Written by Jeremy Duns

As details of Geoffrey Jenkins’ ‘lost’ Bond novel Per Fine Ounce are published, British journalist Jeremy Duns reveals Jenkins’ hidden tribute to Ian Fleming.

Per Fine Ounce cover by artist Evan Willnow

In 1966, the South African thriller-writer Geoffrey Jenkins was commissioned by Glidrose Publications Limited to write the first James Bond novel after Ian Fleming’s death. Jenkins, who had been a friend of Fleming’s, wrote the book, titled Per Fine Ounce, but it was never published. However, four draft pages have come to light—and they offer a fascinating glimpse into what may have been.

For the full details and a raft of new information on this ‘lost’ Bond novel, check out the latest issue of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the magazine of the James Bond International Fan Club. The article comes complete with a brilliant putative cover for the novel by CBn’s own Evan Willnow, created in the style of Richard Chopping.

Per Fine Ounce never made it to print, but Geoffrey Jenkins did publish a James Bond continuation of sorts—or rather, a Fleming continuation. Published the year before the release of the film You Only Live Twice, Hunter-Killer was the last novel Jenkins wrote before Per Fine Ounce, and his first following Ian Fleming’s death in 1964. In it, he paid a touching and wonderfully fitting tribute to his old friend and former colleague, filling it with references to him—some public, some private.

The novel opens with a surprising sentence:

Geoffrey Peace was dead.

Peace was the narrator of A Twist Of Sand, Jenkins’ 1959 best-selling debut. A lieutenant-commander during World War Two, he was cashiered out of the Royal Navy after refusing to admit he had been on a secret mission for the Director of Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming also worked for the DNI during the war, but other than that, there are no obvious references to Bond or Fleming in A Twist Of Sand.

Hunter-Killer by Geoffrey Jenkins

In Hunter-Killer, however, Geoffrey Peace is an explicit amalgamation of James Bond and Ian Fleming. The book is set in the 1970s. Since the events of the first novel, Peace has been reinstated in the Navy and been promoted to Commander—the same rank Fleming held.

The book’s narrator is John Garland (note the reversed initials), Peace’s former first mate. Garland has not seen Peace for years when he suddenly receives a cable from his old friend asking him to come to meet him in Mauritius. Garland is a navigational expert, and Peace says he wants to collaborate with him on a system he has devised. But when Garland arrives, he finds that Peace is distracted. He wants to sail around some remote islands in the Seychelles used by one of his ancestors, a pirate—and when he’s finished doing that, he decides to go spear-fishing. Garland is not pleased:

My irritation with the whole affair increased when I found that I would have to stage back to Johannesburg via East Africa, and that the aircraft was an old flying-boat which only made the leisurely trip once a week. That meant a further delay of three days in the Seychelles. I cursed the soft languor of Limuria.

As Garland has dinner in his hotel that night, a naval officer interrupts his meal and hands him a note, which says that Peace has been found dead in the water half a mile north of Frigate Island.

All this is told in flashback as Garland looks at Peace’s coffin on board Peace’s luxury yacht in Mahé. He is grief-stricken by the loss of someone he admired so much, dismayed by the publicity surrounding his death—elaborate preparations are underway to bury Peace at sea with full naval honours—and perversely angry that Peace died “no more excitingly than an overfed businessman who drops dead after a dip at Ramsgate”.

Just a few pages into his novel, Jenkins has made several references to both James Bond and Ian Fleming, some more obvious than others. The opening chapters are a clever spin on Fleming’s 1960 short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”, published in the collection For Your Eyes Only in 1960. In that story, Bond was sent to Mahé by M to see if it would be feasible for the Admiralty to relocate its fleet base there from the Maldives:

‘Bond’s report, which concluded that the only conceivable security hazard in the Seychelles lay in the beauty and ready availability of the Seychelloises, had been finished a week before and then he had nothing to do but wait for the SS Kampala to take him to Mombasa. He was thoroughly sick of the heat and the dropping palm trees and the interminable conversation about copra.’

A Twist Of Sand by Geoffrey Jenkins

Like Bond, Peace goes spear-fishing; like Bond, Garland is forced to while away his time waiting for the weekly boat to East Africa. In a wry touch, in Hunter-Killer the British now have a missile base in the islands.

Fleming wrote “The Hildebrand Rarity” after visiting the Seychelles for the Sunday Times in 1958: he searched for buried pirate treasure on Fregaté, also known as Frigate Island (the hotel he stayed in, the Northolme, now has an Ian Fleming Suite.)

The remark about Ramsgate may be a reference to Goldfinger: James Bond stayed there before playing golf with the eponymous villain at the nearby Royal St George course in Sandwich—Ian Fleming died of a heart attack shortly after a meeting there.

Few people who read Hunter-Killer at the time would have been likely to have spotted these references—they are skilfully woven into the action. But there is another layer that nobody could then have understood. In the late 50s, before he wrote A Twist Of Sand and James Bond had become a global phenomenon, Jenkins had suggested to Fleming that South Africa would be a brilliant location for a Bond adventure. He even went so far as to write an outline, which Fleming apparently liked very much. But to write it, Fleming said he would have to visit South Africa for himself. This never happened, of course, and two years later, Jenkins’ outline became the basis for Per Fine Ounce.

In Hunter-Killer, the situation is reversed: it is Peace/Fleming who asks Garland/Jenkins to come out to see him. When Peace seems more intent on having fun than collaborating, Garland sourly begins to view what had been the chance to work with an old friend as a failed ‘deal’. When Peace dies, he is racked with guilt about this. Was the opening of Hunter Killer a metaphor for how Jenkins felt about his Bond collaboration with Fleming?

Perhaps to compensate, Jenkins said goodbye to Ian Fleming in his fiction. Garland watches as Peace’s coffin, ‘shrouded by a tarpaulin’, is lashed to the depth-charge throwers of a British destroyer and launched into the sea. A helicopter then hovers over Peace’s grave and a huge wreath floats down at the end of a parachute.

Having given his newly Bonded version of Fleming this marvellous send-off, Jenkins then brings him back—and in a way Fleming would surely have loved. In the next scene, Garland visits the DNI in a cottage on Mahé, where he is living with a beautiful young Seychelloise called Adele. As the three of them talk, Garland senses someone approaching. It is, of course, Geoffrey Peace.

I blinked in disbelief. Peace stood on the terrace in the same black rubber suit in which I had seen him in his coffin. A long diving-knife was in his hand. I tried to speak, but the words would not come…

Mam’zelle Adele was still on my arm. Peace’s greeting to her was level, comradely.

“Hello, Mam’zelle Adele.”

She detached herself. “Good evening, Commander. Was it a good trip?”

“Get me a drink and I’ll tell you,” he replied.

Over wine and turtle steak, the burial at sea is revealed to be a hoax to persuade the US Air Force, the CIA and others that Peace is dead so he can embark on a secret mission involving a new type of space missile: “the ultimate weapon”.

Richard Johnson starred as Commander Peace in 1961’s A Twist of Sand with Honor Blackman (in enlargement)

Apart from all the references to Fleming, Hunter-Killer is a brilliant thriller, with a very Bond-ish feel. Later in the novel, the hero even introduces himself to another character as “Peace—Commander Geoffrey Peace”.

In a letter to his accountant on March 2 1966, Jenkins mentioned that Hunter-Killer would be published in August of that year, and that Twentieth Century were ‘enthusiastic’ about it ‘but have not yet made an offer’. Nothing came of this, but United Artists did adapt A Twist Of Sand: released in 1968, Peace was played by Richard Johnson—who had been Terence Young’s preferred choice to play Bond in 1961—and co-starred Honor Blackman.

Per Fine Ounce never made it to print or screen, but Hunter-Killer shows that Jenkins had a deep admiration and love for Ian Fleming and his work—and that he had what it took to write Bond.

Jeremy Duns’ article on Per Fine Ounce—a world exclusive—appears in Issue 2 of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the magazine of the James Bond International Fan Club. www.007.info to subscribe.

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