A letter in which Ian Fleming asserts that his lesbian Bond girl Pussy Galore “only needed the right man to come along … to cure her psycho-pathological malady” will be sold at auction later this month.
The letter, which is also included in the just-published collection of Fleming’s James Bond letters, The Man With the Golden Typewriter, was written in response to a Dr Gibson. Gibson had written to Fleming that while he enjoyed Goldfinger, “although not a psycho-pathologist, I think it is slightly naughty of you to change a criminal Lesbian into a clinging honey-bun (to be bottled by Bond) in the last chapter”.
Goldfinger ends as Bond looks into Pussy’s “deep blue-violet eyes that were no longer hard … He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, ‘They told me you only liked women’. She said, ‘I never met a man before.’” Bond promises her “a course of TLC”, before she looks up at his “passionate, rather cruel mouth” and it comes “ruthlessly down on hers”.
In his June 1959 letter to Gibson, Fleming writes that Galore “only needed the right man to come along and perform the laying on of hands in order to cure her psycho-pathological malady”.
Gibson was, Fleming’s nephew Fergus Fleming notes in the book, one of the Bond creator’s “most diligent motoring correspondents”, and the letter also thanks him for his “kind invitation” for Bond to join the Aston Martin Owners’ Club, adding: “Since neither Bond nor his biographer are owners of an Aston Martin, I can do no more than pass your invitation on to head of Admin at the Secret Service from whose transport pool the DB III was drawn.”
Fleming adds that he has “in mind a story with motor racing as its background”, following Gibson’s suggestion that he try writing about Formula One because “nobody has yet written a good novel on the subject”.
“I will try and get round to it in due course and shall not be surprised if I then receive a sheaf of acid complaints from experts such as yourself,” he tells Gibson.
The author would go on to write a treatment for a television episode, Murder on Wheels, which features a Grand Prix in Nürburgring in Germany. The show was never made, but the story was worked into in Anthony Horowitz’s recently published official 007 novel, Trigger Mortis.
The letter will be auctioned by Bonhams on 11 November for an estimated price betweem £3,000 and £4,000.
