Thrilling Cities, Ian Fleming
Thrilling Cities, Ian Fleming
List: $21.99 | Sale: $15.39
Club: $10.99

Thrilling Cities
Fourteen Cities Seen Through the Eyes of Ian Fleming, the Creator of James Bond

Author: Ian Fleming

Narrator: Barnaby Edwards

Unabridged: 9 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/24/2024

Synopsis

A CAPTIVATING JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD FROM THE CREATOR OF JAMES BONDIan Fleming’s world travels and interests, as well as his journalism and wartime experiences, lent authority to everything he wrote. In 1959, the Sunday Times commissioned Fleming to write a series of dispatches from the world’s most beguiling locales. The result was Thrilling Cities, a masterpiece of well-observed travelogue that stands ably alongside the author’s Bond canon.From Hong Kong to Honolulu, New York to Naples, he left the bright main streets for the back alleys, abandoning tourist sites in favor of underground haunts, and mingling with celebrities, gangsters and geishas. The result is a series of vivid snapshots of a mysterious, vanished world from a twentieth century Western perspective.Just like his most famous fictional creation, Ian Fleming was a well-traveled man of the world who knew where to go to find excitement, adventure…and danger. In Thrilling Cities, he takes us along on a journey of international intrigue worthy of James Bond.

About Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in London in 1908. His first job was at Reuters news agency, after which he worked briefly as a stockbroker before working in Naval Intelligence during World War Two. His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and was an instant success. Fleming went on to write thirteen other Bond books as well as two works of nonfiction and the children’s classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Bond books have earned praise from figures such as Raymond Chandler, who called Fleming “the most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England” and President Kennedy, who named From Russia with Love as one of his favorite books. The books inspired a hugely successful series of film adaptations that began in 1962 with the release of Dr. No. He was married to Ann O'Neill, with whom he had a son, Caspar. He died in 1964.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on January 15, 2019

Fleming's quick tours & essays of 13 cities in 1959-60 is really enjoyable. The 7 cities of the around the world trip was done in a month, so was somewhat light in details although he had great connections. He managed to find his way to people & areas that the normal traveler would never think of vi......more

Goodreads review by Steve on June 26, 2020

Thrilling Cities is a collection of articles Ian Fleming wrote for The Sunday Times in 1959 and 1960. In the introduction to the book version he describes them as ‘mood pieces’ which ‘focused on the bizarre and perhaps shadier side of life.’ This is true. They couldn’t have been popular with tourist......more

Goodreads review by Nicholas on January 21, 2019

It’s a bewitching moment when Fleming invites a declining Raymond Chandler, who is ‘fast running out of the desire to write about anything,’ to Naples to meet the notorious gangster Lucky Luciano, in the hopes of reigniting Chandler’s writerly imagination once again. Unfortunately, the plan is a bus......more

Goodreads review by Alice on July 18, 2021

Another self-isolation read. This arrived in a box of Bond books found in a friend's parents' attic and kindly passed on to me. I enjoyed the Tokyo chapter, full of inspiration for You Only Live Twice, including the real-life Dikko Henderson and Tiger Tanaka, but what I liked best was the descripti......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List