(1908-1964)
When Casino Royale was published in 1954, the modern-dress spy story had been a negligible sub-genre with only a few widely known efforts, assorted novels by E. Phillips oppenheim, along with Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1908), John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps (1915)—the last three filmed by Alfred Hitchcock). That situation changed considerably following the arrival of Ian Fleming and his “licensed-to-kill” creation, James Bond. Indeed, at the peak of his renown in the mid-to-late 1960s, secret agent 007′s phenomenal impact on the popular culture would match that of any single fictional creation in the 20th century.
Born in England, Fleming was well-educated (Eton, Sandhurst) and upper middle class. A linguist who was well-traveled from an early age, the young Fleming dabbled in journalism and espionage, often both at the same time, as a London Times correspondent and Foreign Office spy in Moscow in the years before World War II. He rose to a high-ranking position in naval intelligence during the war, then in peacetime returned to newspaper work, assuming a picturesque beat as foreign correspondent and feature writer that took him to all the world’s “thrilling cities” (the title he gave a volume of collected travel writing). At a beach house in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, seated before a portable typewriter, with the sounds of the Caribbean surf and tropical breezes in the air, Fleming wrote the first of a series of novels about a fearless, handsome, lethal, and promiscuous super-spy, a protagonist created out of various amounts of autobiography and delirious wish fulfillment.
Casino Royale was a sleazily glamorous, entertaining, but relatively small-scale beginning. Evoking the Old World luxury domes of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s tuxedoed spy thrillers, it was set in the French gaming place of the title. Its highlight was a suspenseful high-stakes card game between Bond and the inaugural Bond villain, LeChiffre. But the elements of future Bond stories were all there: the name brands, the beautiful, willing women, the scenes of cold-blooded violence and sadosexual torture. The topics that followed—Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia, with Love, and more—became more elaborate in scope, with diverse locales (Bond, it might be said, was the first “jet set” hero), an increasingly grand canvas, spectacular action scenes, and larger-than-life characters. The plots included hijacked nuclear weapons, Harlem gangsters, an assault on Fort Knox, a lesbian aviator named Pussy Galore, a barracuda-infested swimming pool, and a bizarre fraternity of supervillains and international crime syndicates—Auric Goldfinger, Dr. No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, SPECTRE.
Critics never gave Fleming much credit as a writer. Many sneered at what they saw as, at best, a gaudy veneer of sophistication, the crass consumerism of brand names as if Agent 007 were a celebrity endorsing various products, and a prose style they considered worthy of a penny dreadful. In fact, Fleming’s writing had the smoothness and speed of one of Bond’s well-tooled automobiles. The style was elegant, icily sensuous, and rife with a deadpan cynical wit (“Bond went to his suitcase again and took out a thick topic— The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature— opened it and extracted his Walther PPK in the Berns Martin holster”). In any case, Fleming’s real impact as a creative artist came not from his prose style but instead from his visionary commingling of modern and classic ingredients to create an influential new form of adventure fiction. The James Bond novels were precisely placed in the modern world: they used torn-from-the-headlines cold war details, contained a jet age mobility, and referred to contemporary consumerist society (the fastest cars, most luxurious hotels, finest tailors, and sharpest shaving blades). Fleming, furthermore, was the first to adapt the ferocious violence and explicit sexuality of Mickey spillane and other postwar hard-boiled American writers to a more sophisticated milieu. Fleming then audaciously grafted these up-to-date elements to a mostly forgotten world of prewar British pulp, the arrogant clubland aristocrats of Sapper and Sydney Horler, the moonlit Monte Carlo intrigues of E. Phillips Oppenheim, the fiendish, megalomaniacal villains of Sax rohmer. It made for a peculiarly rich brew and a satisfying reading experience. The James Bond novels felt as fresh as the latest CIA coup d’etat while providing the same delirious thrills as a vintage tale of Dr. Fu Manchu. In addition— compare the 14-volume Bond canon to the same-old-song of most other series about a continuing character—Fleming often experimented with the form of his novels, writing one in which the hero is not present for many pages (From Russia) and one in which the story is told almost exclusively from the point of view of a female character (The Spy Who Loved Me). Far from remaining a static, invincible superhero throughout, Fleming’s Bond fell in love, wed, became a widower, lost his mind, and otherwise was revealed as human and vulnerable.
The topics did only reasonably well on both sides of the Atlantic until the new American President, John F. Kennedy (a James Bondish world leader if ever there was one), gave a passing endorsement to the series. Fleming’s work instantly moved onto and up the best-seller lists, and a motion picture version of Doctor No was put into production with a little-known Scottish actor named Sean Connery as 007. It was soon followed by adaptations of From Russia, with Love and Goldfin-ger. James Bond mania gripped much of the world throughout the 1960s, with countless emulations, variations, and spoofs in topics, films, television programs, and comic strips.
Worldwide excitement for Ian Fleming’s creation had just begun to peak in 1964 when the author died suddenly at age 56. His last full-length James Bond adventure, The Man with the Golden Gun, a return to the down-to-earth action of his first novel and set in Fleming’s beloved Jamaica, was published posthumously the following year.
Works
- Casino Royale (1954);
- Diamonds Are Forever (1956);
- Doctor No (1958);
- For Your Eyes Only (1960);
- From Russia, with Love (1957);
- Goldfinger (1959);
- Live and Let Die (1954);
- Man with the Golden Gun, The (1965);
- Moon-raker (1955);
- Octopussy/The Living Daylights (1966);
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963);
- Spy Who Loved Me, The (1962) Thunderball (1961);
- You Only Live Twice (1964)
