Book Notes: For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, by Ben Macintyre

001: ‘The Scent and Smoke and Sweat of a Casino…’

One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about creating a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. The circumstances were not immediately auspicious. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before, though he had done much else. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. As a young man of English privilege, he had toyed with the idea of being a soldier, or a diplomat, but neither had worked out. Only during the war, working in the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy, had he found a task – as an officer in naval intelligence dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination.

This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to wash out the hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican home ‘Goldeneye’ and began to type, using six fingers, on his elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line, after several amendments and corrections, would read: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning . . .’ Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of two thousand a day,

He pretended not to take his books too seriously – ‘the pillow fantasies of an adolescent mind’ was how he later described them – but he approached the craft of thriller-writing with the precision of a professional,

The exploits of 007 grew directly out of Fleming’s knowledge of wartime intelligence and espionage; they shared similar tastes and attitudes towards women; they even looked similar.

would teasingly refer to the Bond books as ‘autobiography’. Like every good journalist, Fleming was a magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places, plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from reality that would then be translated into fiction.

This thriller cocktail was as heady and intoxicating as the weapons-grade martini James Bond orders in Casino Royale: ‘Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold, then add a large thick slice of lemon-peel.’

Thirteen more Bond books would follow Casino Royale. By the time of his death, just twelve years later, Ian Fleming had sold more than forty million copies, and the first two Bond films had been made, to acclaim, giving birth to a multi-billion-dollar industry that expands with every passing year.

Bond not only outlived Fleming, but continues to be reborn: new films, new books authorised by the Fleming estate, new spoofs. Every age gets the Bond it needs. He is updated with new attitudes to sex, smoking and alcohol, and remodelled with fresh tailoring, new enemies and ever more imaginative gadgets.

In the books, Bond kills sparingly, while on screen the carnage is often staggering. Fleming’s Bond is vulnerable, prey to nerves and even fear, whereas on screen he barely bleeds, let alone psychologically. Yet the essential Bond is the same, the brand eternal: a sardonic, stylish, seductive Englishman, with a licence not just to kill, but to perform every feat that an armchair Bond can imagine.

002 The Life: Smelling Battle from Afar

The Fleming boys idolised their father (nicknamed ‘Mokie’, on account of his ‘Smokey’ pipe), and after his death he became an unattainable symbol of chivalry and moral goodness. In their nightly prayers, the boys would entreat the Almighty to ‘Make me more like Mokie.’ The desire to emulate this military father-hero would run through the lives of every Fleming son, but perhaps most notably in Ian, and his fictional counterpart.

His time at Eton had been an unmitigated failure, but he could ski beautifully, speak German fluently, and seduce effortlessly. Ernan Forbes Dennis said of his young pupil: ‘He has excellent taste . . . and a desire both for truth and knowledge. He is virile and ambitious, generous and kind-hearted.’ There was also something solitary and reserved about his character, a central hardness. All these things could be said of the young Fleming; in time, they would also be true of James Bond.

As one girlfriend remarked, ‘For Ian, women were like fishcakes. Mind you he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.’ Bond dines on caviar and the finest fillet steak, and then sleeps with the most beautiful women; Fleming, sexually speaking, ‘ate fishcakes’, lots of them.

On 24 May 1939, just four months before the declaration of war, Fleming sat down to lunch at the Carlton Grill with Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the hard-driving Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) and the man responsible for gathering intelligence in all areas of the war related to British naval interests – in other words, just about everywhere. Godfrey, himself barely three months into the job, had put out the word that he needed an assistant. Fleming, he decided, would be the ideal candidate.

In the smoky hive of Room 39, Fleming was Godfrey’s front man, and as such he operated with considerable freedom: he liaised with MI6 and SOE (responsible for sabotage and subversion); he worked with the Political Warfare Executive on propaganda, and handled the press; he fielded demands for information from above, and shielded Godfrey from interference from below.

Godfrey noted that Fleming tended not to let practicalities get in the way of a good ‘plot’: ‘He had plenty of ideas and was anxious to carry them out but was not interested in, and would prefer to ignore, the extent of the logistics background inseparable to all projects.’ In a sense, Fleming’s task was to dream up espionage plans with convincing scenarios; others would then be charged with trying to turn fiction into reality. In this, he was preparing for, and precisely reversing, the process that would lead to the creation of James Bond.

One of Fleming’s most notable contributions to wartime intelligence was the creation of 30 Assault Unit (30 AU), a commando group dedicated to gathering intelligence in advance of the main British fighting force. Fleming and Bond expert Henry Chancellor has described 30 AU as ‘in effect, the private army of the Naval Intelligence Department’; if so, then Fleming was its general, though never in the field.

similar force had been deployed by the Germans to capture Allied documents, codes and equipment; Fleming considered it ‘one of the most outstanding innovations in German intelligence’ and worked hard to copy it. Inevitably, 30 AU attracted men of a particular stamp: daring, independent-minded buccaneers, stylish in a brutal way and supremely tough.

These ‘tough commando types’, as Fleming remembered them, would form the bedrock of James Bond’s character.

In Washington, Godfrey and Fleming met J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, for exactly sixteen minutes, but soon afterwards Roosevelt followed British advice and made Bill Donovan head of the new government intelligence department that would later become the OSS. At Donovan’s request, Fleming penned a seventy-page memo with suggestions on the shape a US intelligence agency should take after the war. His description of the ideal secret agent has the unmistakable ring of Bond: ‘must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience, and be aged about 40 to 50’. Fleming would later claim, not entirely seriously, that this work had been instrumental in forming the CIA charter; even if this was not strictly true, Donovan was grateful enough to present Fleming with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed ‘For Special Services’.

His travels continued, including a round-the-world trip to coordinate intelligence for the new British Pacific Fleet that took him to Cairo, Ceylon, Australia and then home via Pearl Harbor. He also visited Jamaica to attend a conference on the U-boat threat in the Caribbean, and fell in love with the island. Here he would build his holiday home, Goldeneye, and here he would, in time, write every one of the Bond novels.

much of the material was already in place. Fleming had met dangerous adventurers, and known subtle spies; in the midst of war, he had travelled to distant corners of the world; he had witnessed the remarkable power of modern gadgetry in the spy’s armoury; he had seen how secret agents are made; he had watched men die; and he had held the power of life and death in his own hands. Above all, his job with naval intelligence had taken place in a wartime world where anything seemed possible. Winning a war, like writing a novel, required one weapon above all others: imagination.

Over the next fourteen years, he would perform numerous roles at the Sunday Times: manager, columnist and writer on subjects as diverse as gambling and travel. His was an easy, pleasant and unchallenging life. Fleming’s description in Moonraker of Bond’s daily routine when not on assignment is a fairly accurate depiction of his own easygoing existence in these years: ‘Elastic office hours from around ten to six, lunch . . . evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends . . . or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women, weekends playing golf for high stakes.’

003 Who was James Bond?

Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up as a character, or a characteristic, in one of his Bond books. Fleming was, like most fiction writers, an avid collector of facts: he gathered names, plots, meals, venues and words from the places he had been and the people he had met.

several of Fleming’s acquaintances were mortally offended to discover that their names had been appropriated and attached to the most fearsome fictional villains.

Working out who’s who in Bond, and who might be partially based on whom (as well as who later claimed to be whom, and probably wasn’t), is one of the most intriguing and complex aspects of the relationship between Ian Fleming and James Bond.

Where did James Bond – the name – come from? As with all aspects of the Bond stories, there are several theories and a number of speculations. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond,

‘When I was in the Admiralty during the war,’ Fleming told a later interviewer, ‘all the top-secret signals had the double-O prefix. Although this was later changed for security reasons, it stuck in my mind and I decided to borrow it for Bond to make his job more interesting and provide him with a licence to kill.’

The sixteenth-century English mathematician, occultist and secret agent, Dr John Dee, used a similar code in messages sent to Queen Elizabeth I. In Dee’s code the double-O prefix, symbolising two eyes, was shorthand for ‘For Your Eyes Only’.

Fleming never denied that Bond was a combination of real people; he did not, however, identify exactly which people, leaving the door open to an entire raft of claimants.

A more likely candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served in the 30 AU unit during the latter part of the war.

Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job, who died in 2003 at the age of ninety, was credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the association, and claimed that Fleming had told him, long after the war, that he was indeed an inspiration for Bond. But disarmingly, this diminutive figure with large ears who lived in retirement in the Scottish Highlands pointed out that in certain respects he was no Bond: ‘I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style . . . And I only ever loved one woman, and I’m not a drinking man.’ Yet he also implied that he knew what was in the books and films, and recognised himself. ‘When you have lived such an exciting life you don’t need to see a fictional account of it,’ he said, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, since he was approaching the age of eighty-seven: ‘I prefer the quiet life now.’

Who was M?

The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG (finally identified by name in The Man with the Golden Gun) is based, in large part, on John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss at the Naval Intelligence Department. M is grumpy, dedicated, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with ‘damnably clear’ bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts.

Who was Miss Moneypenny?

M’s comely, love-struck secretary, the loyal keeper of secrets, has almost as many potential real lives as she has had appearances on screen.

No one ever accused Fleming of underwriting his villains, who are as lurid and sensational as Bond himself is deliberately understated. They are all extraordinary – ugly, deformed, brilliant, sadistic, rich, power-mad and unrepentantly insane.

Although some of Fleming’s close friends were homosexual, he shared the prejudices of his time and class, and so does Bond.

Bond is repeatedly brought to the villain’s lair, told he is a young fool, and then prepared for punishment. This was a scene only too familiar to Fleming from many unpleasant encounters with his cane-wielding housemaster at Eton, and to any number of ex-public-schoolboys familiar with corporal punishment.

Another who strongly objected to seeing his name in a Bond novel was Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished and controversial modernist architect.

Fleming is said to have objected to Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian

houses to make way for his tower blocks.

there are a few genuine similarities between the Goldfingers: both were Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe who liked fast cars, and both were Marxists, in Auric’s case by association with SMERSH. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger was exceptionally unamused, summoned his lawyers, and threatened to halt publication.

Fleming clearly derived great pleasure, and considerable devilry, from his choice of names, whether the subject was good, bad or inanimate. He had an extraordinary ear for names with a ring to them, a gift which later imitators have found hard to emulate. ‘He took immense trouble with names and plots, although the names sometimes came before the plots,’ said his friend Ivar Bryce

004 The Plots: From Hot War to Cold War

Ian Fleming shared with his brother, Peter, a fear that Britain, having triumphed over Nazism, was becoming soft and irrelevant, a land of small minds and smaller dreams. In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined.

For many of the men and women who had fought Nazism for six long years, peace was an almost physical jolt. Amid the fear and deprivations of war, many had experienced excitement, danger and a freedom from the daily drudgery of normal life in ways that would never be repeated. Even men like Fleming, who had fought a relatively comfortable war of the intellect, had been stretched and challenged. Victory brought peace, but it also brought boredom: ‘The only vice Bond utterly condemned.’

Fleming and Bond spread the belief that Britain produced the best spies in the world and, bizarrely, the myth stuck.

Fleming’s characters and plots emerge, in many instances, directly from the Second World War. Even the demonology derives from that conflict: evildoers being, in approximate order of untrustworthiness, German, Russian, Japanese, Bulgarian, Korean and French.

The Second World War provides the psychological backdrop for almost all the principal characters. ‘He was back there again fighting war,’ Fleming writes of Tiger Tanaka, the spy trained as a kamikaze pilot who heads the Japanese secret service in You Only Live Twice. ‘Bond knew the symptoms. He often visited this haunted forest of memory himself.’ Or as Bond remarks in Thunderball: ‘The war just doesn’t seem to have ended for us.’

The clues to the Second World War are everywhere, yet Bond is fighting an emphatically new war, against a looming communist threat, in the shape of its most evil and ruthless manifestation, SMERSH.

John F. Kennedy was first introduced to Fleming’s books in 1955, and read a copy of Casino Royale while convalescing in New England. He remained a fan to the end of his life. In 1961, Kennedy named From Russia with Love in his top ten favourite books,

The night before he was assassinated in Dallas, the President is said to have been reading a James Bond novel; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who would kill him the very next day.

Fleming was quick to point out that Cold War reality, and the espionage game, was stranger than any fiction he could invent: My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from East to West Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb’s frogman exploit to examine the hull of a Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets . . . this is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate.

Nikolai Khokhlov was the Soviet spy who very nearly succeeded. A KGB spy whose exploits rival any of the models on which Bond was based,

Khokhlov’s remarkable book, In the Name of Conscience, was published in 1959. A copy inevitably found its way on to Fleming’s bookshelves, and from there into his fiction.

From 1960 onwards, Bond’s enemies are no longer the Soviet menace, but individual crooks and killers, gangsters of the higher variety, and most notably SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), the crime syndicate staffed by exmembers of SMERSH, the Gestapo, the Mafia and the Black Tong of Peking, and run by Blofeld.

The shift of focus is even more emphatic in the films. Where once Bond battled ideological foes, in his latter-day incarnations he takes on freelance bandits, mafia types and criminal megalomaniacs – terrifying but politically neutral.

005 Gadgets, Guns, Gizmos and Gear-sticks

Some machines were imaginary; most were based firmly on reality, giving the reader the important sense of being told a fiction based on truth. Kingsley Amis called this use of real information in a fictional world ‘The Fleming Effect’, and it proved highly successful.

But gizmos are also present in the books, courtesy of Q-Branch, the genuine wartime equipment unit under the extraordinary Charles Fraser-Smith. Based in a tiny office near St James’s Park, Fraser-Smith commissioned some three hundred firms around London to make an array of ingenious gadgets. He called them ‘Q gadgets’, after the British warships disguised as merchant vessels known as ‘Q ships’ in the First World War.

Since the Cold War was, to a large extent, a war fought between scientists on opposing sides, Fleming was determined to get the science right.

Fleming’s fascination with the underwater world and the technology involved in deep-sea diving dates from his contact with one of the great underwater experts, Jacques Cousteau.

In May 1956, Fleming received the sort of reader’s letter he partly dreaded and partly appreciated: James Bond, the writer complained, ‘has a rather deplorable taste in firearms’. This was not, perhaps, all that surprising, since Fleming, unlike his brother Peter, had little time or taste for guns. He still owned the Colt .38 Police Positive engraved and presented to him by Bill Donovan, the US spy chief, but there is no evidence he ever fired it. He found the minutiae of gun science extremely boring, but as an essential element of the Bond mystique he appreciated the importance of accuracy.

In Casino Royale, Bond uses a Beretta in a chamois leather holster; Fleming himself had been issued with a .25 ACP Beretta during the war, and may have assumed it was the standard-issue secret agent’s weapon; more likely it was simply the first gun he could think of.

Eventually, on Boothroyd’s advice, Bond swapped his Beretta (‘I am killing the bloody gun in my next book – on sound grounds’) for a Walther PPK

7.65, because Boothroyd thought it was the best automatic of its size with ammunition available worldwide.

Bond drives three different Bentleys in the books, and only one Aston Martin, in Goldfinger, yet this is the car with which he will be forever associated, thanks again to the films.

006 Bond Girls

It is a mark of James Bond’s cultural reach that, for better or worse, a ‘Bond Girl’ has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for a new love interest. She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond’s women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and have some small physical flaw. Like Bond’s cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret.

Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit, vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs, often with other people’s wives, including those of close friends. This was not because Fleming had a particular penchant for adultery: divorce was less prevalent then, and adultery more common. Sometimes these affairs were long-lasting, but mostly they were not. An American acquaintance was struck by his apparently clinical attitude towards women: ‘He got bored with them fast and could be brutal about it. He had absolutely no jealousy. He explained to me that women were not worth that much emotion. But with it all, he had an abiding and continual interest in sex without any sense of shame or guilt.’ Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship.

As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one.

Ian enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends and annoying his family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Even though they were unofficially ‘engaged’, Fleming was consistently and relentlessly unfaithful to her, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded.

Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On 14 March 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of flying masonry hurtled through her open window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once.

year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O’Neill, and future wife of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish, worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complex and extraordinarily good company. Ian’s love affair with Ann started during the war; it continued after O’Neill’s death and her marriage to Rothermere; and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life.

When Ian and Ann finally did decide to marry, on 24 March 1952, he was forty-three, she was pregnant, and he anticipated the worst.

Fleming conducted a long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party.

When they were apart, they missed each other painfully, he declaring: ‘I love you only in the world.’ When they were together, they fought viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly.

007 Shaken, Stirred and Custom-made: Bond’s Life of Luxury

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the allure of Bond’s lifestyle to a postwar Britain strained by rationing, deprived of glamour and still bruised by the privations of war. Bond is, quite simply, a stylish, fast-shooting, high-living, sexually liberated advertisement for all the things ordinary Britons had never had, yet dreamed of: the finest food and drink, smart clothes, fast cars, leisure time, casinos, exotic foreign travel, swimming in warm waters. Fleming called his evocation of this fantasy ‘disciplined exoticism’. But he was also one of the first writers to identify the appeal of the designer lifestyle in an emerging age of consumerism. Identifying Bond with certain brands made him not only classy, but believable.

Bond and Fleming share most sartorial tastes, although 007 favours black knitted silk ties and would not, I suspect, be seen dead in a spotted bow-tie.

Behind Bond the fashion icon lurks Fleming the harrumphing, old-school patriot, disapproving of vulgar dressers, bad manners and homosexuals (even though two of his closest friends, William Plomer and Noël Coward, were gay). Some of Bond’s fashion choices would be considered disastrous today, but were then a mark of extreme sophistication, and all reflected Fleming’s own idiosyncratic fashion: Bond’s taste for pyjama-coats, for example, and black leather sandals (we are not told whether he wears socks with these, but I prefer to assume not).

Bond would come to share Fleming’s deep affection for Jamaica, and in Live and Let Die we learn that 007 ‘had grown to love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people’.

Bond is a foodie; indeed, he may be the first action-foodie-hero in the thriller genre. Fleming’s suggestion that Bond, when not on assignment, often dines simply (grilled sole, oeufs en cocotte and the like) stands in sharp contrast to his gastronomic behaviour throughout the series. In Casino Royale, Bond declares from the outset: ‘I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink.’ He puts this gourmandising down to being a single man who must often eat alone.

Bond’s meals are bright explosions of high cuisine, specifically designed to tantalise and amaze in a Britain where bananas were considered mouth-wateringly exotic, milk came powdered, and practically everything tasted the same and of very little. In 1948, with control over food supplies even stricter than it had been during the war, the average man was rationed to two ounces of bacon and ham, one and a half ounces of cheese and two ounces of tea each week, and just one egg every five days. The memory of deprivation was still fresh in 1953, and meat rationing would not end until 1954.

‘He is basically a hard liquor man,’ Fleming said of his fictional creation. ‘He is not a wine snob.’ Put rather more basically, Bond will drink anything if it is exclusive and sophisticated, and he does, in sometimes quite astonishing quantities.

In the films, Bond’s drinking is essentially pared down to three specific drinks: vodka martinis (‘shaken, not stirred’), champagne and whisky on the rocks. In the books, however, his drinking habits are far wider.

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for example, the eleventh book, Bond downs no less than forty-six drinks, the widest variety in any single book.

Martini drinkers have long debated whether a vodka martini is better shaken or stirred (and even whether a vodka martini is really a martini at all); the theory appears to be that, if shaken, the martini gets colder than if it is simply stirred. That fits in with Bond’s requirements: ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well made.’

Fleming’s own drinking was less varied than Bond’s, but just as voluminous, and far more damaging.

Fleming loved to gamble and so, of course, does Bond.

With the help of Jacques Cousteau, Fleming glimpsed the extraordinary underwater riches, and his daily swim and snorkelling along the reef at Goldeneye became part of a beloved ritual. He made an in-depth study of the fish in the lagoon, and bound it in black leather. Though no fan of the hunt on land, he chased barracuda with a spear gun in the shallower waters, and once went shark hunting, using a dead animal carcass as bait, an experience he described as the most exhilarating of his life.

Ian Fleming spent much of his life behind a desk – at the Admiralty, at the Sunday Times and at Goldeneye – and the rest of his time trying to escape from the confines of a desk-bound life.

Wherever he goes, the weather is wonderful. ‘The sun is always shining in my books,’ Fleming remarked. Conversely, in Bond’s Britain, the weather is reliably horrible, cold, windy and miserable, or else unpleasantly sweltering. This is the place that Bond and his readers escape from. It is easy, and even a touch galling, to imagine Fleming sitting at his desk in Jamaica, opining on the horrors of an English winter while looking out over the azure waters of his private tropical lagoon.

Only one Bond book, Moonraker, the third in the series, is set entirely in Britain. The evocation of Kent reflected Fleming’s love of that county, but the decision to restrict Bond to home turf prompted complaints from some readers keen to be transported elsewhere; thereafter, Fleming sent Bond abroad in every novel.

Wherever Bond travels, Fleming has travelled first. As with all his writing, the fiction is firmly anchored to facts, people and scenes he had experienced at first hand.

008 The Short Life of Ian Fleming; The Eternal Life of James Bond

By 1961, and the publication of Thunderball, James Bond is ailing. As the book opens, he wakes up feeling dreadful, chronically hungover. Boredom, and the soft life he has always feared, are taking their toll.

Fleming’s report on the health of his hero was broadly autobiographical: the drinking, high blood pressure and headaches were all symptoms suffered with increasing persistence by the writer himself.

For all his vigour, Fleming had never enjoyed robust good health.

For Fleming, the odds on his own life expectancy were steadily getting worse, but at the very moment when his books were about to hit the most astonishing winning streak.

When describing his writing methods, Fleming reached for a water-sports metaphor: ‘Each chapter is like a wave to be jumped as we race behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor boat.’ Forcing the reader to turn the page was the only rule of thriller-writing that mattered, and he stuck to the formula religiously, writing at the pace of the most daredevil water-skier, but with iron discipline.

Over the course of fourteen years, every one of the Bond novels was written in Goldeneye as winter turned to spring, usually taking about eight weeks, and then published a year later: two thousand words every morning between 9.30 and 12.30, or approximately seven hundred words an hour.

‘If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky to write five hundred words a day,’ he advised.

He seldom rewrote in any substantial way: the books seemed to flow from him almost fully formed, on the initial draft.

Sales were good, but nowhere near what they would become, or what Fleming would like them to have been. Some of Fleming’s early success may be ascribed to canny promotion, and some to mere good luck. If Live and Let Die had been entitled The Undertaker’s Wind, as Fleming originally planned, then one wonders if the entire Bond series might have come to a premature end.

Damnation, swiftly followed by the breakthrough Fleming craved, would come in 1958 with the publication of Dr No. The critics rounded on Fleming, almost as a pack, and Bond-bashing became the order of the day. Fleming’s writing was pilloried as vulgar, licentious and immoral, snobbish and anachronistic, with a nasty flavour of sado-masochism.

The attacks reflected the fact that Fleming was now well known enough to warrant being attacked: helped by the notoriety and controversy, the faint but exciting whiff of immorality and sexual mischief, the Bond books acquired their own momentum.

In 1959, Goldfinger hurtled directly to the top of the best-seller lists.

Fleming had always intended that his creation should transfer to film or television, and as with the books, he worked hard to bring about the transformation.

The rights to Casino Royale were sold to CBS in 1954 for $1,000 and later adapted into a television play as part of a series entitled Climax, now almost wholly forgotten.

In 1958, Fleming was commissioned to write a thirteen-part Bond series, again for CBS in the US. Once again, the project foundered, but much of the material Fleming had written would be recycled in different forms in the later books.

Through Ivar Bryce, he met an up-and-coming filmmaker, Kevin McClory, and together (along with screenwriter Jack Whittingham) they set about writing a treatment for an underwater Bond adventure set in the Caribbean. Once again, the project foundered, mainly for lack of financial backing, but as usual Fleming was unwilling to see hard work go to waste and adapted the idea into the novel Thunderball.

Film salvation arrived in the somewhat unlikely double act of Albert Romolo ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, an experienced Italian-American Hollywood producer, and Harry Saltzman, a Canadian former circus performer and intelligence agent turned movie impresario. Saltzman had acquired the film rights to all the Bond books (save Casino Royale), and in partnership with Broccoli he founded EON Productions – standing for Everything Or Nothing – which was a good motto for their high-stakes gambling style.

It is said that Fleming initially wanted the part of Dr Julius No to be played by Noël Coward, his old friend and neighbour in Jamaica, a prospect that would have been hilarious, and probably disastrous. He also suggested that David Niven, another friend, should play Bond, or Richard Burton, whom he much admired, or else a young actor named Roger Moore.

Broccoli could be less than flattering about the novelist’s work: Dr No, he allegedly said to one potential director, was ‘full of nonsense’.

the screen Bond was very different from Fleming’s version. For a start, he was a great deal more promiscuous, and substantially more bloodthirsty.

‘I never intended him to be a particularly likeable person,’ Fleming wrote, but in the films Bond is not only instantly and enduringly attractive, but charming and, above all, amusing.

The one-liners became a staple feature of Bond in his film incarnation (the less funny his quips, paradoxically, the better), but in the books the brooding Bond is almost entirely devoid of humour.

There have been six Bond actors to date, and each successive Bond has evolved the character in different, sometimes contradictory, directions. Connery (1962–7, 1971 and 1983) was determined, rugged, effortlessly sexual; George Lazenby (1969) laconic, humourless and perhaps closest to Fleming’s Bond; Roger Moore (1973–85) was jocular, suave and playful almost to the point of parody; Timothy Dalton (1987–94) gritty, serious and occasionally reluctant to accede to the demands of the job; Pierce Brosnan (1994–2002) witty, charming, athletic; Daniel Craig (from 2005) blond, humane and remarkable in swimming trunks.

Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that in 1960 Fleming was selling an impressive 6,000 paperbacks a week; four years later, with the two films and John F. Kennedy’s endorsement of From Russia with Love as one of his favourite books, sales had leapt to 112,000 a week, and Fleming was enjoying a tenfold increase in his income.

Fleming once remarked that he wrote ‘chiefly for pleasure, then for money’. The money began to pour in, just as the pleasure was waning. As his body began to fail, crunching out the words, once so easy, became increasingly taxing, a painful chore. To Plomer, he confided that he was ‘terribly stuck with James Bond . . . I used to believe – sufficiently – in Bonds & Blondes & Bombs. Now the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone . . . I shall definitely kill off Bond with my next book.’

With one last, courageous effort, in January 1964 he tapped out the first draft of The Man with the Golden Gun.

on 12 August, the day of his son Caspar’s twelfth birthday, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered another massive heart attack and died.

Bulgarian writer, Andrei Gulyashki, came up with a communist version of James Bond named Avakum Zakhov. Here was fiction overtaking fact, the Cold War being fought out in rival novels.

If the films extended Bond’s world in one medium, then the continuation novels authorised by the family gave him endless life in another. The first official imitator was Kingsley Amis, with Colonel Sun, in 1968; between 1981 and 1996 John Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels; he was followed by the American writer Raymond Benson, while Charlie Higson successfully took on the challenge of writing the Young Bond series, and Samantha Weinberg took the myth in another direction with The Moneypenny Diaries. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has now joined the party, with the latest authorised Bond novel, Devil May Care, published to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.

009 The Spy Who Never Dies

This central core of male fantasy transcends the various incarnations of Bond. He is about having what you are denied in a British world of convention and order. When Casino Royale was published in 1953, food was still rationed in Britain and gambling illegal outside exclusive clubs: so Bond played the baccarat tables and ate beef in Bernaise sauce, now the staple of every Angus Steak House, then the stuff of gastronomic dreams. Sean Connery’s cold-eyed killer and misogynist transported a generation of british boys brought up on Airfix models, marmite toast and monogamy. Roger Moore, the most

ironic Bond, took cinema-goers from grey Britain to places where the sun shone permanently and you could ski backwards firing a machinegun. Bond has a fabulous wardrobe without ever once having to go shopping – another fantasy for the average British male.