Thrilling Cities Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Fleming

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. Hong Kong

  2. Macao

  3. Tokyo

  4. Honolulu

  5. Los Angeles and Las Vegas

  6. Chicago

  7. New York

  8. Hamburg

  9. Berlin

  10. Vienna

  11. Geneva

  12. Naples

  13. Monte Carlo

  Author’s Note

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘On November 2nd armed with a sheaf of visas…one suitcase…and my typewriter, I left humdrum London for the thrilling cities of the world…’

  In 1959, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was commissioned by the Sunday Times to explore fourteen of the world’s most exotic cities. Fleming saw it all with a thriller writer’s eye. From Hong Kong to Honolulu, New York to Naples, he left the bright main streets for the back alleys, abandoning tourist sites in favour of underground haunts, and mingling with celebrities, gangsters and geishas. The result is a series of vivid snapshots of a mysterious, vanished world.

  See also: The Diamond Smugglers

  About the Author

  Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in London on 28 May 1908 and was educated at Eton College before spending a formative period studying languages in Europe. His first job was with Reuters news agency, followed by a brief spell as a stockbroker. On the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, where he played a key part in British and Allied espionage operations.

  After the war he joined Kemsley Newspapers as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times, running a network of correspondents who were intimately involved in the Cold War. His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. Raymond Chandler hailed him as ‘the most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England.’ The fifth title, From Russia with Love, was particularly well received and sales soared when President Kennedy named it as one of his favourite books. The Bond novels have sold more than sixty million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No starring Sean Connery as 007.

  The Bond books were written in Jamaica, a country Fleming fell in love with during the war and where he built a house, ‘Goldeneye’. He married Anne Rothermere in 1952. His story about a magical car, written in 1961 for their only child Caspar, went on to become the well-loved novel and film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Fleming died of heart failure on 12 August 1964.

  www.ianfleming.com

  Also by Ian Fleming

  The James Bond Books

  Casino Royale

  Live and Let Die

  Moonraker

  Diamonds are Forever

  From Russia with Love

  Dr No

  Goldfinger

  For Your Eyes Only

  Thunderball

  The Spy Who Loved Me

  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

  You Only Live Twice

  The Man with the Golden Gun

  Octopussy and The Living Daylights

  Non-fiction

  The Diamond Smugglers

  Children’s

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

  INTRODUCTION

  Most of us feel we know the writer Ian Fleming in the persona of his character James Bond, who has perennially survived all hazards to appeal equally to successive generations. Thrilling Cities is a reminder that the creator of 007 was in fact very much a man of his own time, and in particular perhaps of the 1960s, when his imaginative powers exactly suited the temper of the age.

  He was 55 when the book was published, in 1963, and exceptionally experienced. He had studied before the second world war at the Universities of Geneva and Munich, had been a banker and a stockbroker, had spent the war years in British naval intelligence and had gravitated in his middle age into the managerial side of the newspaper business – and, since 1952, into the development of James Bond.

  The essays in Thrilling Cities were originally written as journalism, but display the kind of patrician literary defiance, peculiar I think to himself, that gave the Bond novels their style. They are a very unorthodox kind of travel writing; Fleming was rich, he was fashionably connected, he was famously successful, he was a man of cultivated and urbane tastes and he didn’t give a damn. He was not only out to thrill his readers, most of them Bond addicts by then, with his evocations and often severe critiques of places around the world; he was out to inform and entertain himself. Not often for him the museum or the guided tour: he travelled in the spirit of 007, with an eye always for the slinky and the significant, in places where the martinis were shaken not stirred (or was it vice versa?), and all life could be viewed with a cool raised eyebrow.

  By 1963, as he says himself, he was necessarily viewing it with the eye of a thriller writer, and of course much of the book concerns, in real life, the society of louche excitement that informs his novels – the weirdos and the con men, the gamblers, the whores and the spies, leavened by stars, celebrities and the odd genius. But while it all seems timeless in the Bond films and novels, here it is frozen in the moment of Fleming’s own observation. This is a period piece, Bond’s world is as it seemed in the time of its invention. Fleming flies to the East in a De Havilland Comet, the very first of the jet airliners. He feels it necessary to define sushi for his readers, and finds colour television worth mentioning. A five-star hotel in New York costs $20 a night. Chaplins and Noël Cowards are still around to be stayed with or dined with, and Lucky Luciano the gangster politely comes to tea in Naples.

  And if it is indeed the eye of a popular novelist that sees all this for us, it is the mind of a shrewd and cultured observer that analyses it. Whether he is in London or New York, Honolulu, Hong Kong or Geneva, Fleming looks through the screens of glamour, excitement or notoriety to capture the deeper meaning of the city behind. He is never solemn or ponderous, but he is never philistine either. Thrilling Cities is a triple memorial: to an immortal character of fiction, to a time of history, and to a fine and fastidious writer of English prose – as P. G. Wodehouse is to the comic novel, perhaps, Ian Fleming is to the thriller.

  Jan Morris, 2009

  1

  HONG KONG

  IF YOU WRITE thrillers, people think that you must live a thrilling life and enjoy doing thrilling things. Starting with these false assumptions, the Editorial Board of the Sunday Times repeatedly urged me to do something exciting and write about it and, at the end of October 1959, they came up with the idea that I should make a round trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in beautiful, beautiful prose. This could be accomplished, they said, within a month.

  Dubiously I discussed this project with Mr Leonard Russell, Features and Literary Editor of the paper. I said it was going to be very expensive and very exhausting, and that one couldn’t go round the world in thirty days and report either beautifully or accurately on great cities in approximately three days per city. I also said that I was the world’s worst sightseer and that I had often advocated the provision of roller-skates at the doors of museums and art galleries. I was also, I said, impatient of lunching at Government Houses and of visiting clinics and resettlement areas.

  Leonard Russell was adamant. ‘We don’t want that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘In your James Bond books, even if people can’t put up with Jam
es Bond and those fancy heroines of yours, they seem to like the exotic backgrounds. Surely you want to pick up some more material for your stories? This is a wonderful opportunity.’

  I objected that my stories were fiction and the sort of things that happened to James Bond didn’t happen in real life.

  ‘Rot,’ he said firmly.

  So, wishing privately to see the world, however rapidly, while it was still there to see, I purchased a round-the-world air ticket for £803 19s. 2d., drew £500 in travellers’ cheques from the Chief Accountant and had several ‘shots’ which made me feel sore and rather dizzy. Then, on November 2nd, armed with a sheaf of visas, a round-the-world suit with concealed money pockets, one suitcase in which, as one always does, I packed more than I needed, and my typewriter, I left humdrum London for the thrilling cities of the world – Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York.

  On that soft, grey morning, Comet G/ADOK shot up so abruptly from the north–south runway of London Airport that the beige curtains concealing the lavatories and the cockpit swayed back into the cabin at an angle of fifteen degrees. The first soaring leap through the overcast was to ten thousand feet. There was a slight tremor as we went through the lower cloud base and another as we came out into the brilliant sunshine.

  We climbed on another twenty thousand feet into that world above the cotton-wool cloud carpet where it is always a beautiful day. The mind adjusted itself to the prospect of twenty-four hours of this sort of thing – the hot face and rather chilly feet, eyes that smart with the outside brilliance, the smell of Elizabeth Arden and Yardley cosmetics that B.O.A.C. provide for their passengers, the varying whine of the jets, the first cigarette of an endless chain of smoke, and the first conversational gambits exchanged with the seat-fellow who, in this instance, was a pleasant New Zealander with a flow of aboriginal jokes and nothing else to do but talk the whole way to Hong Kong.

  Zürich came and the banal beauty of Switzerland, then the jagged sugar-icing of the Alps, the blue puddles of the Italian lakes and the snow melting down towards the baked terrazza of the Italian plains. My companion commented that we had a good seat ‘viewwise’, not like the other day when he was crossing the Atlantic and an American woman came aboard and complained when she found herself sitting over the wing. ‘It’s always the same,’ she had cried. ‘When I get on an aircraft all I can see outside is wing.’ The American next to her had said, ‘Listen, Ma’am, you go right on seeing that wing. Start worrying when you can’t see it any longer.’

  Below us Venice was an irregular brown biscuit surrounded by the crumbs of her islands. A straggling crack in the biscuit was the Grand Canal. At six hundred miles an hour, the Adriatic and the distant jagged line of Yugoslavia were gone in thirty minutes. Greece was blanketed in cloud and we were out over the Eastern Mediterranean in the time it took to consume a cupful of B.O.A.C. fruit salad. (My neighbour told me he liked sweet things. When I got to Los Angeles I must be sure and not forget to eat poison-berry pie.)

  It was now two o’clock in the afternoon, G.M.T., but we were hastening towards the night and dusk came to meet us. An hour more of slow, spectacular sunset and blue-black night and then Beirut showed up ahead – a sprawl of twikling hundreds-and-thousands under an Arabian Nights new moon that dived down into the oil lands as the Comet banked to make her landing. Beirut is a crooked town and, when we came to rest, I advised my neighbour to leave nothing small on his seat, and particularly not his extremely expensive camera. I said that we were now entering the thieving areas of the world. Someone would get it. The hatch clanged open and the first sticky fingers of the East reached in.

  ‘Our Man in the Lebanon’ was there to meet me, full of the gossip of the bazaars. Beirut is the great smuggling junction of the world. Diamonds thieved from Sierra Leone come in here for onward passage to Germany, cigarettes and pornography from Tangier, arms for the sheikhs of Araby and drugs from Turkey. Gold? Yes, said my friend. Did I remember the case brought by the Bank of England in the Italian courts against a ring that was minting real gold sovereigns containing the exactly correct amount of gold? The Bank of England had finally won their case in Switzerland, but now another ring had gone one better. They were minting gold sovereigns in Aleppo and now saving a bit on the gold content. These were for India. Only last week there had been a big Indian buyer in Beirut. He had bought sacks of sovereigns and flown them to a neighbouring port where he had put them on board his private yacht. Then he sailed to Goa in Portuguese India. From there, with the help of conniving Indian frontier officials, the gold would go on its way to the bullion brokers in Bombay. There was still this mad thirst for gold in India. The premium was not what it had been after the war, only about sixty per cent now instead of the old three hundred per cent, but it was still well worth the trouble and occasional danger. Opium? Yes, there was a steady stream coming in from Turkey; also heroin, which is refined opium, from Germany via Turkey and Syria. Every now and then the American Federal Narcotics Bureau in Rome would trace a gang back to Beirut and, with the help of local police, there would be a raid and a handful of prison sentences. But Interpol, he urged, really should have an office in Beirut. There would be plenty to keep them busy. I asked where all the drugs were going to. To Rome and then down to Naples for shipment to America. That’s where the consumption was, and the big prices. Arms smuggling wasn’t doing too well now that Cyprus was more or less settled. Beirut had been the centre of that traffic – mostly Italian and Belgian arms – but now there was only a trickle going over, and the sheikhs had enough of the light stuff and wanted tanks and planes, and these were too big to smuggle.

  We sat sipping thin lemonade in the pretentious, empty airport with scabby walls and sand blown from the desert on the vast, empty floors. The doors had been locked upon us and our passports impounded by surly Lebanese police. Flight announcements were first in Arabic – the hallmark of a small state playing at power. It was good to get back to one’s comfortable seat in the Comet and to be offered chewing gum by a beautiful Indian stewardess in an emerald sari with gold trim – not only the ‘magic carpet’ routine but necessary to cope with our changing groups of local passengers. We soared up again into the brilliant night sky and then there was nothing but the desert and, forty thousand feet below, the oil wells flaring in the night. (My neighbour said that the lavatories at Beirut had been dreadful. He added that in an Iowa hotel the lavatories were marked ‘Pointers’ and ‘Setters’.)

  I had armed myself for the flight with the perfect book for any journey – Eric Ambler’s wonderful thriller Passage of Arms, a proof copy of which had been given to me by Mr Frere of Heinemann’s for the trip. I had only been able to read a few pages and I was now determined to get back to it. I offered another book to my neighbour but he said he hadn’t got much time for books. He said that whenever someone asked him whether he had read this or that, he would say, ‘No, sir. But have you red hairs on your chest?’ I said that I was sorry but I simply must read my book as I had to review it. The lie was effective and my companion went off to sleep hogging more than his share of the arm-rest.

  Bahrain is, without question, the scruffiest international airport in the world. The washing facilities would not be tolerated in a prison and the slow fans in the ceilings of the bedraggled hutments hardly stirred the flies. Stale, hot air blew down off the desert and there was a chirrup of unknown insects. A few onlookers shuffled about with their feet barely off the ground, spitting and scratching themselves. This is the East one is glad to get through quickly.

  Up again over the Arabian Sea with, below us, the occasional winking flares of the smuggling dhows that hug the coast from India down past the Aden Protectorate and East Africa, carrying cargoes of illegal Indian emigrants on their way to join fathers and uncles and cousins in the cheap labour markets of Kenya and Tanganyika. Without passports, they are landed on the African continent anywhere south of the Equator and disappear into the bidonvilles that are so much more
hospitable than the stews of Bombay. From now on, we shall be in the lands of baksheesh, squeeze and graft, which rule from the smallest coolie to the Mr Bigs in government.

  Ten thousand feet below us a baby thunderstorm flashed violet. My neighbour said he must get a picture of it, groped under his seat. Consternation! A hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of camera and lenses had been filched! Already the loot would be on its way up the pipeline to the bazaars. The long argument with the chief steward about responsibility and insurance went on far across the great black vacuum of India.

  More thunderstorms fluttered in the foothills of the Himalayas while B.O.A.C. stuffed us once again, like Strasbourg geese, with food and drink. I had no idea what time it was or when I was going to get any sleep between these four- or five-hour leaps across the world. My watch said midnight G.M.T. and this tricked me into drinking a whisky and soda in the pretentious airport at New Delhi where the sad Benares brassware in unsaleable Indian shapes and sizes collects dust in the forlorn showcases. Alas, before I had finished it, a pale dawn was coming up and great flocks of awakened crows fled silently overhead towards some distant breakfast among the rubbish dumps outside India’s capital.

  India has always depressed me. I can’t bear the universal dirt and squalor and the impression, false I am sure, that everyone is doing no work except living off his neighbour. And I am desolated by the outward manifestations of the two great Indian religions. Ignorant, narrow-minded, bigoted? Of course I am. But perhaps this extract from India’s leading newspaper, boxed and in heavy black type on the back page of the Statesman of November 21st, 1959, will help to excuse my prejudices:

  10 YEARS’ PRISON FOR KIDNAPPING

  New Delhi, Nov. 16

  A bill providing deterrent punishment for kidnapping minors and maiming and employing them for begging, was introduced in the Lok Sabha today by the Home Minister, Pandit Pant.