Per Fine Ounce

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**Per Fine Ounce**
Author	Geoffrey Jenkins
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	James Bond
Genre(s)	Spy
Publisher	NA
Released	Unpublished; written circa 1966
Media Type	Manuscript
ISBN	NA

Per Fine Ounce is the title of an unpublished novel by Geoffrey Jenkins featuring Ian Fleming's superspy James Bond. It was completed circa 1966 and is considered a "lost" novel by fans of James Bond because it was actually commissioned by Glidrose Productions, the official publishers of James Bond. It was rejected for publication, however, missing the opportunity in becoming the first continuation James Bond novel. 003½: The Adventures of James Bond Junior, a novel written under the pseudonym R. D. Mascott was later published in 1967 featuring the nephew of James Bond and Colonel Sun written by Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym Robert Markham was published in 1968 as the first adult continuation novel following Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

[edit] History

Geoffrey Jenkins was given a job in the Foreign Department of Kemsley Newspapers, an organisation owned by the London Sunday Times, by Lord Kemsley. There he met Ian Fleming who was the Foreign Manager of the department. According to Jenkins in a letter written to John Pearson in 1965 for his biography on Ian Fleming, The Life of Ian Fleming (the letter was never published, however), he and Fleming met numerous times and had serious talks about new ideas for a new James Bond novel to be set in South Africa. According to Jenkins, Fleming was aware of Per Fine Ounce before his death and had actually collaborated on the book. This was later corroborated by John Pearson who found an outline for the book in Fleming's papers.

Since Fleming's death Glidrose was interested in pursuing other authors to continue writing James Bond novels, a notion that Fleming's wife, Ann, was against, but his brother, Peter Fleming, who at the time was the Glidrose director, was for. In November 1965, Jenkins met with Harry Saltzman, a producer of the James Bond films between 1962 and 1974, and Charles Tyrell from Glidrose Productions to discuss the possibility of finishing the novel and having it published as the first continuation novel. Jenkins was later formally granted permission to write the book on May 12, 1966 and a contract was drawn up on August 24, 1966, but it was never signed.

Not much is known of the plot for Per Fine Ounce. The reference work The Bond Files by Andy Lane and Paul Simpson indicates that it was based upon a story Jenkins claimed he and Fleming had worked on around 1957. The storyline was set in South Africa and apparently dealt with diamond smugglers and a spy ring and bore some resemblance to Fleming's Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever as well as his non-Bond work, The Diamond Smugglers. This is an assumption, however, most likely based on the idea that only two previous Fleming works that took place in South Africa were Diamonds Are Forever and The Diamond Smugglers. There is no further evidence to support the story was about diamonds. Much later Peter Janson-Smith, Fleming's former literary agent and the former chairman of Glidrose, claimed that he believed the story was about gold. The title itself derives from the line "per fine Troy ounce" or a variation of. A fine ounce is a Troy ounce of not quite pure gold.

Regardless, the manuscript was rejected by Glidrose. Peter Janson-Smith later recalled that he thought it was badly written, although he admitted that they were probably "stricter in those days."

A copy of the manuscript reportedly exists in the archives of Ian Fleming Publications (renamed from Glidrose in 1998), which has been backed up by Bond novelist and historian Raymond Benson. Peter Janson-Smith, however, has claimed that he doesn't believe Ian Fleming Publications has a copy and that the most likely scenario is that the manuscript was returned for legal reasons (so as to not be sued in the future for plagarism if a book with a similar plot is used).

In 2005, Titan Books published a reprint of a comic strip based upon Colonel Sun. In the introduction, it is stated that in the mid-1970s Amis lobbied for EON Productions (producers of the Bond film franchise) to produce a film based upon his book. Reportedly he was told that Saltzman had forbidden that any film be made based on Colonel Sun due to Glidrose refusing to publish Per Fine Ounce a decade earlier.