Unpublished Ian Fleming story in The Strand Magazine

The Strand Magazine announces, with full authorisation from the Fleming and Greene estates, the first wide release of an unpublished Ian Fleming story - timed for what would have been his 117th birthday - alongside Graham Greene’s rare supernatural entry, “Reading at Night.”

Ian Fleming’s “The Shameful Dream”

Written in 1951 and reportedly inspired by Fleming’s own editor, Lord Kemsley, this suspenseful tale follows Caffery Bone, an editor in Lord Ower’s ruthless media empire. Ower treats mass firings as sport - its calculated cruelty recalling a classic Bond villain - while Bone’s mounting moral unease drives a taut narrative of ambition, fear, and inevitable reckoning.

“Fleming captures the thrill and the chill of modern power,” says Andrew F. Gulli, Managing Editor. “Bone’s fear, memories, and regret propel a world where power for its own sake is the name of the game.”

Shortly after drafting this story, during a vacation in Jamaica and in the midst of wedding planning, Fleming would pen Casino Royale, forever changing the spy genre.

Graham Greene’s “Reading at Night”

Penned in 1962 and unearthed in the Greene Collection at the University of Texas, “Reading at Night” is one of Greene’s few ghost stories. Far from mere homage, it nods to M. R. James while unfolding on a storm-tossed Côte d’Azur- “nothing blue or warm about the coast in November.” A chance bedtime reading unleashes “primeval fear,” as every creak of floorboards and flash of lightning tests the narrator’s rational “sense of reality.”
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Both stories appear in the May/June issue of The Strand Magazine, which is available starting May 16, 2025, and online at www.strandmag.com.