Trade secrets were swapped when James Bond met Philip Marlowe,

08-Feb-2007 • Literary

Nearly 50 years ago, on July 10, 1958, two of the most influential popular-fiction writers of the 20th century recorded a 25-minute conversation in London's BBC studios. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, and Raymond Chandler, creator of hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe, had met three years earlier and developed an enormous respect for each other's writing - reports The Australian.

Fleming admired the older writer's literary prose, inscribing one of his Bond books to "Field Marshall Chandler from Private Ian Fleming". Chandler in turn wrote an endorsement of Live and Let Die in which he praised Fleming's ability to capture the American milieu and in particular its street slang.

Chandler wrote, "Ian Fleming is probably the most forceful and driving writer of what I suppose still must be called thrillers in England." Only months before the author of The Big Sleep died, the two discussed the art of writing thrillers, an event Fleming described in the December 1959 issue of The London Magazine: "When the day came, it was very difficult to get Ray into the studio and when I went to pick him up at about 11 in the morning, his voice was slurred withwhisky."

Since the death of his wife Cissy four years earlier, Chandler had been slowly drinking himself to death, and on the tapes he sounds inebriated. Fleming described him as being puffy and unkempt: "When he did look at you, he saw everything and remembered days later to criticise the tie or the shirt you had been wearing. Everything he wrote had authority ..."

Oddly, this tape, which was buried in the BBC archives for more than 30 years, possibly because Chandler was under the influence, had its first world publication in the February 1991 issue of Australian crime magazine Mean Streets. Editor Stuart Coupe had received a copy from an Australian crime writer who "didn't explain exactly where he got it from, but I knew it was genuine". Having failed to trace the tape's origins, Coupe transcribed the entire conversation, editing out some of Chandler's unintelligible passages, before publishing it.

The conversation ranges from how to arrange an underworld killing ("It's simple," Chandler says. "You want me to describe how it's done?" "Yes," Fleming replies) to the difficulties of taking fingerprints from a handgun. "How much do they (the syndicate) get paid for a hit?" Fleming asks. "Ten thousand," Chandler says. "Ten thousand each?" Fleming asks, adding that killing someone would be a difficult thing to imagine doing. He loathed violence.

Chandler: Well I've known people I'd like toshoot.

Fleming: Anyone in England?

Chandler: No, not in England.

Fleming: What do you want to shoot them for?

Chandler: I just thought they'd be better dead. (laughs)

Both writers enjoy each other's wit, Fleming at one point observing that they are both humourists, although he regards Chandler as a more accomplished stylist. "Of course, you don't write thrillers and I do," he says.

Chandler: I do, too.

Fleming: Yours are novels.

Chandler: Other people call them thrillers.

Fleming: You develop your characters very much more than I do, and the thriller element, it seems to me, in your books is in the people, the character building, and to a considerable extent in the dialogue, which I think is some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today.

Chandler was impressed by Fleming's ability as a full-time journalist to finish his seventh Bond book, Goldfinger, so quickly.

Chandler: How do you write so many books with all the other things that you do?

Fleming explained that he holidayed every year in Jamaica, sat down and wrote a new Bond in two months.

Chandler: I can't write a book in two months.

Fleming: But then you write better books than I do.

Chandler: Well maybe or maybe not, but I still can't write a book in two months. The fastest book I ever wrote, I wrote in three months.

For Fleming, Philip Marlowe was a real hero who behaved in a heroic fashion while James Bond was never meant to be a hero. "I intended him to be a sort of blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get him into bizarre and fantastic situations and he'd have to shoot his way out," Fleming says.

One weakness Chandler saw in the Bond series was that there was always a torture scene; he advised Fleming to try brainwashing. Fleming admitted his torture scenes were a weakness. On the other hand, he explained, Bond always has a good time, he beats the villain, he gets the girl and he serves his government. In the process of that, he's got to suffer something. "What do I do?" he asks, "dock him on his income tax?"

Fleming was tired of the heroes in "other people's thrillers" who get a bang on the head with a revolver butt and then were perfectly happy moments later. Chandler admitted this was one of his faults: "They recover too quickly. I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt. The first thing you do is vomit."

Both agreed that the basic ingredients of a good thriller were a cracking pace from the first page, violence, a certain amount of sex, and an element of mystery.

Towards the end, after discussing the difference between American and the English thrillers (the former are much faster paced, the policemen in England are always drinking cups of tea), Fleming tells his friend, "It's been nice to see you again, Ray".

"Well, I love to see you always," is the Chandler response.

The two never met again. Chandler died the following year of alcoholism and pneumonia, and two years after the release of the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962, Fleming died of a heart attack. He would never know how wildly successful the film adaptations of his Bond thrillers would become. "Ian Fleming's writing," Chandler once said in an interview, "is hard, racy, direct, vivid stuff. I've enjoyed all his books (but) the one I liked most is Casino Royale."