Thrilling Cities – Ian Fleming, 1963 ★★★

Come Fly with Me

Air travel was fairly new in 1959; many still lacked the nerve or the money to go up in a plane. What better way to promote round-the-world adventure than in the company of the man who invented James Bond?

This may be the idea behind this pleasant curiosity and footnote in the career of Ian Fleming, as envisioned first by the editors of the Sunday Times and, years later, the publisher of the Bond thrillers. The title hastens to assure you some really exciting places await you inside.

Do they?

Not exactly. Adventure and crime are discussed, in varying degrees, but people picking this up expecting spy tales (like me as a young man) will be disappointed. What you get instead is Fleming the cranky tourist, unapologetic chauvinist, and diverting draftsman of vistas in prose.

Not thrilling, no, but a pleasant lark most of the time.

Fleming recalls an editor’s pitch at the Sunday Times:

“In your James Bond books, even if people can’t put up with James Bond and those fancy heroines of yours, they seem to like the exotic backgrounds. Surely you want to pick up some more material for your stories? This is a wonderful opportunity.”

Ian Fleming cuts a figure on the tarmac. Visiting an airport in Bahrain, he describes "the scruffiest international airport in the world. The washing facilities would not be tolerated in a prison...This is the East one is glad to get through quickly."
Image from https://www.bondsuits.com/ian-fleming-wardrobe-model-james-bond/

That’s the best possible pitch for Thrilling Cities, and a valid one: If you like Fleming’s way of describing the sights and sounds of Bond’s different locales, you get a lot of that here.

Short essays detail Fleming’s 1959 impressions of Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles and Las Vegas (combined), Chicago, and New York City; followed by a 1960 Sunday Times first-person account of Fleming’s driving jaunt across Europe, with stops in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples, and Monte Carlo.

Early on, you get a sense Fleming knows his audience and is writing to their expectations. Looking out his cabin window, he lectures us on the smuggling traffic below, as if Walter Winchell narrating “The Untouchables.” The rise in prostitution in Hong Kong, he later offers, is “partly the traditional desire of Oriental womanhood to please, combined with unemployment and the rising cost of living.” Asians also love gold, Fleming adds, because they tend not to trust paper currency.

If all this comes off as backward and reductivist, Fleming doesn’t care. “Ignorant, narrow-minded, bigoted?” he asks. “Of course I am.”

As they say, your miles may vary. My best times reading this came at the start, with Fleming in Asia. He wears his political incorrectness proudly, enjoys the people and cultures unreservedly, and communicates all this and more quite winningly.

Hong Kong as Fleming saw it in 1959: "Avoiding harsh primary colours, the streets of Hong Kong are evidence that neon lighting need not be hideous, and the crowded Chinese ideograms...are entrancing not only for their colours but also because one does not know what drab messages and exhortations they spell out."
Photo by Mike Cussans from https://www.timeout.com/hong-kong/big-smog/the-1960s-a-decade-that-changed-hong-kong 

On dining in Hong Kong: All the tastes were new and elusive, but I was particularly struck with another aspect of Oriental cuisine – each dish had a quality of gaiety about it, assisted by discreet ornamentation, so that the basically unattractive process of shoveling food into one’s mouth achieved, whether one liked it or not, a kind of elegance.

On gambling in Macau: The Central Hotel is not precisely a hotel. It is a nine-story skyscraper, by far the largest building in Macao, and it is devoted solely to the human so-called vices… The higher up the building you go, the more beautiful and expensive are the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling-tables, and the better the music.

Once Fleming gets to the United States (after a forced landing on Wake Island from engine failure), the book loses some of its vigorous charm.

Fleming’s caustic takes on American people and culture are wonderfully amusing, whether its Las Vegas slot machines or overaged sun bathers in Honolulu. He recalls an adolescent affection for Hawaiian music and claims to have “appreciated my family’s exasperation” about it now. He shares a quiet interlude looking out at a lone woman standing rather sadly on the surf of Waikiki, calling to mind James Stewart and “Miss Lonelyhearts” in Rear Window.

Honolulu postcard, circa 1960. Fleming on the tourist boom there: "If I were a Sheraton or a Hilton, I would reserve a proportion of my hotel space for young and attractive people and put them up for next to nothing, both to gladden the eye of the more hideous customers and perhaps to shame them into dressing their age."
Image from https://www.hippostcard.com/listing/honolulu-hawaiidowntown-honolulu1960-postcard/19580103

Overall, though, a lack of investment slowly tells. He spends a lot of time relating conversations he has with people at police stations and the Playboy Club, and admits to being quite bored by the time he reaches New York:

It was my last lap and perhaps I was getting tired, but each time I come back (and I’ve revisited the city every year since the war) I feel that it has lost more of its heart.

For that reason, perhaps, he fills the New York section of the book with a James Bond story. What better way to sneak some thrills into a travelogue? Actually I suspect without tangible evidence that the story was never part of the Times series and was used to help market the book in 1963.

Fleming was in fading health by then. Perhaps that is the reason why “007 In New York” fails in both the story and guidebook departments.

Bond is in Manhattan to untangle a possible scandal for his boss. While making plans, he reflects on where to dine out and ponders some negative views of Gotham that align with Fleming’s own. The vignette is wrapped up with a quick, comic shrug so fast you might miss it.

What is James Bond's favorite Manhattan dish? Would you believe creamed oyster stew with crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station (seen above)? In Thrilling Cities, Fleming has Bond sing its praises and notes it is a favorite of his, too.
Image from https://www.ediblemanhattan.com/event/feast-seven-fishes-grand-central-oyster-bar-2/ 

The rest of Thrilling Cities is more satisfying. Not as good as the Asian first quarter of the book, but offering plenty of Fleming’s caustic charm. Fleming was now traveling continental Europe by car, in the company of his wife, Ann. Apparently his 1959 Sunday Times series was enough of a success that the editors wanted more of the same in 1960. Fleming obliges, if with a readable sigh.

The second, European half begins in Hamburg, which Fleming enters in July 1960. Had he waited a month, he might have brushed shoulders with those other British tastemakers of the coming decade, as the Beatles began their famous residency at the German port city in August.

Fleming does pick up on one thing the Beatles also did, a total lack of sexual inhibitions. Fleming admires this greatly:

…except to the exceedingly chaste, it is all good clean German fun. People are cheerful. They laugh and applaud and whistle at a kind of erotic dumb crambo which is yet totally unlascivious. Everyone wandering up and down the garish, brightly lit alleys seems engaged in a lighthearted conspiracy to pretend that “anything goes.”

Fleming on Hamburg, 1960: "In Hamburg, normal heterosexual 'vice' is permitted to exist in appropriate 'reservations' and on condition that it remains open and light-hearted. How very different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so disgracefully mismanage things in England!"
Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAwFJ8cVeo

Berlin occasions his most interesting spy tale, about a tunnel dug by the Americans to tap into Soviet communications. It was all going so swimmingly until an East German work crew discovered it while fixing a telephone break. Western embarrassment ensued.

Fleming relates this, like so many tales, second-hand. As was the case with his earlier non-fiction work, The Diamond Smugglers, this approach gives the overall enterprise an unfortunate whiff of barroom journalism, of someone collecting stories that may be dog-eared or bogus rather than bothering to dig out fresher material.

But Fleming can carry this off because his style is so gracefully undemanding, of himself and of the reader:

In Austria and Bavaria, yodeling is light and airy and gay and mixed up with romance. In Switzerland the yodel has deep undertones of melancholy that sometimes descend into an almost primeval ululation akin to the braying moan of the alpenhorn – an echoing pliant against the strait-jacket of Swiss morals, respectability, and symmetry.

The essay on Geneva from which the above is excerpted, and another on Vienna, are peeks into Fleming’s own past; he spent much of his youth in those nations and was even engaged to a Swiss woman.

Geneva, as seen from St. Pierre's Cathedral. In Thrilling Cities, Fleming reveals a love-hate attitude toward the city: "The spirit of Calvin, expressed in the ugly and uncompromising cathedral that dominates the city, seems to brood like a thunderous conscience over the inhabitants."
Image from https://unsplash.com/s/photos/geneva

Even within a city, Fleming bounces around a lot.

In Vienna, for example, he visits a bar staffed by transvestites, rues the loss of hundreds of thousands of Jews on Austrian culture, and discusses atomic treaties with a diplomat. “Having worked briefly in the League of Nations around 1932, I believe that all international bodies waste a great deal of money, turn out far too much expensively printed paper, and achieve very little indeed,” he explains.

In Geneva, he has dinner with Charlie Chaplin and Noel Coward, where talk centers around how Chaplin might insert comedy into the hot new movie Ben-Hur. There are a few of these celebrity encounters, more in the second half. In Naples, Fleming visits exiled American gangster Lucky Luciano, who strikes Fleming as a fine fellow with smart ideas about legalizing drugs to make them less dangerous.

Fleming fought depression all his life; the blues he wrote about in New York reoccur on a trip to Pompeii. This time, at least, he is more engaged by the history around him, even if he finds walking on old lava dreadful. He also marvels at the roadside manners he sees:

With the advent of the motor-scooter, this posturing, previously expressed through flashy clothes, exaggerated tones of voice, expressions, and gestures, has now been vastly reinforced by the attachment, apparently to every Italian male, of a chattering two-stroke engine, an electric horn, and an exhaust pipe.

In Italy, Fleming writes about the grotto of Sperlonga, discovered three years before, where Emperor Tiberius was alleged to have committed numerous cruelties. Fleming is skeptical: "Real monsters are even more difficult to credit than real saints."
Image from https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/villa-and-grotto-of-tiberius

Thrilling Cities concludes with a visit to Monte Carlo. Again Fleming seems low and tired, but he has some advice for casino goers which seems apt and fitting in a Bondian way: “Do not approach casinos with timidity or reverence. They are simply fruit-machines tended by bank clerks and mechanics.”

Thrilling Cities also offers brief postscripts recommending restaurants and other touristy attractions; these seem written by someone other than Fleming in the early 1960s to pad out the book to just over 200 pages. The references sometimes have a flavor of Fleming about them, so perhaps he was consulted or offered some notes to be fleshed out.

I doubt he actually priced out the various establishments, or rated them. By 1962-63, he had other things to do with the little time he had left.

While it does lag at times, Thrilling Cities captures Fleming with more to say about life than live and let die. “Exotic backgrounds” he was sent out to collect, and that’s what you get, resulting in minor but enjoyable fare.