that remains unpublished. We will not find the typescript lurking in the archives, nor hidden amongst the papers held by Ian Fleming’s estate, for this book is not about James Bond but written by Bond himself. It is from Fleming’s 1959 novel Goldfinger that we learn that 007 spends his hours on night duty at the Secret Service compiling a manual on unarmed combat called Stay Alive!, containing the best that had been written on the subject by his peers in intelligence agencies around the world.