Lest this sound like one of those laments for masculinity, consider this: Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale because he wanted to emulate his successful brother, the writer Peter Fleming, and to impress his wife’s smart literary friends, like Evelyn Waugh. Needless to say, he didn’t.
The irony is that by aspiring to literary respectability – by imagining he wanted to be something that he evidently was not – and failing, he achieved something far more lasting: the ultimate un-Brit, a cultural immortal, and between male generations a lasting bond, James Bond. (Whoops, sorry.)
010
The Thriller Writer with the Golden Touch
010
The thriller writer with the golden touch
A faint whiff of literary snobbery accompanied the news that Sebastian Faulks has written a new James Bond novel. ‘No one tipped the acclaimed serious literary novelist . . . to be entrusted with the latest incarnation of Britain’s most famous spy,’ one newspaper noted. Another sniffed that replicating Ian Fleming required an ability to write ‘bouts of genteel sex at bestseller level’.
Martin Amis, on Radio 4, noted that his father, Kingsley Amis, completed the first ‘continuation Bond’ in 1965. ‘After he divorced my mother, Kingsley was so churned up emotionally that he couldn’t write anything more serious than James Bond,’ Amis said.
The subtext of all this was clear: the James Bond novels are not serious literature. Writers of a higher brow have always wrestled with Bond, trying, and failing, to consign him to pulp fiction. Yet nearly a century after Fleming’s birth, and more than half a century after he sat down to write, Bond remains a literary landmark of the modern age. So far from being mere adventure stories, the Bond books created an entire fictional world around a single individual, as enduring and rich as those of Sherlock Holmes or Bertie Wooster.
That a literary novelist of Faulks’s calibre should take on Fleming’s mantle is a fitting tribute to one of Britain’s greatest thriller writers. That assessment of Ian Fleming has been, is and probably always will be hotly disputed. Many readers have been neither shaken nor stirred by James Bond in book form, but enraged and offended: by his perceived misogyny, materialism, violence and sexual coldness.
Ever since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953, debate has raged over whether Fleming’s novels are titillating pop culture with a cruel edge, or a higher art.
During his lifetime, Fleming’s detractors included the likes of Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge. The latter hammered Bond as ‘utterly despicable; obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways’. Paul Johnson, in a devastating New Statesman essay of 1958 entitled ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’, described Dr No as the nastiest book he had ever read. Fleming himself did not help matters by his diffident attitude towards his own creation: this ‘thriller thing’, his ‘oafish opus’, the ‘pillow book fantasies of an adolescent mind’.
Bond is a medical as well as a literary miracle. In our health conscious times, 007’s louche lifestyle seems more of a threat to his health than any number of SMERSH assassins. At the start of Casino Royale, Bond is tucking into his 70th cigarette of the day, while sucking down endless bottles of champagne and weapons-grade martinis made from three measures of Gordon’s gin, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet, a wincingly bitter aperitif heavily fortified with quinine. It is amazing Bond could stand up, let alone drive his Bentley.
But Bond has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for literary survival. Some of the author’s more perceptive contemporaries predicted as much. Fleming will still be read, observed Noel Coward, ‘long after the Quennells and the Connollys have disappeared’. (Peter Quennell was a prominent critic of the 1940s and 1950s; none of his books is in print today.) Bond has seen off every rival. Bulldog Drummond was put down two generations ago; John Buchan creaks with age; Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu has not survived the passage of time and the evolution of racial attitudes.
But Bond still lives and breathes, without wheezing.
Fleming’s vivid descriptions fire off the page; his plots still cruise along at souped-up Bentley speed and he writes with a tensile beauty. Above all, Fleming’s imagined universe remains believable, though the purest fantasy. As John Betjeman wrote to Fleming shortly before his death: ‘The Bond world is as real and full of fear and mystery as Conan Doyle’s Norwood and Surrey and Baker Street . . . This is real art. I look up to you.’
This world – of an emotionally cauterised upper-class British secret agent – welcomed allcomers. John F. Kennedy was reading a Bond novel the night before he was assassinated; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, his killer. Bond offers escapism, but of a serious sort. To the readers of the 1950s, Bond was a promise of glamour and plenty amid postwar austerity, the thrill of sexual licence in a buttoned-up society. In our own time of uncertainty, Bond is still the man who can do anything and achieve everything, an exemplar of what Anthony Burgess called ‘Renaissance gusto’ in a frightened age.
Raymond Chandler, the only thriller writer to rival Fleming for sheer staying power, identified the three qualities that make the Bond books ‘almost unique’ in British writing: a willingness to experiment with conventional English, a flamboyant evocation of place and an ‘acute sense of pace’.
Fleming has been repeatedly emulated, parodied and ‘continued’, but never equalled, let alone bettered. Fleming published fourteen books; some twenty continuation novels have followed. A few are good, but none quite captured Fleming’s (and Bond’s) authentic, smoky and sardonic voice. The skills for that are not those of the thriller writer or the mimic, but the more profound talents of the literary novelist, which is what makes the appointment of Faulks as the newest Bond author so intriguing, and so promising.
Even at the height of his fame, Fleming was modest about his literary accomplishments. He would have been flattered that Kingsley Amis should be his first authorised heir, and Faulks his latest, but he might not have been surprised at the homage. ‘I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories’, he once declared. Ten years later Fleming achieved that self-appointed mission, and wrote the spy story that has no end.
Author’s Note
This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, is a homage to Ian Fleming on the centenary of the author’s birth, and a celebration of James Bond, his greatest creation. It is not a biography of Ian Fleming – others, notably John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, have already performed that task admirably – nor is it a ‘biography’ of James Bond, for that, too, has been written. It does not purport to be a comprehensive guide to the James Bond phenomenon (for this, I recommend Henry Chancellor’s official companion). Rather, it is a personal investigation into the intersection of two lives, one real and one fictional.
As a journalist and writer of non-fiction, I have always been intrigued by the factual origins of fiction. In previous books, I went in search of the nineteenth-century criminal Adam Worth, the model for Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes tales, and Josiah Harlan, an adventurer who would win literary immortality in Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than any writer I know, anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former officer in naval intelligence, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one. This book is an attempt to explore a remarkable double life and to establish, as nearly as possible, where the real world of Ian Fleming ended and the fictional world of James Bond begins.
Ben Macintyre, April 2008
Picture Section
Evelyn Beatrice Ste Croix Fleming (née Rose), Ian Fleming’s beautiful, domineering mother, who was known to the young Fleming boys, intriguingly, as ‘M’.
Images on this page used with permission of the Fleming family
Valentine Fleming, Fleming’s adored father, who was killed in action while serving on the Western Front in 1917.
The four Fleming brothers: Ian, Michael, Peter and Richard. ‘Strong, handsome, black-haired, blue-eyed boys’, as one contemporary described them.
Ian with his mother on the beach. In his writings, Fleming recalled his childhood beach holidays with a deep and nostalgic affection, which he transferred to James Bond.
Fleming (second from right) attending a dining club at Eton. His younger brother Richard is seated to his right.
Images on this page courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Fleming clad in his naval uniform in Room 39 of the Admiralty, the nerve centre of the Naval Intelligence Division. It was a smoky den crammed with desks, which one inhabitant likened to ‘an Arab bank’.
Fleming’s passport, showing his career switch from journalism, at which he had excelled, to stockbroking, at which he was quite hopeless.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
The Soviet press pass issued to Fleming in 1939.
Used with permission of the Fleming family
Norman Parkinson’s portrait of Ian Fleming in suitably James Bond-like pose. Fleming disliked shooting and knew little about guns, avoiding them whenever possible.
Used with permission of the Norman Parkinson Archive
Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, the Swiss woman to whom Fleming became briefly engaged in 1931 while studying French and German at the University of Geneva.
Images on this page courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Muriel Wright, Fleming’s wartime lover: a model, athlete and good-time girl, who was tragically killed during the bombing of London. Fleming mourned ‘Mu’ deeply after her death, and perhaps modelled the archetypal Bond Girl on her.
Ian with Ann Fleming, the woman he married in 1952. Their marriage was complex and often painful, but it was also loving and full of humour.
Patrick Dalzel-Job, the naval intelligence officer and commando whose extraordinary exploits during the Second World War brought him into contact with Ian Fleming. Dalzel-Job was one of the principal inspirations for the character of 007.
Images on this page courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, the debonair station chief of MI6 in Paris, whose contacts with French and Polish intelligence helped to secure a model of the Enigma machine and break the German code.
Sir Fitzroy Maclean of Dunconnel: Scottish diplomat, soldier, adventurer, writer and politician, and another model for James Bond.
Bernard Lee in the role of ‘M’, James Bond’s irascible and indulgent boss. In The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming finally reveals his name: Vice Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, KCMG.
Courtesy of EON Productions
Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss as Director of Naval Intelligence, and the principal model for ‘M’. Grumpy and demanding, Godfrey was nonetheless ‘a real war winner’, in Fleming’s estimation.
Reproduced with the permission of The National Archives
Maxwell Knight, the wartime MI5 agentrunner who signed his memoirs ‘M’, and who ended his life as a much-loved presenter of nature programmes on the BBC.
Used with permission of the Norman Parkinson Archive
Vera Atkins, executive officer with the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and a brilliant intelligence professional who spent many years after the war seeking to discover the fate of her agents.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Lois Maxwell played the role of Miss Moneypenny, ‘Britain’s last line of defence’ in the first fourteen James Bond films.
Courtesy of EON Productions
Ursula Andress on the beach in Dr No, wearing that bikini or, technically speaking, a black and white frontgather underwire bra with widely spaced shoulder straps and nombril bikini. And a knife.
Courtesy of EON Productions
Fleming smoked custom-made Morland Specials, each one decorated with three gold bands in memory of the rings on the sleeves of the wartime naval uniform. He smoked elegantly, constantly and fatally.
Used with permission of Getty Images
Ernst Stavro Blofeld (played by Donald Pleasence), Fleming’s arch-villain, pictured here with his white Persian cat, an accoutrement that never appears in any of the books.
Courtesy of EON Productions
Aleister Crowley, occultist, mystic, drug addict and sexual omnivore, was the ‘wickedest man in England’, according to his detractors. He may also have been the inspiration for Le Chiffre, the villain of Casino Royale.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Ernö Goldfinger, the modernist architect, who was so enraged to see his name appropriated by Fleming and attached to a gold-obsessed super-crook that he threatened to sue.
Used with permission of the Solo Syndication
Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, the naval war hero whose headless body was found more than a year after he was sent by MI6 to inspect the hull of a Soviet cruiser – provoking a political furore and inspiring the plot of Thunderball.
Used with permission of Getty Images
Nikolai Khokhlov, still hairless from the effects of radioactive poisoning caused when his coffee was laced with thallium – a revenge attack eerily reminiscent of the more recent murder of former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Geoffrey Boothroyd (left), the firearms expert who advised Fleming to re-arm James Bond with something more manly than his Beretta. He was rewarded by having his name attached to ‘Major Boothroyd’, Fleming’s fictional secret service armourer.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Sean Connery and Ian Fleming in the film set of Dr No, 1962.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Eva Green and Daniel Craig as Vesper Lynd and James Bond in the 2006 film of Casino Royale, the biggest box-office hit for Bond so far.
Courtesy of EON Productions
Roger Moore with film producers Cubby Broccoli (right) and Harry Saltzman on the roof of the Dorchester Hotel in London.
Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd
Desmond Llewelyn as Q, the Einstein of the espionage gadget, with Pierce Brosnan in Golden Eye (1995).
Courtesy of EON Productions
Prototypes of Rosa Klebb’s famous dagger-shoes, as worn by Lotte Lenya in the 1963 film of From Russia with Love: elegant, and lethal.
Images on this page courtesy of EON Productions
Bullet-holed cello from The Living Daylights.
Spear guns from Thunderball (1965).
Fleming makes scrambled eggs: twelve eggs, lashings of butter, then some more butter. ‘I think you sometimes add cream instead of the last piece of butter’, he wrote. Note his unconventional ‘hotplate’.
Images on this page used with the permission of Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images
Bond in the bunker: Ian Fleming playing golf.
Ian Fleming poses by a Bentley, similar to Bond’s first car, the battleship – grey 1933 4.5-litre Bentley convertible he drives in Casino Royale.
Fleming at the card table. ‘The same cries of victory and defeat, the same dedicated faces, the same smell of tobacco and drama. For Bond, who loved to gamble, it was the most exciting spectacle in the world.’ (Moonraker)
Used with the permission of Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Bond Books
Casino Royale
1953
Live and Let Die
1954
Moonraker
1955
Diamonds Are Forever
1956
From Russia with Love
1957
Dr No
1958
Goldfinger
1959
For Your Eyes Only (short stories: ‘From a View to a Kill’; ‘For Your Eyes Only’; ‘Risico’; ‘Quantum of Solace’; ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’)
&n
bsp; 1960
Thunderball
1961
The Spy Who Loved Me
1962
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
1963
You Only Live Twice
1964
The Man with the Golden Gun
1965
Octopussy and The Living Daylights (short stories)
1966
Acknowledgements
This book represents a collaboration between many people and several different groups and organisations, all of whom gave generously of their time and expertise, usually at very short notice.
Kate Grimond, representing the Fleming family, Zoë Watkins of Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), and Terry Charman, historian of the Imperial War Museum, were all kind enough to read the manuscript, saving me from a number of embarrassing errors and omissions. It has been a pleasure to work with James Taylor, Elizabeth Bowers, Ann Carter and the rest of the enthusiastic and expert staff of the Imperial War Museum in assembling the objects and words that most accurately represent Ian Fleming and James Bond. I am also grateful to Meg Simmonds of EON Productions for her help, and to Keith Snelgrove, senior vice-president of global business strategy for EON Productions, for granting permission to reproduce stills from the Bond films and photographs of items from the James Bond archive. Thanks also to Johnny Ring for his elegant photography. The Times, media partner of the Imperial War Museum exhibition, generously provided full access to its photographic library and archive; my thanks to Bob Kirwin and Donna Richmond for all their help and advice on pictures, and to News International for permission to reproduce a selection of these. My friends and colleagues at The Times have been typically helpful, and I am particularly grateful to the editor, Robert Thomson, and executive editor, Keith Blackmore, for their support of both the exhibition and this book.
For Your Eyes Only Page 14