Thrillerdom

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30419, 18 April 1964, Page 4

Thrillerdom

Discussing a new James Bond book he was going to Jamaica to write, lan Fleming said in New York recently that normally he would have about 80 per cent of it in mind, “but now there’s only 30 per cent.”

“The way I work, it’s important to get the first line, and I think 1 have that,” said Mr Fleming. “‘There was a lot about the Secret Service that James Bond didn’t know.” That will be a good steppingoff place, but it isn’t 80 per cent of a book.

“Villains are getting increasingly hard to come by. I seem to have run out of villains. The older you get, the more compassionate you get. The real villains are psycho, badly, brought up as children or something. It gets tougher to find a proper enemy. Heroes are easy, heroines are easiest of all. They’re shortlived, only for the duration of the book.

“In this particular world of thrillerdom, life is different from that of writing novels. In the end, the whole thing is to have a tremendous lark. I regard my job as that of entertaining other people—to have them say, if they like, ‘You really did go beyond the realm of probability in that one, didn’t you?’ This is a world of adult fairy tales.”