Fleming: Island passion

New York, Nov. 8: “The first law for a secret agent is to get his geography right,” Ian Fleming wrote in The Man With the Golden Gun. And so it is for anyone following the trail of the man who created the world’s most famous secret agent through his adopted island of Jamaica.

The journey starts near Kingston on the tiny spit of beach called the Palisadoes that connects the city to Norman Manley International Airport.

Most of the traffic heads into the capital, but if you steer westwards, snaking around the contours of dunes on the poorly paved street towards the peninsula’s dead end, you’ll find Morgan’s Harbour Hotel in Port Royal. Only five miles from the airport, you are already deep into Ian Fleming’s Jamaica.

Fleming, the British intelligence officer turned newspaper man turned spy novelist born 100 years ago this year, spent winters on his Caribbean getaway for almost two decades. The airport and the Palisadoes both feature in James Bond novels; the hotel is where Bond chose to lay his head in Golden Gun.

It was on Jamaica that Fleming wrote more than a dozen novels and short stories featuring Agent 007. Of these once best-selling volumes of action pulp, Dr. No, Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun and the short story Octopussy are largely or partly set in Jamaica, and the films based on the first two were also shot there.

The island was Fleming’s retreat, artist colony and passion, and he repeatedly sent Bond, an incarnation of Walter Mitty-esque wish fulfillment, on assignment there. The legendary spy experienced the island as Fleming did — beautiful and underdeveloped with enough exoticism, history and potential for danger to justify it as a backdrop for post-war espionage adventure.

Fleming’s Jamaica is a Venn diagram of three overlapping spheres: the author’s actual Jamaica of the 1950s and early ’60s (when the island was a British colony rapidly becoming a hot spot for the rich and famous); the semi-fictional Jamaica as seen through James Bond; and Jamaica as a location for the 007 film franchise.

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While the rural interior of the country has changed little in the last 50 years, the huge, buffet-to-beach inclusive resorts and a blighted downtown Kingston, once high on the jet-setters’ dance cards, would now discourage Fleming.

He lived in Jamaica when you could get there by banana boat, and he described Negril on the west coast as a “five-mile crescent of unbroken, soft, white gold sand, fringed for all its dazzling length with leaning palm trees”.

In 1947 Fleming wrote a portrait of his adopted home in Horizon magazine, influential enough to fuel a post-war tourist boom among well-heeled Britons and Americans.

“I have examined a large part of the world,” he wrote. “After looking at all these, I spent four days in Jamaica in July 1943. July is the beginning of the hot season and it rained in rods everyday at noon, yet I swore that if I survived the contest I would go back to Jamaica, buy a piece of land, build a house and live in it as much as my job would allow.” He did just that, as foreign manager for Kemsley Newspapers.

The Palisadoes at night is still as Fleming described it in Dr. No, a “long cactus-fringed road” with “the steady zing of the crickets, the rush of warm, scented air... the necklace of yellow lights shimmering across the harbour.” Not so Morgan’s Harbour Hotel, now an estranged and shabbily furnished cousin of the “romantic little hotel” from Golden Gun.

Kingston, reached by the road used in the first car chase in Dr. No, sits beside bright blue waters and beaches littered with broken boats and the rusting remains of bygone industry. It feels like an early Bond film — vibrant, colourful and a bit disconcerting. What Kingston does not resemble, for the most part, is itself from the Fleming days.

Most of Fleming’s days in Jamaica, though, were spent on the northern coast, best reached by the A3, or Junction Road, “that runs across the thin waist of Jamaica”. Bond and his local sidekick Quarrel travel the same route in Live and Let Die to get to the secret island lair of the villainous genius Mr. Big.

The mountainous interior of the island, “like the central ridges of a crocodile’s armour” as Fleming put it in Live and Let Die, is a constant pull on the steering wheel.