Funny old thing, that James Bond. Though Ian Fleming died in 1964, his hero has had a charmed existence since, newly incarnated in a variety of actors and films, and in further Bond adventures written by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and, now, William Boyd.
Of these, Boyd seems the best choice. He has a sophisticated interest in the world of espionage, a fluent prose style, and a crisp eye for a Bondish detail. He was pictured, on publication week, in front of one of seven vintage Jensens, each of which was to deliver a copy of Solo, his new Bond novel, to Heathrow, from where they would be flown to various destinations associated with Bond (or Boyd).
What will happen to the books in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Zurich, New Delhi, Los Angeles, Cape Town and Sydney was not announced. Nothing very exciting, I presume. Standing in front of one of the cars, with young women dressed up as glamorous British Airways flight attendants, Boyd looked mildly bemused at this exuberant silliness, but was joining in with characteristic good humour.
I read all of the Bond books more or less as they came out (in paperback) and was, at the time, a devoted fan. James Bond was, to my American eye and ear, an immensely sophisticated Brit. He could be relied upon to defeat villains, bed any pretty girl, and eat and drink to a standard one could only learn from. Shaken, not stirred: must remember …
The films, too, imprinted themselves on my memory: Ursula Andress emerging from the sea; Goldfinger, Oddjob and the poor dead, gilded girl; Pussy Galore and her lesbian acrobats. Sean Connery was an exemplary Bond, and while both Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan made a decent fist of following up, Daniel Craig seems more an automaton than a flesh and blood hero. The films became increasingly reliant on special effects, with ludicrously extended chases of one sort or another, more like video games than movies; an arcade experience, not a cinematic one.
In the first edition market, the Bond books occupy an interesting and in some respects unparalleled place. In my Catalogue Number 1 (1982), as item 37, I listed an extensive Fleming collection, which consisted of all 14 novels, in nice condition in their original dust wrappers, with 22 further Fleming items. I priced it at £1,385, and remember counselling one of my customers not to buy it at what seemed to me rather a high price. The books, I observed, were only a bit of popular culture, unlikely to last, and very likely to be hyped while the Bond phenomenon was still bubbling away. I remember saying something similar about the early inflation of the prices of the Harry Potter books, which have – like the Bonds – continued to rise steeply. I am not a very good judge of this market.
The Fleming collection – which I had purchased from Iain Sinclair before he became a well-known novelist (he spent a lot of his time then as a book scout) – didn't find a buyer, and I had to break it up, ensuring a considerable Fleming inventory for the next few years.
If someone had bought it, it would have been a bargain. The prices for the Bond novels have escalated remarkably since then. I recently saw a copy of Casino Royale (the first novel) in beautiful condition offered at £50,000, and myself sold an equally pristine copy of Live and Let Die (the second) for £17,000. I wasn't particularly happy dabbling once again in the Bond market, but I was asked to source some of the books by a collector-friend, and that, after all, is what a rare book dealer is supposed to do.
My 1982 offering would now be worth at least £75,000, and I would hesitate to dissuade any prospective customer from buying Bond books, which increase in value year upon year. The process has recently been reflected in – and perhaps enhanced by – the issue of a magisterial bibliography of Fleming by the bookseller John Gilbert. It's a lavish, outsized, handsomely comprehensive account of the books, which in itself might be thought of as a collector's item. Originally published at £175, it is a companion worthy of its hero.
If you look at the price trajectory of the Bond books in tandem with other first editions over the same period, there is hardly any comparison. My 1982 catalogue had a lot of nice things, which would be worth a lot more today. It included a copy of Journey of the Magi coolly inscribed by TS Eliot to his first wife – "VHE from TSE 1927" (£775, now perhaps £15,000) – as well as the corrected typescript of Virginia Woolf's Freshwater (£4,250 then, perhaps £30,000 now). Both of these items are unique and important, and both need to be described and analysed with care so that their full significance can be understood. They are, in their own modest ways, part of literary history. Whereas my little Fleming collection had nothing special about it: none of the books were signed or inscribed by their author, there were no letters or manuscripts. Just a bunch of books, of the kind that I suspect you could duplicate with an hour's work on abebooks.com and a very fat wallet.
I do not know why prices of the Bond books have escalated so substantially over the past 30 years. Partly it is a market phenomenon: a lot more people read the Bond novels than Eliot or Woolf, and if a set percentage of the readership becomes collectors, there will always be more demand for the Bond books than those by highbrow literary writers. But the same is true of Barbara Cartland, and nobody collects her.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Bond is not merely a hero, but an archetype. Unlike the ultimate reasoning machine, Bond is an embodiment of the man of action, fit for any purpose, the ultimate answer to the manifold faces of evil. That the collecting market should respond to such figures (in children's literature think of Christopher Robin or Bilbo Baggins) is understandable enough. Collectors pursue a wide variety of agendas, but one of them is undoubtedly the (often unconscious) search for a figure with whom to identify, or one who touches some nostalgic chord.
In the meantime, the new Boyd/Bond is very enjoyable, with a full canvas of gruesome murders, hideous villains, sexy lovers and switched identities. I've read all of the Bond follow-ups, with varying degrees of satisfaction, and Solo is the best of them. It even has a new take on the perfect martini. Bold? Certainly. But Boyd has earned my trust.
