Thrilling Cities

Template:Short description Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Good article Template:Infobox book

Thrilling Cities is a travelogue by the author and The Sunday Times journalist Ian Fleming. The book was first published in the UK in November 1963 by Jonathan Cape. Fleming covered Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo.

Thrilling Cities was initially a series of articles Fleming wrote for The Sunday Times, based on two trips he took. The first trip was in 1959, in which he travelled around the world, and the second was in 1960, in which he drove around Europe. The first trip was at the behest of The Sunday TimesTemplate:'s features editor Leonard Russell; the paper's chairman, Roy Thomson, enjoyed the series so much he requested Fleming undertake a second trip. The book version includes material edited out of the original articles, as well as photographs of the various cities. Fleming is better known as the author of the James Bond series of books; Thrilling Cities is one of two non-fiction books he wrote, the other being The Diamond Smugglers, which was published in 1957.

SynopsisEdit

Thrilling Cities is Ian Fleming's view of thirteen cities he visited in two trips in 1959 and 1960. The cities it covers are: Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles and Las Vegas (the two cities are examined in one chapter), Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. Fleming's account is highly personal and deals with his visit and his experiences and impressions. Each chapter closes with what Fleming titled "Incidental intelligence", dealing with the hotels, restaurants, food and night life, in which he gives his recommendations for the best of each.

In Hong Kong, Fleming visits the bar of the Luk Kwok Hotel, a brothel—a destination made famous at the time by Richard Mason's 1957 novel The World of Suzie Wong. In Macau he goes to the Central Hotel, a nine-storey building dedicated to enjoyment, which contains casinos and a six-storey brothel. In Tokyo he meets his friend Somerset Maugham for lunch and then has a Japanese bath. Fleming also visits a geisha house.Template:Efn As Fleming notes, "Most foreigners do not have a correct understanding of the geisha. They are not prostitutes".Template:Sfn

During his trip to Los Angeles Fleming visits the Los Angeles Police Intelligence headquarters, where he learns about organised crime in the US. In Las Vegas he plays at the casinos where he won $210.Template:Efn The chapter includes advice on how to gamble sensibly. In Chicago he ventures to local crime locations, such as the site of the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre and the Holy Name Cathedral, where the mob boss Hymie Weiss was gunned down in 1926.

In Hamburg Fleming visits the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}—both part of the city's red-light district. In Berlin, Fleming is told details of Operation Stopwatch, the Anglo-American attempt to tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone in the mid-1950s to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters; he also crosses into East Berlin. In comparison to Hamburg, Fleming writes that Berlin was "sinister".Template:Sfn He explains:

I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1916 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother. In contra-distinction to Hamburg and to so many other German towns, it is only in Berlin and in the smoking cities of the Ruhr that I think I see, against my will, the sinister side of the German nation. In these two regions I smell the tension and hysteria that breed the things we have suffered from Germany in two great wars and that, twice in my lifetime, have got my country to her knees.Template:Sfn Template:Efn

When Fleming moves on to Geneva he reports that he finds the city boring, and calls it "clean, tidy, God-fearing".Template:Sfn He then travels to Les Avants, the village near Montreux and the European home of his close friend, the writer Noël Coward. Coward introduces him to the actor Charlie Chaplin, his neighbour. In Naples Fleming interviews the gangster Lucky Luciano, and finds him "a neat, quiet, grey-haired man with a tired good-looking face".Template:Sfn

BackgroundEdit

By 1959 Fleming had published six fictional novels in the preceding six years, all featuring the character James Bond;Template:Efn that year he wrote his seventh book, For Your Eyes Only, which was published in April 1960.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He had also written a non-fiction work, The Diamond Smugglers, which was published in 1957.Template:Sfn Fleming was on the staff of The Sunday Times as both a writer and the paper's foreign manager, dealing with the foreign coverage of the paper, including appointing correspondents.Template:Sfn

In 1959 the features editor of The Sunday Times, Leonard Russell, suggested to Fleming that he take a five-week, all-expenses-paid trip around the world for a series of features for the paper.Template:Sfn Fleming declined, saying he was a terrible tourist who "often advocated the provision of roller-skates at the door of museums and art galleries".Template:Sfn Russell persuaded him, pointing out that Fleming could also get some material for the Bond books in the process.Template:Sfn Fleming was given a first-class ticket that cost £803 19 shillings 2 d and £500 of traveller's cheques for expenses;Template:Efn he flew BOAC to his first stop, Hong Kong.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Fleming was guided around Hong Kong by his friend Richard Hughes, the correspondent for The Sunday Times;Template:Sfn Hughes was later the model for the character Dikko Henderson in Fleming's 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, as well as for "Old Craw" in John le Carré's 1977 novel The Honourable Schoolboy.Template:Sfn Fleming stayed three days in Hong Kong, before he and Hughes flew to Macau. After staying there they flew to Tokyo where they were joined by Torao Saito—also known as "Tiger"—a journalist with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper group. Saito later became the model for the character Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice.Template:Sfn Fleming spent three days in Tokyo and decided there would be "no politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies"Template:Sfn on his itinerary; he instead visited the Kodokan—a judo academy—and a Japanese soothsayer.Template:Sfn

Fleming left Tokyo on Friday the 13th to fly to Hawaii; Template:Convert into the Pacific one of the Douglas DC-6's engines caught fire and the plane nearly crashed, although it managed to make an emergency landing on Wake Island.Template:Sfn After Honolulu, he moved on to Los Angeles, where he visited a number of places he had been before. At the Los Angeles Police Intelligence headquarters, he again met Captain James Hamilton, whom he had first encountered during his research for his 1956 novel Diamonds Are Forever.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In Chicago he visited the offices of Playboy; they took him on a tour of some famous Chicago crime locations.Template:Sfn

By the time Fleming got to New York he was fed up with travelling and his biographer Andrew Lycett notes that "his sour mood transferred to the city and indeed the country he had once loved".Template:Sfn He wrote in his article: "Go into the first drugstore, ask your way from a passer-by, and the indifference and harshness of the New Yorker cuts the old affection for the city out of your body as sharply as a surgeon's knife."Template:Sfn Because of his harshness toward the city, his American publishers asked him to modify the chapter; Fleming refused. By way of recompense, in August 1963 he wrote the short story "007 in New York".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Efn

The series of articles was published in The Sunday Times from 24 January 1960, with an introductory piece,Template:Sfn followed by the article on Hong Kong the following week.Template:Sfn The series finished on 28 February 1960 with the article about Chicago and New York.Template:Sfn Template:Efn

Roy Thomson, the chairman of The Sunday Times, enjoyed Fleming's articles and suggested a number of other cities to be visited, including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, New Orleans and Montreal.Template:Sfn Others, such as the editor of The Sunday Times Harry Hodson, were less enthusiastic; Hodson considered that "more serious readers have tut-tutted a bit about missing the really important things".Template:Sfn Instead, they agreed that Fleming should visit a series of European cities; he planned to drive most of his second tour, which concentrated on places he wanted to visit.Template:Sfn For the trip he took his own car, a Ford Thunderbird convertible, crossing the channel and journeying through Ostend, Antwerp and Bremen before arriving at his first destination: Hamburg.Template:Sfn

File:Reeperbahn - June 2008.JPG

Herbertstraße, part of the red-light district Fleming visited in Hamburg

Fleming stayed only briefly in Hamburg, praising the sex industry in the city, saying "how very different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so disgracefully mismanage these things in England".Template:Sfn He moved on to Berlin, where he was shown round the city by The Sunday Times correspondent Anthony Terry and his wife Rachel.Template:Sfn

In Geneva he met Ingrid Etler, a journalist and former girlfriend, who was resident in the city and who provided him with much of his background material. Ann Fleming joined her husband in Les Avants and for the rest of the journey. Fleming had asked his friend Noël Coward to arrange the meeting with Charlie Chaplin, as Chaplin was writing his memoirs and Leonard Russell had asked Fleming to secure the rights for The Sunday Times; Fleming was successful in his approach and the memoirs were later serialised in the paper.Template:Sfn After visiting Naples, the Flemings moved to Monte Carlo, the final stop on Fleming's journey.Template:Sfn Despite spending time at the casino, Fleming thought Monte Carlo somewhat seedy.Template:Sfn

The second series of articles was published in The Sunday Times starting on 31 July 1960 with an article about Fleming's trip to Hamburg,Template:Sfn and finished on 4 September with an article about his visit to Monte Carlo.Template:Sfn Overall the series was considered popular and successful.Template:Sfn Template:Efn

When the idea of the series was first considered, in November 1957, the provisional title given was Round the World in Eight Adventures; later considered were The Thrilling Cities—subsequently used for the newspaper articles—and More Thrilling Cities.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Publication and receptionEdit

Thrilling Cities was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, on 4 November 1963; the book was 223 pages long and cost 30 shillings.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Efn There were 10,000 copies in the first print run.Template:Sfn In October 1964 Pan Books published a paperback version of Thrilling Cities in the UK; it was published in two volumes. Each volume cost 3 shillings 6 d and the print run was 100,000 copies.Template:Efn A second print run of 60,000 copies was needed by November 1964.Template:Sfn The cover was designed by the artist Paul Davis and shows "a surreal version of Monte Carlo".Template:Sfn For the US market, Thrilling Cities was released in June 1964 through New American Library and cost $4.95.Template:Sfn Template:Efn The book also included the short story "007 in New York".Template:Sfn

ReceptionEdit

Thrilling Cities received mixed reviews when it was published as a book.Template:Sfn Some reviewers praised the quality of writing; Honor Tracy, The GuardianTemplate:'s critic, thought Fleming "writes without any pretension at all", while also managing to be both entertaining and amusing, which led to "a lively, enjoyable book, written from an unusual point of view".Template:Sfn The reviewer for The Times thought that Fleming's style was "no nonsense over fine writing",Template:Sfn and summed up the book as "Fleming's smooth, sophisticated, personally conducted tours".Template:Sfn Francis Hope, who was writing for The Observer, was surprised by Fleming's written style, which he found to be "more flabbily verbose than one expects of a thriller writer",Template:Sfn although this was redeemed in Hope's eyes by the discussions Fleming had with local crime experts in various cities.Template:Sfn The critic for The Financial Times, James Bredin, found the book unsatisfying because of its brevity, although he thought that Thrilling Cities was good enough and well written so that it "can—and will, compulsively—be read at a sitting".Template:Sfn

Some reviewers observed Thrilling Cities was written either with Bond in mind, or if he were the visitor. Charles Poore, writing in The New York Times, calls Fleming "Flemingbond" because "it is as if James Bond had decided to take his ghost on holiday", given the book's angles of pleasure and crime,Template:Sfn while The Boston GlobeTemplate:'s Marjory Adams refers to the book's author as "Fleming-Com Bond".Template:Sfn David Holloway's review in The Daily Telegraph describes the subject as "James Bond's world rather than Mr Fleming's".Template:Sfn Writing for The Times Literary Supplement, Xan Fielding thought the thrills were limited in the book, but hoped that the material gathered would be used in Fleming's Bond works with thrills included.Template:Sfn

Reviewing for The Evening Standard, Tom Pocock thought it read as recollections of the "voluptuous pleasures with the relish of a slightly raffish uncle".Template:Sfn John Raymond, in The Sunday Times, wrote that "Mr Fleming's prose arouses the voyeur that lurks in all but the best of us"; he considered that the book remained "supremely readable" throughout.Template:Sfn Writing for the Daily Express, Peter Grosvenor thought that Fleming—a "tourist extraordinary"Template:Sfn—was "never afraid to record a controversial view",Template:Sfn citing Fleming's views on the differences between eastern and western women's approaches to men.Template:Sfn The reviewer for The Listener thought that although the book was fascinating, it was "disarmingly snob-ridden".Template:Sfn Robert Kirsch, who reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, considered Fleming to be "a second-rate reporter, filled with the irritating prejudices and pomposities of a middle-class English traveller" and that "Fleming's wit is provincial".Template:Sfn

Notes and referencesEdit

BooksEdit

Inflation calculationsEdit

{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}

1634–1699: Template:Cite journal
1700–1799: Template:Cite journal
1800–present: {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}

Journals and magazinesEdit

NewspapersEdit

"Thrilling Cities" articlesEdit

WebsitesEdit

{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }} Template:Refend

External linksEdit

Template:FadedPage

Template:Ian Fleming