Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones Page A

harassing a fellow author to be
the ultimate demonstration of bad taste.’ I don’t know much about cricket but I can recognize a
sticky wicket when it swallows the batsman whole. Fleming’s gentlemanliness has to be assessed
as part-time, and when he was off the clock he wasn’t above appropriating another writer’s work
and passing it off as his. If Ian Fleming’s gentlemanlinesshad been
uninterrupted, there could have been no book for him to rise up in hypothetical righteousness to
defend.
    The dispute over
Thunderball
, with
lawsuits erupting over so many years, resembles a small volcano in its alternation of activity
and periods of dormancy, or perhaps a cold sore brewing up every few years a fresh batch of
litigant virus. Dad stuck around for one cycle of infection and then moved on.
    Perhaps even now the dispute isn’t dead and
buried but merely dozing. I imagine the McClory Estate and the Ian Fleming Will Trust as the
last organisms to survive on a ravaged and blistered planet, periodically serving writs on each
other.
    The instructing solicitor in the 1963 case, Peter
Carter-Ruck, attributed the successful outcome of the case to Dad’s performance, though it was
also clearly important (and perhaps not expected by the other side) that Kevin McClory stood
firm in the witness box. There were complications, with two plaintiffs initiating the
proceedings (though McClory’s business partner, Jack Whittingham, withdrew, in poor health and
worried about the financial risk involved) and two defendants throughout, Fleming and Ivar
Bryce, which makes it harder to separate out individual motives from the swirl of courtroom
manoeuvres.
    Apart from Whittingham the three principals were
well funded. McClory had recently married an heiress, Fleming’s earnings from the Bond books
were colossal and Bryce was not only a rich man but had married an heiress of his own. According
to
The Battle for Bond
it was Bryce who decided to settle the case, but logically it
was Fleming who was vulnerable. It would be a huge blow to his standing if he was found by the
court to have plagiarized McClory’s screenplay, and it was strongly in his interest to accept
any terms before such a judgment was given.
    The settlement allowed him to
say, after the hearing, ‘I am glad that the whole expensive misunderstanding has now been
disposed of’, though this was just the sort of blurring of the issue which got Jonathan Cape and
John Pearson into trouble with the Fleming biography three years later.
    There were those who said that Bill Mars-Jones
loved the sound of his own voice (this group occasionally included members of his immediate
family), that he talked for the pleasure of hearing himself speak. On this occasion his vocal
performance was close to heroic. His laying out of the case against Ian Fleming lasted
twenty-eight hours and eight minutes. As court time is measured out, Dad spoke for more than a
week.
    A full performance of
Der Ring Des
Nibelungen
lasts fifteen hours, just over half the length of Dad’s opening speech in the
Thunderball
case, and even Wagnerian roles aren’t continuous. It’s true that Dad
didn’t need to hit specific notes, but he will have needed to pay attention to vocal variety.
Vital to avoid the sing-song intonations which can tug a judge’s eyelids downward in the long
watches of the afternoon.
    What was the point of so extended an opening? It
can be a way of dramatizing confidence, indicating the wealth of evidence on offer, by saying in
effect: ‘My client’s case is not made of straw, My Lord, nor of sticks, nor even of stoutly
bonded bricks, bricks so well laid and soundly mortared that no huffing and puffing on the part
of Mr Fleming’s advocates (my learned friends) could make the slightest impression on its
solidity of structure, but of concrete. Reinforced concrete.’ Putting pressure, hour by endless
hour, on the defendant. This sounds like overkill, but Dad was well known for the