My new novel DEATH IN THE
FACE centers on James Bond creator Ian Fleming and two 007-driven excursions he
made late in life while a very unwell man.
 |
| James Bond sometimes smoked dozens of cigarettes daily in the original novels. Ian Fleming seemed driven to match his character's smoking habits. |
Pre-order DEATH IN THE FACE here
Like fellow macho author
Ernest Hemingway, Fleming was a man who seemed driven to live the
larger-than-life escapades he put down on paper.
In my series of novels about
Hector Lassiter (DEATH IN THE FACE is the 9th in the 10-novel
series), novelist-screenwriter Hector Lassiter is often dubbed “The man who
lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”
While the Lassiter series
make it clear there is harrowing truth in this assessment, Hector is far more
circumspect than Hemingway or Fleming. In the end, as a man and an artist,
Hector is a survivor, and his groping towards continued existence is his larger
character arc that binds and drives the series to its conclusion.
Hemingway has been an
on-the-page character, sometimes even a kind of “co-star,” in four of the
Lassiter novels. Actor-director Orson Welles has also appeared in several of
the novels in a similar context.
For me, Fleming represents
the third and final of Lassiter’s major artist companions—three tragic men
whose self-destructiveness point a light for Hector toward his own salvation.
Ian Fleming has been name-checked
in previous Lassiter novels; his role in Hector’s later life deliberately foreshadowed:
With DEATH IN THE FACE, he at last arrives to the Lassiter series in person.
My new novel is patterned to
replicate the kind of structure Fleming himself often used in his James Bond
novels. I’ve tried to evoke some of Fleming’s narrative voice while remaining
true to the tone of the Lassiter novels that have come before.
 |
| Ian Fleming in Beppu, Japan. That city, and this statue, figure in DEATH IN THE FACE. |
DEATH opens with Hector
accompanying Fleming on a research trip across Japan for his penultimate Bond
novel YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. The second half of DIF takes Ian and Hector to
Istanbul, to witness some of the filming of the second Bond film, FROM RUSSIA
WITH LOVE.
In a passage cut from the
final version of PRINT THE LEGEND, I referenced an anecdote repeated in several
Fleming biographies and articles about the way in which a dying Fleming bonded,
so to speak, with actor Pedro Armendariz, the fine actor who plays Bond’s companion
Kerim Bey in FRWL. (He also played another real life character central to my series,
one Pancho Villa.)
 |
| Pedro Armendariz and Ian Fleming in Istanbul during the filming of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. |
During their mutual stay in
Istanbul, Fleming and Armendariz purportedly talked at length about Ernest
Hemingway and his then-still-relatively recent suicide by shotgun.
Upon returning to North
America, Armendariz smuggled a firearm into the hospital that he used to end
his own life.
For his part, Fleming continued
to kill himself just as surely, but more slowly, with forbidden cigarettes and
liquor.
At the end of the novel
(spoiler alert!) YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, Bond is presumed dead and his obituary
printed. It incorporates a quote from Jack London that surely spoke to Ian Fleming’s
own sense of fatalistic bravado:
“I would rather be ashes than dust. I would
rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than that it should be
stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in
magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function
of man is to LIVE. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong
them. I shall use my time.”
My novel of Ian Fleming and Hector Lassiter and
their last journey together as authors, former spies and friends takes its cue
from a quote Fleming placed at the beginning of his Japan-centric Bond novel:
“You
only live twice: Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face”
Next time: Author Yukio
Mishima, and his role in DEATH IN THE FACE.
Posts
