MI6 looks back at the titles Ian Fleming mused over before ultimately naming his third James Bond novel "Moonraker"...

Ian Fleming History - Moonraker
25th April 2005

On July 15th 1954, almost nine months before it was was published, Ian Fleming mused over the title of his third James Bond novel.

The Infernal Machine Ian Fleming wrote to Mr G. Wren Howard, on the board of London-based publisher Jonathan cape, discussing potential titles. "What do you think of THE INFERNAL MACHINE as a title? Or alternatively WIDE OF THE MARK or THE INHUMAN ELEMENT? Personally, I think the firs might be the one. It is an expression everyone knows but has been long out of fashion." Below the copy of the letter are various scribbled titles that Ian Fleming discarded (including "Bond and the Moonraker", "The Moonraker Secret" and "The Moonraker Plot"), until ultimately deciding upon "Moonraker". Right: The letter Ian Fleming wrote to Mr G. Wren Howard in July 1954.

Above: A first edition copy of "Moonraker" inscribed by Ian Fleming to Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler Upon "Moonraker" being published, Ian Fleming inscribed a copy to his friend and fellow author Raymond Chandler. “To Field Marshall Chandler, from Private Ian Fleming, 1955.” Fleming’s admiring and deferential inscription did not divert Chandler from looking at Moonraker with a close or critical eye: at the end of Chapter 1, on page 18 of his first edition, Chandler wrote in large, underlined, lettering“all Padding”; on the first text page, he penned in the margin “2½ barrel,” referring to the “Colt Detective Special” named in the book; and on the rear inside flap Chandler wrote several memos and notes to himself – about 24 words.

Fleming and Chandler became friends after first meeting at a dinner in London in May 1955. “Fleming treated him with the deference he reserved for very few. Chandler had arrived in England a month before (April) and was just emerging from a long spell of drinking that had followed the death of his beloved wife Cissie...the year before...Two more different characters than the creators of Philip Marlowe and James Bond it would be hard to find, but since that dinner at the Spenders’ they had met on several occasions and got on well together”, John Pearson wrote in "The Life of Ian Fleming".

The biography describes how their meeting came at a pivotal moment in Fleming’s literary career. “The friendship between the two men...was to prove of importance to Fleming and also James Bond. Indeed, but for Chandler it is more than likely that Fleming would have finished off his hero for good at the big desk at Goldeneye [his home in Jamaica] the following year. For when he came back to London from [the island] with the manuscript of Diamonds Are Forever in March 1955, Fleming had had enough of his creation...However good the reviews of Moonraker had been when it was published that April [1955], and however much better he privately believed Diamonds Are Forever to be, he seems to have convinced himself that he had gone as far with writing about James Bond as he ever would or could”

It was at this point that Chandler encouraged the younger author, praising the second Bond novel Live and Let Die (Fleming apparently had a copy sent around to Chandler’s nearby apartment for him to read) and writing a testimonial about the book for Fleming’s publishers. “The interest and support of Chandler had come at a crucial moment for Ian Fleming, and the brief meetings between them in May and early June [1955], even before the testimonial was written, had an electric effect on the attitude of Fleming to his writing and his hero...Chandler’s approval seems to have made Fleming quickly decide that his next book, instead of finishing Bond for good, would go to the opposite extreme. It would be different from any other book he had written, it would have depth and seriousness. Bond would become a ‘rounded character’ like Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe”.

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