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The Express
began their strip adaptation with CASINO ROYALE on July 7th 1958,
and Anthony Hern, then literary editor of the Express adapted
the book. Hern remembers: “It seemed incongruous to Fleming that
this character, an extension of one of his selves, should be paraded
before the sort of mass readership then represented by the Daily
Express. Another problem was with me. I had never written a script
for a strip of any sort. But I had serialized Fleming’s books in the
Express, cutting the material to fit the demands of a newspaper
serial: not more than 1500 words an instalment, each instalment to
end the day with a read-on cliff-hanger. Here, too, Fleming had been
initially difficult. He thought of his novels as the complete works
of a skilled craftsman. He insisted, if I recall, on seeing a proof
of the very first instalment. He sent me a telegram. It read:
‘SALUTE TO A MASTER BUTCHER’.”
It was plain sailing after that.
But it was because he liked my serialising of the Bond stories that
I was nominated to ‘strip’ Agent 007. We had lunch at Wheeler’s to
overcome Fleming’s last scruple. Over the lobster he told me that in
describing James Bond he had consciously had in his mind’s eye one
of his own sporting heroes, the master golfer Henry Cotton. For the
artist, John McLusky, this was welcome news. At least we now had
picture references, for Cotton had been widely photographed in his
prime. There would now not be any of those tedious wrangles (‘That’s
not how I imagined him!’) We were in business. Fleming now trusted
me to give Bond a good show; I trusted John McLusky to make
pictorial sense of my scenario. Again, we were fortunate Fleming
tended to choose, for his high dramatic points, locations which he
himself knew well: high class hotels, rich men’s gambling haunts.
John beavered away getting pictorial references for the many
background ‘shots’ needed to establish the scene. His artwork was
vastly superior to my script. It was that which ensured the wide
following for the Bond strip after a shaky start. |
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