The Man with the Golden Typewriter by Bloomsbury Publishing

knew Drax would not survive the story as soon as I saw (on p. 71) that he turned on his heel and did it again on p. 86.
    Apart from that and a bit of lipbiting and smiling or grinning ruefully or wryly, the book is comparatively free of clichés.
    TO W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
    Fleming wrote to congratulate Maugham on the splendid, if not outlandish posters that were being used as part of the
Sunday Times
promotional campaign
.
    10th June, 1954
    This is a great day for “les amis de Somerset Maugham”. In honour of the Queen’s birthday the town is being plastered with your face and the massed bands are playing for you both.
    The Hallowe’en turnip [Maugham’s portrait] being reproduced on the front page of the “Sunday Times” is nothing to the giant scraper-board mask which, on the top floor of this building, is gazing angrily up Gray’s Inn Road towards King’s Cross and down Gray’s Inn Road towards Lincoln’s Inn.
    It reminds me of the “Black Widow” poster designed to “Keep Death Off the Roads”, but in fact the whole campaign is having an electric effect on England and people can be seen in restaurants with scrubby bits of paper and pencil jotting down Hawthorn [sic], and Ulysses.
    I will gather together a great bundle of our advertisements and ship them out to you but the twenty-foot square posters would be too much for the mails and I will have to try and send a photograph.
    Incidentally, they would just about paper the outside walls of your villa and I like the idea of you and Alan emerging from between your lips. It would be a good scene in a Cocteau or Dali film, and I may steal it for my fourth thriller. 6 (The third is with Cape’s and they say it is the best but it doesn’t amuse me as much as the others.)
    Anyway the whole venture has aroused interest all over the world and everybody is delighted.
    As part of the ballyhoo I was requested to write a light piece on my visit to you and in some trepidation I did so.
    But Lord K is so overwhelmed by the importance of the occasion and so loth, I think, to allow it to be thought that it was anybody’s idea but his own that he told me he thought the piece was not sufficiently “dignified”.
    So I send it to you to see what you yourself think. It is difficult not to be vulgar in these sort of things but I feel I have avoided the major pitfalls.
    Annie is in wonderful form and is delighted with the announcement in the “Times” this morning, although she says it isn’t enough and hopes that you have at least precedence over Dame Sitwell. 7 She’s spinning like a top through the Season and I am looking forward to enjoying her company again when she comes to rest at the end of July. She loved your letter and will, I expect, reply this week-end from St. Margaret’s.
    I must stop now as the chapel bells are ringing and this is too long by at least half.
    FROM SOMERSET MAUGHAM
    16th June, 1954
    My dear Ian,
    I have read your article with great amusement. I don’t see that it is undignified. There is nothing I want less than to have anyone take mefor a stuffed shirt on a pedestal. The only objection I have to make is firstly you speak of my having a chef, whereas my simple, and even spartan needs are satisfied by a cook. Secondly, you speak of the poetess being offered soup at luncheon. That is something that I should be ashamed to offer any guest, drunk or sober. I look upon soup at luncheon as barbarous, detestable, uncivilized and conducive to promiscuous immorality.
    If you have a moment to spare, and can tell me what sort of reaction the first article has had on the public at large, I shall be most grateful.
    Yours always,
    Willie
    TO WREN HOWARD
    29th June, 1954
    Having brushed up the typescript a bit as the result of the comments of William and Daniel, I am sending it over to you.
    There’s one fairly long rewriting job on Chapter 22 which Daniel