1953-1966: The Literary Canon

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.

Opening lines from Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.1

Before the films, there were the books: eleven novels and a collection of short stories published during author Ian Fleming's lifetime - one each year from 1953 to 1964 - then posthumous publication of a final novel in 1965 and a mop-up of three short stories collected in paperback in 1966. 2

Ian Fleming was 'a curious and complex person . both clever and conceited'. 3 'Beneath the sybaritic exterior', Ben McIntyre notes, 'Fleming was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and occasional cynicism'. 4

Born in 1908, Fleming came from a privileged background - he was the grandson of the founder of the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. His father, Valentine, was an MP from 1910 until 1917, and was killed on the Western Front. Valentine's obituary was written by Winston Churchill. 5

Ian Fleming, the second of four sons, was educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and the universities of Munich and Geneva. His father's will was restrictive, so unlike many of his peers, he needed to earn a living, although he was never short of money. After failing the entrance exam for the Foreign Office, he had spells at Reuters and two City banking firms. Fleming twice visited Moscow in the 1930s. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, he was involved in planning Operation GoldenEye, and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. Fleming's wartime service and his subsequent career as a journalist provided much of the background, detail and depth of the James Bond novels.

Upon demobilisation in 1945, Fleming became the Foreign Manager for The Sunday Times. He was a bridge-playing friend with the paper owner Lord Kemsley and his generous contract allowed him to take three months holiday every winter in Jamaica. It was here, in his house GoldenEye, that Fleming wrote Casino Royale in January and February 1952. 6

Published in April 1953, this first novel is hard-hitting, inventive and, at times, shocking. Casino Royale contains many of the ingredients which coloured the later Bond novels and, in time, the films - a glamorous setting, a beautiful but flawed woman, a hideous villain, and much luxury, violence and sex. That famous opening scene is set in a casino: the introduction to the lead character in the first James Bond film Dr. No. is almost identical. Gambling in casinos was illegal in the UK until 1960, so from the opening moments of both the first Bond book and film we are in territory that was utterly unfamiliar to the majority of British readers and viewers. To war-ravaged Great Britain in 1953, with rationing still in place, the Bond stories were pure escapism and, to a large degree, fantastic and aspirational. Fleming himself understood this. 'James Bond is the author's pillow fantasy,' he told a reporter in 1963. 'It's very much like the Walter Mitty syndrome - the feverish dream of the author of what he might have been: bang, bang, bang, kiss, kiss, kiss, that sort of stuff. It's what you'd expect of an adolescent mind, which I happen to possess.'

Fleming's routine would be to plot and research his stories during the summer and autumn, write them in Jamaica in the winter, then polish and correct the proofs during the spring and summer. The hardback first edition would follow the next spring, by which time the next book would have been written. The second Bond novel, Live and Let Die, written in 1953 and published in April 1954, established both Fleming's annual routine and his racy writing style -fast-moving, taut, sexy, diligently researched, and underpinned by vivid powers of descriptive writing. Whereas some of Fleming's plots would verge on fantasy, and many character traits would reappear from book to book (talkative villains and nebulous evil organisations; cartoon henchmen; food snobbery; athletic, slightly-tanned women with 'fine' breasts and short fingernails; Bond's self-reliance, cruel mouth and comma of hair), readers of the Bond novels would grow to expect a hard, humourless lead character compared to the one later portrayed on film. Indeed, it's the complete lack of humour in Fleming's Bond novels that make them funny. There are also the outdated attitudes to women, sexuality and race, with heavy overtones of sadism and snobbery that can jar the modern reader.

Writer and historian Simon Winder suggests that Fleming was 'a handsome but banal philandering toff; self-confident but only through staying within the vast ramparts of class distain; intelligent but only because the usual arbitrary scraps of elite education had stuck to him. In fact, he is very much like Bond, but minus the action and adventure and plus the golfing chums'. 7 Fleming himself was asked on the radio programme Desert Island Discs 'Is there much of you in it?' The author replied: 'I hope not . I certainly haven't got his guts nor his very lively appetites.' 8

A further ten books followed annually. From Russia With Love (1957) became Fleming's first overwhelming success, boosted by a visit from the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden to the GoldenEye estate and the publication of Fleming's previous books in paperback in 1956, and by a serialisation in The Daily Express newspaper, first in an abridged, multi-part form (April 1957) and then as a comic strip (February to May 1960). An article in Life (March 1961) listed From Russia With Love as one of President John F. Kennedy's ten favourite books. 9

Ian Fleming soon became the best-selling thriller writer in both the US and the UK. Of the first eighteen books to sell a million copies in the UK, no fewer than ten were Bond thrillers. For Your Eyes Only, published in 1960, collected five short stories. Some of these were Fleming's adaptations of treatments for a television series that was never made. 10

This proposed TV series was just one of several attempts to film James Bond.

1 Copyright the Ian Fleming Estate.

2 Since Fleming's death, a number of other authors have written continuation works: Kingsley Amis (1968, Colonel Sun, a direct sequel to the Fleming books), John Gardener (sixteen books, 1981-1996: Bond is the same character in the same extended timeline of the Fleming books, but by now getting a little long in the tooth), Raymond Benson (six books, 1997-2002, applies a floating timeline to ensure Bond is of appropriate contemporary age), Sebastian Faulks (one book, Devil May Care, 2008, set in the 1960s), Jeffery Deaver (one book, Carte Blanche, 2011, Bond's birthdate is reset to 1980), William Boyd (one book, Solo, 2013, set after the events of Colonel Sun in 1969), Anthony Horowitz (since 2014, two books set within or before the Fleming time line: 1957 [Trigger Mortis] and 1950 [Forever and a Day].)

3 Grace and Favour, the memoirs of Loelia, Duchess of Westminster (1961). She was one of Fleming's many close woman friends (and possibly lover), and provided the name of James Bond's secretary in the early novels.

4 For Your Eyes Only: James Bond and Ian Fleming (2009).

5 Churchill ended his obituary for Fleming's father with these poetic words: 'As the war lengthens and intensifies and the extending lists appear, it seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the darkness one by one.' A framed copy was treasured by Ian Fleming throughout his life.

6 Fleming always pronounced 'Royale' as in 'Royal family'.

7 The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (2006).

8 First broadcast on 8 August 1963.

9 Following Kennedy's endorsement, Fleming saw the sales of his books skyrocket. The other books listed in Life were Montrose and Leadership by John Buchan (1930), Melbourne by Lord David Cecil (1954), Marlborough: His Life and Times (book one) by Winston Churchill (1933), John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy by Samuel Flagg Bemis (1949), Ordeal of the Union vol 2: The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins (1950), The Price of Union by Herbert Agar (1942), John C Calhoun American Portrait by Margaret L Coit (1950), Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell (1941) and The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830). As Sandipan Deb writes 'No one has read any of the other nine, including, one suspects, JFK.' Interestingly, Kennedy and Fleming had in fact met, in Washington DC on 13 March 1960. Urban myths persist that both Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald...