How to write a thriller, according to Ian Fleming

A fascinating read I stumbled across and wanted to share. Fleming explains how to write a thriller circa 1963:

https://crimereads.com/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thriller-circa-1963/

Came across that a few years ago. Loved reading Fleming's thoughts. Truly a master of the craft.

Have read this several times now. A great essay.

Quote :

I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh.

Made me think of this from Foucault’s Pendulum:

“Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.“

Given NTTD is the most sexless Bond film ever, it goes to show another way the Craig era fails to capture the spirit and essence of Fleming's works:

Ian Fleming wrote:

My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds... The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh.

The liberal Twatterati class for whom NTTD was made regard Fleming as yet another dead white racist man and Babs obliged by figuratively toppling his statue.

All the more reason the material lifted out of Fleming's YOLT didn't belong in NTTD.

The poison garden was hardly even lip service.

I wrote an essay in a communications class called 'How Not to Write a Thriller' wherein I quoted from Fleming's original. A lot of his advice still holds up today.