Electric Cars

I just finished reading “Talk Of The Devil,” which is a collection of writings by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. The book contains some personal letters with other authors, anecdotes with friends such as Noel Coward and Raymond Chandler, various non-Bondian short stories, and also collections of articles written for magazines and newspapers during the course of his literary career.

A reporter by trade, he was foreign manager for the Kemsley Newspaper Group from 1945 until 1959 when they were eventually bought out by Thomson Regional Newspapers. This was, of course, after his much celebrated career in British Naval Intelligence during the Second World War — with those events and experiences eventually molding the more romanticized fantasy world of Agent 007.

Fleming was a prolific writer. I dare say if his career had occurred during the modern era he would have no doubt been quite an active blogger. There are much better authors and greater books than his Bond adventures (Fleming was quite cognizant of where his thrillers lay; referring to them not as ‘Literature’ with a capital L, but “thrillers designed to read like literature”), and authors who weave intricate suspenseful tales, but few of them match Fleming’s poetic prose. His Bond adventures are almost secondary to the experience — we know Bond is against an arch villain, we know he is scuba diving underwater, but Fleming had the gift of submersing us underwater with him. A gifted and rich detailed descriptions of the world below the waves, and it is for this reason the Bond adventures, and some of his contributions to the non-fiction Thrilling Cities travel log compilation, come alive. Not all of us have the means of holidaying in the Seychelles, but Fleming provided the next best thing. Making all of us feel we are there in an exotic location alongside either he or Bond.

Fleming also appears to have been modern in some of his thinking (although we have to concede he was also socially a product of his time), and willing to grasp at new things. His writing suggests that he took stagnation or complacency as a form of accidie, and that should probably serve as a warning sign to us all. One particular excerpt I’d like to share that best illustrates this is from 1959 regarding electric cars.

In a lengthy essay Fleming wrote — in that very tongue and cheek arid British humor kind of way — what he would do if he became Prime Minister. We all have that harmless daydream of what we would do if We were in charge. The part that struck me most was his advocacy of electric vehicles. This was from 1959, and it makes one think what could have happened if R&D had been devoted to such a technology back then and how far along we’d be today. While it’s true electric vehicles have come along way in the last ten to fifteen years, the primary mode of transportation remains carbon emitting; fossil fuel burning exhaust from combustible engines. It is likely decades lost to innovation — made even more regrettable that there is a powerful backwards movement by archaic leadership and hailed by equally short-sighted individuals in this country who desire to extinguish what little progress we’ve made in the intervening years. A deep rooted desire to scroll the country back to their more narrow view of what it should be. It’s a fool’s notion to attempt to un-ring a bell.

That, of course, is a subject for another debate, but for the present, I’d like only to leave this excerpt for your entertainment:

“If I were prime minister”

As it appears in:

Fleming, Ian, and Adam Gopnik. Talk of the Devil : The Collected Writings of Ian Fleming. First William Morrow hardcover [edition], William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2025.

“Our present internal combustion engine is a ridiculous steam-age contraption which turns only a modest proportion of fuel into energy and spews the rest out in the form of petrol vapour of a more or less solid consistency. When there is no wind, this lies in a dense layer in our streets and we breathe it in day and night. It then rises into the upper atmosphere, where, I am told, it forms a kind of envelope round the world which has the effect of interfering with the beneficial rays of the sun. Whether that is so or not, the petrol engine is obviously a noxious and noisy machine, and I would gradually abolish it and replace it by some form of electric motor. This would take some time, but I would hope that, within three years of assuming office, I could have converted the whole of central London to electric transport. Very cheap, State-owned garages would be built at the point of entry into London of our main roads and drivers would there transfer into electric buses or the Underground and later into cheap, State-run electric taxis. There would be quiet, no smell and no parking problems. Gradually I would extend this system to our other great towns and in due course the problem would be solved for the whole country.”

October 1959, Ian Fleming