For Your Eyes Only (19 page)

Bond is a medical as well as a literary miracle. In our
health conscious times, 007's louche lifestyle seems more of a threat to his health than any number of SMERSH assassins. At the start of
Casino Royale
, Bond is tucking into his 70th cigarette of the day, while sucking down endless bottles of champagne and weapons-grade martinis made from three measures of Gordon's gin, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet, a wincingly bitter aperitif heavily fortified with quinine. It is amazing Bond could stand up, let alone drive his Bentley.

But Bond has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for literary survival. Some of the author's more perceptive contemporaries predicted as much. Fleming will still be read, observed Noel Coward, ‘long after the Quennells and the Connollys have disappeared'. (Peter Quennell was a prominent critic of the 1940s and 1950s; none of his books is in print today.) Bond has seen off every rival. Bulldog Drummond was put down two generations ago; John Buchan creaks with age; Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu has not survived the passage of time and the evolution of racial attitudes.

But Bond still lives and breathes, without wheezing.

Fleming's vivid descriptions fire off the page; his plots still cruise along at souped-up Bentley speed and he writes with a tensile beauty. Above all, Fleming's imagined universe remains believable, though the purest fantasy. As John Betjeman wrote to Fleming shortly before his death: ‘The Bond world is as real and full of fear and mystery as Conan
Doyle's Norwood and Surrey and Baker Street . . . This is real art. I look up to you.'

This world – of an emotionally cauterised upper-class British secret agent – welcomed allcomers. John F. Kennedy was reading a Bond novel the night before he was assassinated; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, his killer. Bond offers escapism, but of a serious sort. To the readers of the 1950s, Bond was a promise of glamour and plenty amid postwar austerity, the thrill of sexual licence in a buttoned-up society. In our own time of uncertainty, Bond is still the man who can do anything and achieve everything, an exemplar of what Anthony Burgess called ‘Renaissance gusto' in a frightened age.

Raymond Chandler, the only thriller writer to rival Fleming for sheer staying power, identified the three qualities that make the Bond books ‘almost unique' in British writing: a willingness to experiment with conventional English, a flamboyant evocation of place and an ‘acute sense of pace'.

Fleming has been repeatedly emulated, parodied and ‘continued', but never equalled, let alone bettered. Fleming published fourteen books; some twenty continuation novels have followed. A few are good, but none quite captured Fleming's (and Bond's) authentic, smoky and sardonic voice. The skills for that are not those of the thriller writer or the mimic, but the more profound talents of the literary novelist, which is what makes the appointment of Faulks as the newest Bond author so intriguing, and so promising.

Even at the height of his fame, Fleming was modest about
his literary accomplishments. He would have been flattered that Kingsley Amis should be his first authorised heir, and Faulks his latest, but he might not have been surprised at the homage. ‘I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories', he once declared. Ten years later Fleming achieved that self-appointed mission, and wrote the spy story that has no end.

This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, is a homage to Ian Fleming on the centenary of the author's birth, and a celebration of James Bond, his greatest creation. It is not a biography of Ian Fleming – others, notably John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, have already performed that task admirably – nor is it a ‘biography' of James Bond, for that, too, has been written. It does not purport to be a comprehensive guide to the James Bond phenomenon (for this, I recommend Henry Chancellor's official companion). Rather, it is a personal investigation into the intersection of two lives, one real and one fictional.

As a journalist and writer of non-fiction, I have always been intrigued by the factual origins of fiction. In previous books, I went in search of the nineteenth-century criminal Adam Worth, the model for Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes tales, and Josiah Harlan, an adventurer who would win literary immortality in Rudyard Kipling's short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King'. All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than any
writer I know, anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former officer in naval intelligence, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one. This book is an attempt to explore a remarkable double life and to establish, as nearly as possible, where the real world of Ian Fleming ended and the fictional world of James Bond begins.

Ben Macintyre, April 2008

Evelyn Beatrice Ste Croix Fleming (née Rose), Ian Fleming's beautiful, domineering mother, who was known to the young Fleming boys, intriguingly, as ‘M'.

Images on this page used with permission of the Fleming family

Valentine Fleming, Fleming's adored father, who was killed in action while serving on the Western Front in 1917.

The four Fleming brothers: Ian, Michael, Peter and Richard. ‘Strong, handsome, black-haired, blue-eyed boys', as one contemporary described them.

Ian with his mother on the beach. In his writings, Fleming recalled his childhood beach holidays with a deep and nostalgic affection, which he transferred to James Bond.

Fleming (
second from right
) attending a dining club at Eton. His younger brother Richard is seated to his right.

Images on this page courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd

Fleming clad in his naval uniform in Room 39 of the Admiralty, the nerve centre of the Naval Intelligence Division. It was a smoky den crammed with desks, which one inhabitant likened to ‘an Arab bank'.

Fleming's passport, showing his career switch from journalism, at which he had excelled, to stockbroking, at which he was quite hopeless.

Courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd