Once upon a time - not my time - this magazine ran a story by Ian Fleming. We shall not in future run stories by Ian Fleming. For one very sufficient reason: We find Ian Fleming's work the nastiest and most sadistic writing of our day. This supposedly gifted scion of the Upper Orders in Britain has waxed fat on the proceeds of a stream of books which compete with each other in salacity and cruelty. Now Ian Fleming is making a film of one of his more objectionable books - "Dr. No," which stars, as usual, Fleming's nasty little hero, James Bond.

When Ian Fleming was compared to Mickey Spillane, the blood, guts and sex American crime writer, he was elegantly appalled. Said he:

"You have to be well educated to write good thrillers. I was expensively educated and I am proud of my factual knowledge."

Mr Fleming was certainly expensively educated. He is a product of Eton, Sandhurst and the universities of Munich and Geneva. He is, indeed, fairly typical of the dream world inhabited by today's Smart Set. His hero Bond drinks the right drinks, drives the right cars, seduces the right sort of girl-blonde, wild, pagan, instantly available at the first twitch of Bond's sleek muscles- and always stays at the right sort of places.

James Bond, in fact, is a cheap and very nasty upper class thug. Yet serious gentlemen writing in the quality papers - the Sunday Times for example - have praised his creator's excellence as a writer of English.

Bond hallmarks:

In the film version of "Dr. No," James Bond will be played by Sean Connery. Mr. Connery - naturally- will be dolled out in all the hallmarks of Bondism: shoes by a St. James Street manufacturer, shirts specially imported from France and a superb suit specially tailored for the rôle in Savile Row. The film will be shot on a million-pound estate in Jamaica.

Worse and worse:

Every Easter for the last few years, Mr Fleming has produced a James Bond book and every Easter the cruelty and depravity of Mr Bond has grown worse and worse. But let's take a look at Dr. No:

"Silence!" Dr. No's voice was like the crack of a whip. "Enough of this foolery. Of course it will hurt. I am interested in pain. I am always interested in finding out how much the human body can endure. From time to time I make experiments on those of my people who have to be punished."

About to be punished on this occasion is a girl called Honey - played in the film by Swiss actress Ursula Andress - who, in some mad way, has got tangled up with Mr. Bond. Honey - in her wild state, as discovered by Bond - is naked except for a "broad leather belt round her waist with a hunting knife in a leather sheath at her right hip."

As Bond appreciates, "the belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic." As an incidental to Fleming's feast of flesh, we should add that "the behind was almost as firm and rounded as a boy's."

Back to Dr. No - a fantastic creature with steel claws instead of hands: "The crabs devour what they find in their path and at present, woman, they are 'running.' They are coming up the mountainside in their tens of thousands, great red and orange and black waves of them, scuttling and hurrying and scraping against the rock above us at this moment. And tonight, in the middle of their path, they are going to find the naked body of a woman pegged out - a banquet for them - and they will feel the warm body with their feeding pincers and one will make the first incision with his fighting claws and then... and then..."

Nice stuff, isn't it? Just the sort of clean, clinical prose to send the literary critics raving. But perhaps you prefer something softer, gentler, some love idyll from the pen of Mr. Fleming? Let's consider his latest book - one of the worst, most boring, badly constructed novels we have read. It is called "The Spy Who Loved Me." And quite a chunk of the first part is devoted to the sexual initiation of a girl called Vivienne Michel.

One little scene occurs in a cinema at Eton in "one of the small streets leading down from the Castle towards the Ascot Road." It is impossible to quote from it. But Vivienne and her boy friend are finally interrupted in their amours by the cinema manager who bursts into their box, takes one look at the recumbent Vivienne and exclaims: "Filthy little brats."

Yet this is the sort of stuff offered by a reputable firm of publishers such as Jonathon Cape as good wholesome reading, presumably for the younger generation. One could go on and on, endlessly quoting filth from the tireless pen of Mr. Fleming. All good, virile stuff beloved by the Upper Class.

Honey, the girl in "Dr. No," has been mauled and raped by a white overseer who smashed her nose in the process. She gets her own back by dropping a poisoness Black Widow spider on his naked belly as he sleeps. Of course, he would have to be naked beneath the mosquito net. All Bond men are almost always naked. This particular bad lad dies a horrid death seven days later.

Carpet beater:

All this is small time stuff for Fleming, whose hero Bond has been in far dicier situations. In "Casino Royale," the very first James Bond story, we meet out hero tied naked (of course) to a chair without a seat. A fat French Communist is holding a cane carpet beater with the trefoil base resting under Bond's chair. I quote:

"He looked at Bond carefully, almost caressingly, in the eyes. Then his wrists sprang suddenly upwards on his knee" - what this means we are not quite sure, but proceed-"the result was startling. Bond's whole body arched in involuntary spasm. His face contracted in a soundless scream and his lips drew right away from his teeth."

In yet another saga of filth, Bond is bound naked to a girl and keelhauled across a coral reef.

Who IS Mr. Ian Fleming? He is a former manager of Kemsley Newspapers, now taken over by Roy Thomson's group. He worked with Reuters, the news agency, Cull & Co., the merchant bankers, Row and Pitman, the stockbrokers, and, during the war, he was personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence. In 1952 he married Anne, Lady Rothermere, the former wife of Lord Rothermere, the boss of Associated Newspapers.

Right people:

Fleming knows all-but all-the Right People. He had Anthony Eden as a guest at his home in Jamaica when Eden was convalescing from the illness that cost him the premiership.

Yes, all the nice people, the people with Oxford accents and a high falutin' attitude to life, just ADORE Ian Fleming and James Bond. We believe that in no other age could so many well-known people go publicly out on a limb for such as despicable fictional character as James Bond and such an appallingly decadent writer as Ian Fleming.

It is all part and parcel of the strange nastiness which afflicts many of the Top People in Britain. These self-same people sneer at the material published by the popular Sunday papers. Yet no Sunday paper we know of would ever dare to print the filth which is annually inflicted on Britain by Ian Fleming.

Yes, it is all most surprising. No doubt the film of "Dr. No" will reap further rich rewards for Ian Fleming. And all this because a bunch of would-be "in the mode" intellectuals has huffed and puffed this nasty writing into respectability.

No filth?

Consider now the enigma of Lord Beaverbrook. His lordship is always claiming that his newspapers never publish filth. Yet no newspaper has done more than the Daily Express to puff the creator of Bond.

Praising a new strip cartoon about Bond, the Daily Express said in 1958: "There could be no higher recommendation to the new Bond strip-a fast-moving adventure that rivals 'Dr. No' and 'Diamonds Are Forever' for thrills, suspense and, of course, GLAMOUR."

Does Lord Beaverbrook read the Ian Fleming novels? If he does, then this son of the Scottish kirk must have a curious idea of what makes good, clean reading. But more likely than not, Lord Beaverbrook has not read the wicked Fleming novels his papers extol and would be shocked to learn their contents. We would hate to think their dirty, sleazy attitude to sex and women could have his approval.

And how do these so respectable journals justify the praises they have lavished on this sadism- praises reproduced by Jonathon Cape on Fleming's dust-jackets: Financial Times: "Pace, humour and style."

Sunday Times: "Admit it, now, Fleming's books are nothing but bloods. Yes, but blue bloods, surely. Bloods springing from a sensational imagination but informed by style, zest and - above all - knowledge.

The Times: "This is a highly polished performance." Yet those self-same critics would no doubt describe the memoirs of Errol Flynn - "My Wicked, Wicked Life" - as published in The People as terrible depravity. They would likewise criticize the News of the World for publishing the memoirs of Diana Dors. Fleming's books contain more violence and more lustful sex than both those memoirs put together and multiplied seven times.

Yes, it all a curious sort of snobbery. And in our view it marks the decadence of a part of the British Smart Set. If the writer is "O.K." - comfortingly "one of us" - anything goes. Rome was rather like this in the days of Nero. Bond is successful among the Slick Set because he appeals to their basic vulgarity and cruelty.

A bean-feast:

He is toughly anti-Red. That is good. He is supposedly "virile" - yet not in the true, earthy sense. Do normal men really regard sex as a tortured bean-feast? What this really means is that Bond would make a nasty little Nazi. At least one Top Paper - the Sunday Times - had Bond's creator on their editorial board. And today, according to the Sunday Times office, he is "an extra-mural adviser" - whatever that may mean.

TODAY makes this declaration:

We stand firmly against all the things represented by Mr. Fleming. We find his writings disgusting drivel. We deplore the manner in which they have been puffed. And we deplore even more the fact that a respectable publisher chooses to put his imprint on them.

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