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  1. Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers now shipping

    By Devin Zydel on 2009-07-16

    Literary 007 fans will be pleased to hear that the recent reprints of two of Ian Fleming’s non-James Bond novels, Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers, are now shipping from the Ian Fleming Publications Ltd website.

    Unavailable for many years, these works of non-fiction are reissued with introductions by Jan Morris and Fergus Fleming and presented in an all-new limited edition hardback format.

    Ian Fleming's 'Thrilling Cities'

    Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities

    Thrilling Cities is a collection of travel pieces originally written in 1959 and 1960 for The Sunday Times. In it, Fleming turns his inimitable eye on 14 separate cities. The fleshpots of Macao, Tokyo and Hamburg feature alongside explorations of the Mafia culture in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. At every stop he uncovers fresh nuggets of interest. In Naples, for example, he wangles an introduction to Lucky Luciano, the notorious Chicago gangster of Capone-era fame. Written in the days when a De Havilland Comet took 12 hours to fly from London to Beirut, this is a rich and enjoyable tapestry of the world as it once was – a must for lovers of travel and great writing.

    Ian Fleming's 'The Diamond Smugglers'

    Ian Fleming’s The Diamond Smugglers

    The Diamond Smugglers is a book that starts with a phone call. ‘One day in April 1957,’ Fleming writes, ‘I had just answered a letter from an expert in unarmed combat writing from a cover address in Mexico City, and I was thanking a fan in Chile, when my telephone rang…” The voice at the other end asks if he’d like an assignment. Within weeks he is in Tangier speaking to “John Blaize”, an ex-MI5 agent now contracted by a diamond firm to break an international smuggling ring. Fleming picks up the trail in a unique piece of investigative journalism that combines treasure and travel, cunning and criminality – the elements that had always attracted the creator of James Bond.

    CommanderBond.net recently took a ‘look back’ at both of these Fleming books: The Diamond Smugglers | Thrilling Cities.

    Keep watching the CBn main page—and our brand new Twitter feed—for the most up-to-date literary James Bond coverage on the web.