Spy, womaniser, cad: the writer who created James Bond
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man. By Nicholas Shakespeare. Harvill Secker; 864 pages; £30. To be published in America by Harper in March; $35 It was a chance invitation to a dinner party that changed Ian Fleming’s life and legacy.
In 1960 Fleming, the author of some modest-selling books about a spy called James Bond, was on a trip to Washington, as foreign manager of the Sunday Times. The dinner was with John F. Kennedy, who had just declared himself a presidential candidate and was a James Bond superfan.
As the conversation turned to the problem of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba, Kennedy asked Fleming, “What would James Bond do?" Fleming replied that Bond would make Castro look ridiculous, rather than important. That Kennedy should have sought Fleming’s (and Bond’s) advice on how to bring down Castro was not as odd as it may seem. Fleming had a wartime career as an officer in British naval intelligence.
In 1961, when Kennedy had become president, he told Life magazine that Fleming’s “From Russia, with Love", the fifth Bond novel, was one of his ten favourite books. The endorsement introduced a relatively unknown English author to American readers. Fleming’s publisher scrambled to relaunch five Bond books ahead of the publication of “Thunderball".
As Fleming’s literary agent in New York put it, “the gusher burst." In the remaining two years of his short life, Fleming became an international celebrity. James Bond made his first big-screen appearance in “Dr No" in 1962, launching what would become the longest-running—and one of the most valuable—film franchises of all time. Well over 100m copies of Fleming’s 14 James Bond books (12 novels and two short-story collections) have been sold.
Read more on livemint.com
