MUSTREADS Out now in paperback
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN TYPEWRITER edited by Fergus Fleming (Bloomsbury £9.99)
EXPLAINING how he came to write his first James Bond thriller, Casino Royale, the novelist Ian Fleming ungallantly recalled: ‘After being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it.’
To celebrate finishing the novel, Fleming ordered a gold-plated typewriter, and the letters he typed on it sparkle as brightly as the machine itself.
This selection of Fleming’s correspondence, edited by his nephew, Fergus, chronicles his literary career, with a chapter devoted to each of the Bond books.
Witty, charming and unexpectedly modest (his note to a Scottish minister who had preached a thunderous sermon against the wickedness of Bond is a model of humility), this offers a glimpse into the private world of Bond and his creator.
THE MOVIE DOCTORS by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (Canongate £8.99)
IN THIS larky book, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, who present Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on Radio 5 Live, come up with a list of movie suggestions to match every imaginable medical specialism.
Insomniacs can pop into their sleep clinic, where films by Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone score highly as soporifics. Or perhaps anxiety is your problem, in which case the movie doctors prescribe a soothing course of 84 Charing Cross Road.
(They warn that it might not work ‘if you find the idea of two old people reading letters aloud to each other for 100 minutes a bit too racy’).
Having a spot of bother with your children? A viewing of The Omen should help. (‘What parent hasn’t thought their child might be the Antichrist? Well, sometimes he actually is. . .’)
Taken as prescribed, this is the perfect antidote to Netflix angst.
HEMINGWAY IN LOVE by A.E. Hotchner (Picador £8.99)
IN THE spring of 1948, Cosmopolitan magazine sent journalist A. E. Hotchner to Havana, where Ernest Hemingway was then living, with instructions to get the great novelist to write an article on the future of literature. Hemingway assured Hotchner that ‘I do not know a damn thing about the future of anything’, but invited him to his favourite bar for several bucket-sized frozen daiquiris, and the next day took him marlin fishing by way of a hangover cure.
From that encounter a friendship developed that lasted until Hemingway’s suicide in 1961.
In this memoir, Hotchner recalls Hemingway’s sad last days, but also his lengthy conversations with the author at the very beginning of Hemingway’s literary career, when he was living in Paris and trying to decide between the two women he loved: his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and the exciting, mercurial Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife.