FLEMING, JAMES FLEMING

‘Secretan, James Secretan.” That was what Ian Fleming initially called his hero in the typescript of Casino Royale, which he first published in April 1953. Fortunately, just as Arthur Conan Doyle realized that Sherrinford Holmes wasn’t quite the right name for the greatest of all detectives, Fleming recognized that he needed something punchier.

According to Nicholas Shakespeare, in his huge, immensely detailed biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, there may have been two or three sources behind the seemingly inevitable choice. The 43-year-old Fleming, who was living two months of each year in Jamaica, regularly consulted the book Birds of the West Indies, by a Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond. And when he was working in British Naval Intelligence, one operation was saved from disaster by a heroic Rodney Bond.

One of the strengths — or, arguably, weaknesses — of Shakespeare’s 821-page biography is its length. If not exactly too much of a good thing, there’s always a little more than seems necessary.

Take the long central section devoted to Fleming’s wartime intelligence work. Shakespeare deduces Fleming was far more than the desk-bound assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence and quite probably the department’s guiding mastermind. In these chapters, he describes in detail espionage strategies, meetings with American spymasters and botched operations — all of which may well be catnip to students of military history but will send other readers off for a cat nap.

Overall, though, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man is a dazzling, even dizzying, achievement, despite that ludicrous-sounding subtitle.

A “complete man,” Fleming believed, would resemble one of those swashbuckling Elizabethan all-rounders who were simultaneously poets, courtiers, lovers and soldiers. For Fleming, I think being a “complete man” remained largely aspirational. In his personal life, he was, by turns, a youthful rebel, a resentful mama’s boy, a modern-day Don Juan and a middle-aged melancholic.

Grandfather Robert Fleming was Britain’s leading banker, one of the richest men in the world. After Ian’s father, Valentine, was killed during the First World War, Winston Churchill wrote the obituary for the Times. Val was held up to his four young sons as an unattainable ideal. The eldest, Peter, excelled at everything, from athletics to academics, while Ian, the moody, insecure second son, dwelled in Peter’s shadow until the Bond novels reversed the relationship.

Eve Fleming ruled Ian through her control of the family purse strings. She made him break up with the woman he wanted to marry by threatening to cut off his allowance. Mummy was extravagant in every way: A maid said if it were raining, Eve would put on a new pair of shoes to walk to her waiting car and never wear them again.

She never remarried, partly because her late husband’s will stipulated she would forfeit much of her enormous wealth. This didn’t preclude an affair with painter Augustus John, with whom she had a daughter, Ian’s half sister, Amaryllis.

As Ian grew up, he not only discovered an ability to charm women, he used it. Again and again, Shakespeare notes his subject’s casual seductions, affairs with the girlfriends and wives of his friends, and, most disagreeably, a gigolo-like willingness to accept gifts and money from rich older women in his thrall — one gave him the equivalent of what would today be a quarter-million dollars to build his Jamaican compound, Goldeneye.

As with his excellent biography of travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming, replacing a fine one by Andrew Lycett that appeared almost 30 years ago.

But Shakespeare certainly recognizes that Bond’s creator, especially when young, behaved much like his hero toward women — in fact, much worse. He regularly comes across as a callous, sexist jerk, no matter how vehemently his friends, lovers and admirers testify to the man’s charisma, thoughtfulness and ability to light up a room.

A far more likable, even mellow Fleming appears in his letters, edited by his nephew Fergus Fleming for the book The Man With the Golden Typewriter (2015). The creator of James Bond could be remarkably courteous in answering correspondents, even those who pointed out his factual errors or other slips. Didn’t he know that the perfume Vent Vert came from Balmain, not Dior, and that a Beretta is a lady’s gun rather than a proper weapon for a secret agent?

The letters also make plain that the directors of the publisher Jonathan Cape despised the Bond books, regarding them as sadistic trash even though they ended up keeping the firm afloat.

Fleming died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 56, from cardiac disease, to which smoking 60 or more cigarettes a day doubtless contributed.

Today, the real question is: Do the original James Bond thrillers stand up to rereading in the 21st century?

In my experience, the original books — a dozen novels and two short-story collections — remain compulsive page-turners, while being grounded in their time, the Cold War era of the 1950s. Bond is nothing if not patriotic and deeply conservative.

Little wonder that poet Philip Larkin spoke of Fleming’s “mesmerizing readability.” What’s more, though the books emphasize action and violence, they don’t utterly shy away from elegance and lyricism, or even the occasional philosophical reflection:

“Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through — these are the vices of the herd.” Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. “I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac — a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That” — the black holes glittered blankly at Bond through the contact lenses — “is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”

HOW DID THE GRANDSON OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST MEN, CREATE BOND? HE LOOKED IN THE MIRROR MICHAEL DIRDA