Battle for Bond Redux: Robert Sellers’s Thunderball Book Returns
By Wesley Britton
To put my proverbial cards on the table, since 1995, I
didn’t think any book in print matched Andrew Lycett’s Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond for providing authoritative
history, biography, and background into how 007 came to be. Then, in 2007, Robert Sellers gave us The Battle
for Bond: The Genesis of Cinema’s Greatest Hero. It became the second most
important book in my Bond collection. Drawing from many previously unknown
primary sources, most notably court records held by Sylvan Whittingham Mason, Sellers
shared how the idea of bringing Bond to film began and the unexpected and
complex sequence of events that followed. Not a perfect book by any means, but
one belonging in every film lover’s library.
Perhaps it was appropriate that publishing a book dealing so
much with legal twists and turns ended up mirroring its subject. Because
anything associated with Ian Fleming is closely controlled by various heirs of
the legacy, some publishers wanted nothing to do with Battle for Bond. Then small British publisher
Tomahawk took up the challenge, and Battle
for Bond enjoyed deserved critical praise for telling a story that had been
clouded in myth and speculation for decades. Then the Ian Fleming Will Trust
stepped in.
In an interview for James
Bond Magazine (The Battle for Bond Rages On),
Sellers noted, “Pretty quickly after the
book was published the Ian Fleming Will Trust, through their London lawyers, took great exception to our
publishing, in full, copies of a number of letters by Ian Fleming, to which the
Trust owned copyright. They really were not best pleased, and notified us that
we had infringed their copyright and were liable for damages.â€
The letters in question were copies of court documents
involved in the first lawsuits filed by Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham regarding
ownership of Thunderball and the
creation of the cinematic 007. “We, that’s the publisher and I,†Robert told
007 Magazine, “claimed that we had every right to reproduce these documents in
the book without infringing copyright as they were used as part of the
prosecution case in the 1963 Ian Fleming plagiarism trial. We also believed
ourselves to be protected by law, since section 45, subsection 2 of the
Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988 states that it is not an infringement
of copyright if the publication of documents occurs within the context of
reporting legal proceedings, which clearly is the case with this book.â€
Whatever the legal merits, historians and small-presses
don’t have the resources to defend themselves against such suits, so in March
2008 Sellers and Tomahawk agreed to allow the Fleming Trust to pulp the
remaining 300 copies of the book in England. This didn’t affect the first
edition in the U.S. where copies quickly became something of a new 007
collector’s item. Just as quickly, Sellers announced a new edition would be
coming out without the offending photographs in mid-June 2008.