Thursday, May 15, 2025

Rare Ian Fleming Story Features A Londoner Named Bone, Caffery Bone

Hillel Italie at the Associated Press offers a piece on the publication of a rare story by Ian Fleming:

NEW YORK (AP) — “James Bond” creator Ian Fleming didn’t need to write about Cold War intrigue to consider the ways people scheme against each other. “The Shameful Dream,” a rare Fleming work published this week, is a short story about a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone.

Fleming’s protagonist is the literary editor of Our World, a periodical “designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,” its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Bone suspects, with a feeling of “inevitable doom,” that he is to meet the same fate of so many employed by Lord Ower — removed from his job and soon forgotten.

“For Lord Ower sacked everyone sooner or later, harshly if they belonged to no union or with a fat check if they did and were in a position to hit back,” Fleming writes. “If one worked for Lord Ower one was expendable and one just spent oneself until one had gone over the cliff edge and disappeared beneath the waves with a fat splash.”

 “The Shameful Dream” appears in this week’s Strand Magazine along with another obscure work from a master of intrigue, Graham Greene’s “Reading at Night,” a brief ghost story in which the contents of a paperback anthology become frighteningly real. Greene scholars believe that the author of “Our Man in Havana,” “The End of the Affair” and other classics dashed off “Reading at Night” in the early 1960s when he found himself struggling to write a longer narrative.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Rare Ian Fleming story features a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone | AP News

You can also read two of my Crime Beat columns on Ian Fleming and James Bond via the below links:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Iconic James Bond Character


Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: The Ian Fleming and James Bond Phenomenon

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