The Man with the Golden Gun was my first encounter with James Bond.
It was a birthday treat to the cinema to witness the world's most popular state-sponsored murderer in celluloid action.
I'm not sure if it was the gratuitous killing, the pantomime villains, the gadgets or the fantasy women that floated my boat, or the whole larger-than-life shooting match. But hooked I was and, in a desperate desire to satiate a craving for more tall tales from the inner lining of the Iron Curtain, turned to the novels and Bond's creator lan Fleming.
Since consuming all 14 of the highly quotable books (12 novels and two short stories) in my teens, movie Bond has shadowed me. I interviewed Roger Moore for the anniversary of Bond's 50th and wrestled with the staggeringly awkward Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 at Beaulieu in England, some years later. Much like the women in Bond's life, Fleming's lexicon was an on-off lover.
I was alerted to Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Fleming, The Complete Man, through a colleague in Hong Kong, who'd also shared a similar journey to my ownthrough "paper Bond". He loved it and raved about it. As did I, when my copy arrived in late 2023. Skip forward six months and I'm sitting in the interview room at Clarks Amer in Jaipur, Rajasthan. The hotel is home to the Jaipur Literature Festival and Shakespeare has The Complete Man on tour and is happy to discuss four and a half years of access to the Fleming archive.
When I meet Shakespeare he's upbeat, having come directly from a one-on-one stage discussion with Matthew Parker, the author of Goldeneye (named after Fleming's Jamaican bolthole). He's played to a packed house and has just left the stage having destroyed some young TV hot blood who was stupid enough to enquire as to "Fleming's favourite movie Bond".
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