Of course, Fleming did not communicate this title from the grave, but that`s exactly what one man claimed he had done. The story ideas, which circulated around 1970, were never published.

Six years after Ian Fleming had died, a man approached Ian`s brother, Peter Fleming, claiming Ian passed messages, and even a novel called “Take Over”, from the great beyond. Apparently the man`s late wife would channel these messages through their daughter, while the latter was in a trance.

Intrigued and missing his famous sibling, Peter Fleming read the novel, and even met with the girl. Peter questioned her. She quickly and correctly answered questions anybody could have found in John Pearson`s biography of his brother, but botched more pertinent answers only Peter and Ian would have known.

Peter Fleming also thought that the writing in Take Over was nothing like Ian`s, and, worse, the book was incompetently written. Peter Fleming didn`t think that the girl or her father had perpetrated a deliberate hoax, and allowed the man to submit Take Over to Jonathan Cape (the Fleming brothers` British Publisher)! Cape read the manuscript and declined. The plot involved a poisonous gas that would enable its users to dominate the world, an idea grabbed if one thinks of oil as a poisonous gas, for The World Is Not Enough.

[Note: Peter Fleming`s son Nichol – Ian`s nephew – eventually wrote a novel entitled “Takeover”. It presumably has nothing else in common with this book.]