“We have all the time in the world,” James Bond tells his new bride Tracy in 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” both moments before and after she dies at the hand of Bond’s nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofield. Unfortunately, like Tracy, Bond’s creator—a brilliant, troubled, complex writer who died at 56—never had as much time as he, or we might have liked.
This is the first biography authorized by the Fleming estate. It gave English writer Nicholas Shakespeare unprecedented access to his subject’s correspondence and to his remaining living family members and friends. In Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an engrossing and definitive biography, we encounter the man in full, contradictions and all.
Fleming’s compatriots remember him as a “moody, harsh and withdrawn person, habitually rude and often cruel,” “the most generous, least malicious, most merry, yet most melancholy man I ever knew,” “most emphatically not a snob” (his wife, Ann), “a real snob” (Sean Connery), “completely and utterly irresistible to women,” and someone whom “nine out of ten women couldn’t stand.” How could one person contain such multitudes?
The British Intelligence Machine
Shakespeare begins by examining the Fleming clan’s paterfamilias, Robert, a wildly successful self-made financier. Robert Fleming rose out of Scottish lowland poverty in the late 19th century, founding an important bank in the City of London. He conducted business with J.P. Morgan and other titans.
His son Valentine, Ian’s father, joined the upwardly mobile and self-abnegating fin-de-siecle English striving class, attending Eton, befriending Churchill’s younger brother Jack, joining the family business, and winning a seat in Parliament. Val married Eve, a boisterous and outspoken social climber who bore him four sons. Ian was the second.
Tragedy struck during World War I in 1917 when the courageous Val, a major in the Oxfordshire Hussars who had already survived multiple shellings, returned to the battlefield in France and fell under heavy German bombardment in the Somme. Churchill eulogized him in the Times. A bereft nine-year-old Ian maintained the proverbial stiff upper lip and soon followed his late father’s example, enrolling in Eton, where he excelled athletically but not academically. He then washed out of the military academy at Sandhurst, relocating to the hamlet of Kitzbuhel in the Austrian Tyrol, where an expatriate English couple took him in.
Aimless and floundering, the teenaged Fleming found love, writing, and inner peace in the Alps. He was introduced there to Alfred Adler, the renowned psychologist and acolyte of Freud, who diagnosed him with classic “second-child syndrome,” a feeling of inferiority to his dashing older brother Peter.
A more confident, mature, and self-aware Ian returned to London, where he began reporting for Reuters, training that he found “much more valuable to me than all the reading in English literature I did at Eton” and that “taught him to write fast and above all be accurate.” His assignment took him to Moscow, where he covered a notorious 1933 Stalinist show trial in a series of articles that brought him recognition and instilled both a knowledge of and a loathing for the authoritarian Soviet system. (He was also sent to Berlin to report on Hitler’s triumphant election as chancellor.)
When his grandfather passed away and left nothing to his branch of the family, Ian landed a partnership at a city firm and lived a charmed bachelor’s life in Belgravia. But as the Nazi storm gathered, Fleming found himself called to duty, and at some point in the late 1930s applied for and received a commission in naval intelligence.
Even now, nearly 90 years later, his role in the secret service remains shrouded in secrecy. Shakespeare surveys military historians who’ve unanimously assessed that he “was at the very centre of the British intelligence machine.” He’s even credited, persuasively, with influencing the Americans’ decision to create the Office of Strategic Services.
Specifically, Commander Fleming created and ran the Number 30 Assault Unit, nicknamed 30AU. It was a group of daring commandos who penetrated enemy lines to secure ciphers, encoding machines, and confidential documents, including during the D-Day invasion. One of their most valuable discoveries was the trove of top-secret Nazi naval materials they rescued in the war’s waning days from the storied German castle in Tambach, days before the Soviets arrived. While Fleming’s wartime travels never put him directly in harm’s way, he lost many close to him, including school friends, men under his command, other Service colleagues, and, worst of all, his younger brother Michael, who fell during the Dunkirk evacuation.
The war birthed much of the Bond series. Fleming’s boss, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, whom he praised for his “brilliant, unconventional, and labyrinthine mind,” was unmistakably the model for “M,” Bond’s handler and superior. Many of their (reported) stratagems involved the use of gadgetry and deception and employed the services of unsavory characters (Guy Ritchie’s latest film, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” features all of these motifs and depicts a young Fleming toiling behind the scenes in the Admiralty).
The war even furnished the name James Bond in the form of a lieutenant who rescued Peter Fleming when disaster struck his own clandestine intelligence-gathering operation in Greece. A historian of Fleming’s unit would later say, of the 007 books, “They work because he’s a storyteller. They are firmly rooted in convincing details. What we see as inventiveness is part of his naval knowledge.” Shakespeare puts it differently: “By converting his lived experience into fiction, he released the burden of that knowledge.”
The Quintessential Western Hero
Shortly after VE Day, Fleming returned to civilian life. He took up a plum posting as foreign manager for the Mercury newspaper group, which owned the Times and other outlets. It allowed him to continue to travel widely and, Shakespeare suspects, continue spying, however informally.
But scandal soon cost him his vocation while winning him a wife: his patron, the Viscount Kemsley, discovered Fleming’s adulterous relationship with Ann Rothermere when her cuckolded aristocratic husband revealed all to his friend Kemsley, who then essentially disowned Fleming. When Ann divorced and found herself pregnant with Fleming’s child, Caspar, they wed.
In parallel, Fleming had grown besotted with Jamaica and purchased a modest bungalow on its north shore that he christened Goldeneye, a property that would later entertain the likes of Graham Greene, Truman Capote, Lucien Freud, Errol Flynn, and Evelyn Waugh. It was there, in 1952, that Fleming brought to life James Bond, a composite of the many figures who’d populated his professional and personal lives.
Beginning with Casino Royale, over the next 12 years until his untimely death he would sell millions of copies of his fast-paced, gripping thrillers that would later become beloved films. Bond became the quintessential Western hero: famously elegant, dashing, audacious, clever, and committed to defending freedom.
The series failed to take off at first. Of the first five Bond books, none sold more than 12,000 copies in hardback, and by 1955, he had earned less than £2,000 in royalties, forcing him to hold on to his dead-end job at the Times. He despaired of “that ass Bond” and planned to kill him off.
Then good fortune struck: the 1956 Suez Crisis drove an addled Prime Minister Anthony Eden to convalesce at Goldeneye, and the publicity rocketed Bond to instant popularity. The Express agreed to serialize the next novel, and when From Russia with Love emerged, it sold tens of thousands of copies. Bond’s fame migrated stateside in 1960 when a young Massachusetts senator running for president, “mesmerised” by Fleming, invited him to Georgetown for an extended discussion. Once inaugurated, JFK told Life magazine he counted From Russia among his ten favorite books (he and RFK even plotted with Fleming outlandish ways to assassinate Castro).
After that, it was off to the races: Thunderball’s first U.S. printing sold out in a week. A massive movie deal with United Artists followed, with a little-known, charming, and charismatic working-class Scottish actor named Sean Connery chosen to play the hero. “Dr. No” opened to massive success in 1962, juicing sales of the other Bond books and related merchandise, including toothpaste, snorkels, and even lingerie. Other blockbusters followed, and the franchise flourishes into the 2020s. By some estimates, more than half the world’s population has seen a Bond film, and more than 100 million of his books have been sold.
Fleming scarcely managed to enjoy his success. His and Ann’s marriage was troubled from the start, with both spouses conducting long-running affairs. They quarreled over money (even with the book and film revenue, they spent millions renovating a Wiltshire manor), the anxious Caspar (who would later take his own life), and pretty much everything else.
He fell out with Kevin McLory, the ne’er-do-well Irish producer to whom he’d assigned early film rights, who failed to deliver, and who, embittered, sued Fleming. Depression gripped him, especially later in life, when he commissioned from friends entries into The Gloom Book. These struggles, along with copious smoking and drinking, exacted a heavy toll on his health, largely incapacitating him and contributing to his premature demise. He succumbed to heart disease in 1964 after one final round on his beloved Royal St. George’s golf course.
Bond’s Remarkable Longevity
Like Fleming, Shakespeare’s crisp prose, combined with his many chapter breaks (70, across 700 pages), propels the narrative across his subject’s short but highly eventful life. Shakespeare also casts light on underappreciated aspects of Fleming’s career, including that 007 was originally named “James Secretan”; Fleming sold to MGM for £1 the rights to a storyline that would become “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and, later, “Charlie’s Angels”; Lee Harvey Oswald adored the series and so did the president he assassinated; and Fleming was an avid if secretive collector of rare, first-edition books.
The book also successfully appraises its subject’s cultural and geopolitical importance. “It is impossible to overstate [Fleming’s and Bond’s] quite extraordinary influence in making something English seem important in the 21st-century world. James Bond has a stature to which no modern prime minister, nor royal, nor indeed anything can lay claim,” historian Max Hastings tells Shakespeare.
The timing of Bond’s emergence, too, was no coincidence. “Britain had lost an empire,” Shakespeare writes of the 1950s and early 1960s, “yet all at once, through Bond, it discovered a different way of being reunited with the world.”
Finally, the series’ remarkable longevity attests to the enduring virtues of its hero and his creator. In some quarters of the post-modern world, integrity, daring, loyalty, and patriotism may be dead, but in the highly entertaining and profoundly inspiring literary and cinematic universe Ian Fleming created—so deeply rooted in the heroic, multifarious author’s personal and professional upbringing and so adroitly documented here by his extraordinary biographer—they still reign supreme.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reach him at michaelmrosen@yahoo.com.
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