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his team were undercover German veterans who intended to drop an atom bomb on Britain itself. Bond’s involvement stemmed from an invitation by M to investigate Drax’s flukish run of luck at Blade’s, London’s premier gentleman’s club. As he soon discovered, Drax was a card sharp. Having outcheated him at a game of bridge, Bond found himself assigned to guard duty at Drax’s missile installation. Piece by piece he unearthed Drax’s plansand, after several brushes with death, managed to alter the missile’s course so that it landed in the North Sea. Its detonation killed several hundred innocent observers aboard a warship – also Drax, who had fled, gloatingly, in a submarine – but saved the millions that would have died had it hit London.
    The action was set mainly in the county of Kent, where Fleming spent most weekends, and was researched with rigour. He sought advice from, among others, the Bowater Corporation, then the world’s largest producer of newsprint, and the British Interplanetary Society (whose recent chairman, Arthur C. Clarke, was sadly unavailable for comment). Given a growing vogue for wartime literature, and Britain’s technological advances in rocketry and nuclear physics, it was pitched perfectly at the domestic market.
    Nevertheless, Fleming felt there was something missing. The title, for a start, eluded him. As did the gung-ho certainty of his previous two books. It was almost as if by putting 007 on home territory he had shorn him of his vigour: Bond did not get his girl, the policewoman Gala; he won the war but not the battle – Drax’s missile missed its intended target, but still caused multiple casualties; and the plot went beyond (or perhaps beneath) the usual romantic escapism. To compound Fleming’s uneasiness the film deal with Korda came to nothing. He fell prey briefly to pessimism and wondered if Bond had any future at all.
    He quickly regained his self-confidence. One of his mantras was that if you didn’t make your own way then nobody else was going to do it for you. On 4 April 1954, under the title
Spur to Fame
, Atticus included a verse by poet laureate John Masefield:
    Sitting still and wishing
    Makes no person great.
    The good Lord sends the fishing.
    But you must dig the bait.
    Noting that it had inspired hundreds of people – ‘mostly budding authors one suspects’ – Fleming renewed his assault on Cape for higher royalties and better publicity. Remarkably, it worked.
    There were other causes for optimism. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was interested in the book, as was Rank. Thus enthused, he flew to America in August to research his next novel. For once there would be no quibbles about the title. It was to be called, from the start,
Diamonds are Forever
.
    FROM SIR ALEXANDER KORDA, London Film Productions, 146 Piccadilly, London, W.1.
    In a letter dated 1 January 1954 Sir Alexander Korda waxed enthusiastic about
Live and Let Die
– ‘Your book is one of the most exciting [books] I have ever read. I really could not put it down…’ – but didn’t think it was one his company would take up. Nevertheless, he encouraged Fleming’s future efforts in that direction: ‘I feel that the best stories for films are always the stories that are written specially for films. Would you be interested in working on one?’
    TO SIR ALEXANDER KORDA
    6th January, 1954
    Thank you for your most exhilarating letter. I hope the public will share your views.
    I think my next book, which I shall start to write on Sunday in Jamaica and finish around March 10th, may be more to your liking as it is an expansion of a film story I’ve had in my mind since the war – a straight thriller with particularly English but also general appeal, set in London and on the White Cliffs of Dover, and involving the destruction of London by a super V.2, allowing for some wonderful settings in the