The Diamond Smugglers - Ian Fleming

 A collector's item in two senses - first, non-Bond adult non-fiction by Fleming, and second, a Fleming book I actually enjoyed.

Taking the second first, it's been a while since I said it on this blog, so for clarity, I'll say it again.   I do not like James Bond.   I read most of the original novels when I was a lad but fell out with the films with Thunderball.   To the best of my knowledge I haven't watched a Bond movie all the way through since.   I tried the novels again in middle age and concluded they were crap.   Some of the posthumous follow-ons were better but still nothing I could get excited about.   There were soon limits to even those that I could not bring myself to cross.   Gardner yes, Amis OK, Faulks ... a bridge too far for me.

Back now to this, which I saw mentioned on Spybrary and found in this smart 2013 reissue by Vintage.  The book itself dates from 1957 when Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Glasgow Police and MI5 Chief, let it be known that Fleming, author of Diamonds Are Forever, was the chap to write up an account of Sillitoe's retirement job in charge of the International Diamond Security Organisation, set up to investigate and put a stop to the diamond smuggling business.

The smuggling enterprise was vast.   Far more was seeping out of Africa than was sent legitimately.   The licit and illicit markets were completely separate, with different price scales.   The fact was, in some parts of Africa someone strolling along a riverbank could pick up stones big enough to make them rich for life.

The task had been finished by 1957 and the smugglers at least curtailed.   Sillitoe had been in charge from London but the man on the ground, John Collard - called 'John Blaize' in the book because he was ex-MI5 - was the one with all the details, the one Fleming met and interviewed over ten days in Tangier.   The vast majority of the book is Collard's first person account.   This works well for me - I have never found Fleming's dialogue anything more than perfunctory.   On the other hand Fleming (and perhaps only Fleming) could conjure up so effortlessly the tawdry glamour of the neutral ground of Tangier.   The collaboration is a winning formula.  It's very short - the perfect length for its story - and I raced through it in two sessions.