The strange birth of Commander Bond

In Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography, Ian Fleming appears as a wild yet loveable character to rival 007

Considering James Bond was employed on a midranking civil servant’s salary of £1,500 per annum (according to Ian Fleming’s Moonraker), we’ve had an awful lot of value out of him. Sir Max Hastings says of Fleming and Bond: “It is impossible to overstate their quite extraordinary influence in making something English seem important in the 21st-century world.” Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, even credits “the Bond culture” with enhancing our intelligence services’ reputation for thrusting competence.

How did Fleming come to create this talisman of Britain’s worth to the rest of the world? He played up the idea that his Bond novels were implausible fantasies, but Nicholas Shakespeare, his latest biographer, reckons they drew heavily on his secret work for Naval Intelligence in the Second World War: “By converting his lived experience into fiction… he released the burden of that knowledge.” In a way, the row of gaudy Pan paperbacks on my shelves is a substitute for the line of medals that Fleming was apparently denied because his work was too hush-hush to be acknowledged.

Other theories put forward here include the idea that Fleming wrote the Bond novels to indulge on the page the taste for light sadism that also informed his many sexual relationships; to do Freudian battle with his ghastly mother Eve (“She was Goldfinger’s greed, Blofeld’s snobbery, Dr No’s icy heart, Rosa Klebb’s sadism,” observes the Bond scholar John Cork); and to recapture the pleasures of bachelor life after his late marriage to the mercurial Ann Charteris.

Whatever the truth, the world seems to need Bond – the entire film industry would apparently have collapsed in 2021 without him – and so we must be grateful Fleming’s life took the shape it did, even if he did not always have cause to be.

He was born in 1908 – the grandson of Robert Fleming, founder of the merchant bank. At Eton he excelled at athletics, got into trouble for wearing hair oil and possibly first developed his interest in flogging. His mother decided the school was unsuitable and had him removed; she did the same when he went to Sandhurst, which he left with no qualifications, and gonorrhoea.

He was an indifferent stockbroker when, thanks to a well-connected girlfriend 17 years his senior, he secured an interview with Admiral Godfrey of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) on the outbreak of war. Where others have written Fleming off as a deskbound ideas man firing off crackpot but sometimes brilliant schemes – such as the outline of Operation Mincemeat – Shakespeare defies the lacunae in the NID records to present a mass of evidence that Fleming hurled himself into danger’s path on the Continent whenever possible.

He has come up with an interesting theory as to why Admiral Godfrey took the risk of dispatching his invaluable second-in-command to France in June 1940. Godfrey, Shakespeare argues, wanted Fleming to assist in the exfiltration from Bordeaux of hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of Belgian gold reserves, subsequently lent to the British government.

The evidence of Fleming’s involvement in this mission is circumstantial, although Shakespeare makes a good case for Auric Goldfinger’s rhapsodies on the beauty of gold reading like they were written by somebody who had handled the stuff. Shakespeare also offers fuller versions of more familiar stories; we know that Fleming once managed to argue his way on to a Lufthansa flight from Lisbon to Madrid, but this is the first time I’ve read details of his actual – and splendid – words: “you are a common carrier. This is a neutral country and you are obliged by law to take me.”

Shakespeare also insists with rather wearying frequency on Fleming’s position as “a more significant figure in the history of covert operations” than fellow novelist-spies John le Carré and Graham Greene. Fleming certainly played a key advisory role in the founding of the first US intelligence agency, and he was a driving force in assembling the gung-ho intelligence-gathering group 30 Assault Unit (although Bill Marshall, a nonagenarian ex-member of 30AU tracked down by Shakespeare, did not take to him: “I thought him an ‘old queer’”). After the war he returned to journalism and published the first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), when he was 44.

In Fleming’s From Russia, with Love, a strategically placed Eric Ambler novel prevents an assassin’s bullet from entering Bond’s heart; with a copy of this biography, 007 could have stopped a cannonball. Its size indicating an ambition to become the definitive Life, the book doesn’t offer a radically different portrait from those of Fleming’s previous biographers John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, but it is a richer reading experience: written with Fleming-esque brio and insouciance yet with a feeling

Ian Fleming: a deskbound ‘ideas man’, or at the centre of British intelligence? for the tragic aspects of his life as well as the ironic comedy of it.

The amount of new testimony Shakespeare has truffled up about a man nearly 60 years dead is dizzying; he has secured particularly fruitful interviews with the often tight-lipped Fleming family. Fleming’s niece Gilly reports that she was only allowed to meet him when she was past 18 as he was such a demonic influence, with his womanising and drinking; but everybody Shakespeare speaks to who knew him well adored him (“Like him? I’d go down on the knees and say prayers for his afterlife,” says the not normally easy-to-please Len Deighton).

Shakespeare, a spy novelist himself as well as the author of an outstanding biography of Bruce Chatwin, is an elegant writer, although the book is not free of the odd duff metaphor (“Fleming… is [often] left out of the picture entirely, like the missing comma in the film From Russia with Love”) or confusing sentence (“On 15 January 1910, [Fleming’s father] was elected Conservative and Unionist MP for Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Henley”). His research is impeccable, although he mangles things slightly when he says that one of the first Bond dramatisations was a 1958 South African radio play “with a quiz-show host as James Bond”: in fact, it was Bob Holness, then an actor and later famous as the host of Blockbusters.

Could lack of knowledge about the career of Bob Holness be a symptom of the same high seriousness that possibly prevents Shakespeare from fully appreciating the Bond novels? He quotes much extravagant praise for the books from the likes of Betjeman and Larkin, but conveys little sense of really enjoying them himself, and offers surprisingly little detailed analysis of them. Still, his enthusiasm for Fleming the man, if not Fleming the author, has been sufficient to produce a book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life.

It is, ultimately, a sad story though. After several years of so-so sales, when the Bond books finally caught the public imagination Fleming was too ill to enjoy his newfound fame (“I’d swap the whole damned thing for a healthy heart”) and the phenomenal success of the early Bond films only took a further toll. He died in 1964 at 56. It was, writes Shakespeare, “as if Ian had become the girl in Goldfinger, coated with gold so that he could not breathe”.