QUICK! The Bureaucrats are coming!

literarybond:

James Bond, meet James Trotter. James (left) works for Her Majesty’s government in London and has a Bentley. James (right) lives with his horrible aunts in Dover and has a giant peach.

Don’t worry, I haven’t gone mad. I just wanted to do another author comparison, this time looking at Ian Fleming and his good friend, Roald Dahl.

Dahl is best known for his children’s classics including James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvelous Medicine, and Danny, Champion of the World. Alongside the 007 series, Fleming also wrote a beloved children’s story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Dahl’s general fiction is dark, gruesome and filled with the same black humour as his children’s stories (only moreso). I was thrilled to learn that my favourite Dahl story, Lamb to the Slaughter, was actually inspired by Fleming. While attending a dinner party, they started talking about clever murder weapons; Fleming had the idea that you could use a certain frozen item as a weapon, and a story was born.

In Moonraker (1955), James Bond teases Gala Brand as she’s picking flowers, saying that an Indian professor had recorded the scream of a rose being picked (pp. 101-102). I daresay Fleming got the idea from a 1949 short story of Dahl’s entitled The Sound Machine, which features a scientist who has invented a machine to study the sounds plants make.

Fleming and Dahl shared many other similarities besides their work. Both went to prestigious prep schools (Fleming went to Eton, Dahl went to Repton); both were gifted athletes, and both had important military positions during World War II (Fleming was a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy; Dahl was a pilot in the Royal Air Force).

During the war, both worked for the same espionage division of the British government. The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington details the espionage and propaganda work Dahl, Fleming and others did to encourage the U.S. government to join the European theatre of operations.

After Fleming’s death in 1964, Dahl adapted two of his late friend’s books into screenplays: You Only Live Twice (1967), starring Sean Connery and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) starring Dick van Dyke.