The snarky 1956 letter that changed the course of James Bond history: “That’s far more appropriate”
It doesn’t matter whether you know James Bond better from the books or the big screen, even if it’s almost definitely the latter, everybody knows the tropes and core tenets of the character.
He’s a secret agent with the codename 007 who carries a licence to kill, always looks dapper in a tuxedo, prefers his martinis to be shaken and not stirred, prefers to carry out his spycraft with the help of some fancy gadgets, and he’ll add another couple of notches to his bedpost along the way.
Without any of those things, Bond isn’t really Bond at all, and another aspect of the long-running franchise’s anchor that you can’t imagine him without is his trusty Walther PPK. Every single actor to have played the role in a movie has fired it at at least a handful of henchmen, but it only became his weapon of choice after Ian Fleming received a snarky letter in the post.
Casino Royale may have been published in 1953, but Geoffrey Boothroyd didn’t get around to it for a while. When he did, the firearms expert didn’t find Bond’s preferred choice of gun to be very suitable for a man of his talent and standing, so he went directly to the source to outline his concerns.
“I wish to point out that a man in James Bond’s position would never consider using a .25 Beretta,” he wrote. “It’s really a lady’s gun, and not a very nice lady at that! Dare I suggest that Bond should be armed with a .38 or a nine millimetre, let’s say a German Walther PPK? That’s far more appropriate.”
In response, Fleming conceded to Boothroyd that “you have totally convinced me, and I propose, perhaps not in the next volume of James Bond’s memoirs, but in the subsequent one, to change his weapons in accordance with your instructions.” Just like that, 007 had a new signature weapon, but that was far from the end of the letter’s long-lasting impact on the franchise’s legacy.
When Dr No hit the shelves, it introduced the character of Major Boothroyd, named after Fleming’s pen-pal. In the 1962 film adaptation, the character was played by Peter Burton, where art imitates life, and he takes Sean Connery’s Beretta away from him and replaces it with the now-standard Walther PPK.
However, in From Russia with Love, Major Boothroyd was recast in the permanently flustered shape of Desmond Llewellyn, renamed as ‘Q’, and became part of the series’ furniture. The character doesn’t exist in the books, but in the movies, Llewellyn would appear in 15 of the next 16 instalments, turning Q into a must-have character that it’s impossible to imagine 007 without.
The Walther PPK and the flustered quartermaster have been woven into the fabric of Bond since the early 1960s, and it’s all because Fleming got an irritated letter.
