The Books Briefing: When Ian Fleming Got Sick of James Bond

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Writing novels about the British superspy James Bond brought the author Ian Fleming immediate success. Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, was released in 1952; in the 12 years to follow, Fleming would pump out more than a dozen other books about his secret agent (two were published posthumously). But “by 1960, he was sick of Bond and wondering how he could kill him off,” my colleague James Parker writes in this month’s issue. Fleming died in 1964, but Bond has outlived him as a movie character, a global brand, and an icon. You know his lines: “Shaken, not stirred”; “Bond. James Bond.” Fleming, the person, is poorly remembered by comparison (though Nicholas Shakespeare recently wrote a biography of him, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, which tells the story of the creator overcome by his invention).

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Agatha Christie got tired of Hercule Poirot; A. A. Milne had enough of Winnie the Pooh. But the best-known example of an author who rejected the work that made him famous is probably Arthur Conan Doyle. By 1893, after having written dozens of Sherlock Holmes plots that brought him literary and financial success, Doyle was done with the detective. At the end of “The Final Problem,” meant to be Holmes’s last case, he dies after sailing over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

“I must save my mind for better things,” Doyle wrote to his mother, “even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him.” With that done, he moved on—for a time. His fans didn’t, and in 1901, facing pressure from readers, Doyle dreamed up a new adventure for his sleuth, The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before Holmes’s untimely death. And then, two years later, Doyle capitulated once again: In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” readers learn that Holmes actually faked his own demise. Doyle would keep publishing tales about Holmes until nearly the end of his life. Almost a century after his death, many readers don’t know that he was also a prolific writer of historical novels, plays, and other short stories.

Accounts of authors who have disliked their characters feel counterintuitive and a bit transgressive, especially if writing about them made their authors particularly well known. But I don’t think it matters that much if the artists later turned their back on their work, because these fictional people now belong, essentially, to their fans. (In many instances, their longevity is also thanks to their wildly popular film and television adaptations.) A made-up person is much more malleable than a real one. We remember Bond and Holmes more than their creators because their legacies are in the collective hands of the people who inherited them—that’s us.

The James Bond Trap

Ian Fleming created the superspy—and then couldn’t get rid of him.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Winter is an internal season, and in Harding’s skinny novel, which covers the eight days before the ailing Mainer George Washington Crosby passes away, we are pulled into a man’s interior world. Surrounded by his family, George is nevertheless trapped both in the house and in his failing body, and as he slowly ticks through the hours before death, his mind is filled with the history of his absent epileptic father, who took off in George’s youth. George became a clock repairman in his old age; both he and his father were tinkers and hoarders, trying to provide for their families but unsure of how. When his father shows up on George’s doorstep unannounced one Christmas, the two can’t find a way to be comfortable with each other. Tinkers is a book about craft, inheritance, and survival in brutal times, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in part for its careful language: “Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have. That it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?”  — Heather Hansman

From our list: Six books about winter as it once was

Out Next Week

📚 This American Ex-wife, by Lyz Lenz

Your Weekend Read

On Failing the Family Vacation

By Kim Brooks

On the last night of our vacation, Beth told me that the secret of being a single woman is that “it’s actually not hard at all. Being in a relationship is hard. Being married is hard. As long as you have a community and good friends, being single is easy. But you have to pretend that it’s hard. You have to pretend that you’re sad and lonely, because otherwise every woman would want to do it, and then society would fall apart.”

Read the full article.