The Man with the Golden Typewriter Read Online Free

affairs. Yet however tempestuous their relationship they did indeed love each other, and the fact of being both husband and father provided Fleming with a solid platform from which his imagination took flight for the next fourteen years.
    TO IVAR BRYCE, ESQ., (address unknown)
    In the early 1950s Ivar Bryce and his wife Jo made the transatlantic crossing four times a year and Fleming often asked them to smuggle items past customs. On one occasion, Bryce recalled, he wrote, ‘Could you execute one chore for me? I badly need a .25 Beretta automatic and I can’t find one in London. Could you pray purchase one in New York and bring it over in your left armpit?’ In 1952, however, Bryce was detailed to carry a particularly important item.
    May, 1952
    Dear Ivar
    Now here is one vital request. I am having constructed for me by the Royal Typewriter Company a golden typewriter which is to cost some 174 dollars. I will not bother for the moment to tell you why I am acquiring this machine. Claire Blanchard 6 has handled all the negotiations and I would be vastly indebted if you would advance her the necessary dollars for the machine and also be good enough to slip it in amongst your luggage, possibly wrapping it up in Jo’s fur coat and hat!
    TO NOËL COWARD, ESQ., Goldenhurst Farm, Nr. Aldington, Kent
    After much to and fro about the state in which White Cliffs had been left, for which Fleming insisted that repairs would cost at least £100, Coward replied with an offer for £50. In the spirit of playful banter that marked their correspondence, he added the words: ‘If you do not want it I can give you a few suggestions as to what to do with it when you come to lunch on Sunday.’
    15th May, 1952
    Dear Messrs Noël Coward Incorporated,
    The mixture of Scottish and Jewish blood which runs in my veins has been brought to the boil by your insolent niggardliness.
    Only Ann’s dainty hand has restrained me from slapping a mandamus on your meagre assets and flinging the charge of bottomry, or at least barratry, in your alleged face.
    Pending the final advices of Mann, Rogers and Greaves, my solicitors, I shall expend your insulting ‘pourboire’ on a hunting crop and a Mills bomb and present myself at one o’clock exactly on Sunday morning at Goldenhurst.
    I shall see what Beaverbrook 7 has to say about your behaviour at lunch today.
    Tremble.
    FROM JONATHAN CAPE, 30 Bedford Square, London W.C.1.
    Writing to congratulate Fleming on the birth of Caspar, Cape was ambivalent about his new author’s capabilities either as a parent or a writer. He had little interest in thrillers, believing them to be short-run phenomena that rarely covered their costs. Nor did he think much of their authors, and suspected that Fleming was a dilettante. Remarkably,
Casino Royale
was the only Bond book he ever read.
    13th August, 1952
    My dear Ian,
    The Times this morning tells me of the good fortune that has come to you and to your wife with the birth of a son. My congratulations and best wishes. You have succeeded I should imagine brilliantly, and I hope and believe that you will be equally successful when you have done athorough job of revising the MS which I have read and about which William [Plomer] is corresponding with you. You are entitled to a certain amount of congratulations on the MS at this stage and I look forward to you having as much success as a novelist as it would seem you are likely to have as a parent.
    To which Fleming replied, more or less cheerfully, on 16 August:
    My dear Jonathan,
    It was very kind of you to have sent me such a charming note on the birth of my son, but it was not so friendly of you to commit me to such a heavy holiday task.
    The story was written in less than two months as a piece of manual labour which would make me forget the horrors of marriage. It would never have seen the light of day if William had not extracted it from me by force.
    However, in view of your interest