Great Britain: The Man with the Golden Bond

GREAT BRITAIN

One golden day early in 1952, wearing shorts, sandals and a blue T-shirt, Ian Fleming sat down before a portable typewriter in a beach house on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. "The scent and smoke and sweat of a Casino are nauseating at three in the morning," he wrote. "James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired."

With those opening words of Casino Royale, tough, handsome James Bond of the British Secret Service was born, soon to be hailed by millions of devotees the world over from Presidents (including John F. Kennedy) and princes to postmen and plumbers. All were effortlessly drawn into a magic country of tension and torture, peopled by pliant, pneumatic blondes, sturdy, self-sacrificing friends, and hordes of mean-eyed villains possessing every evil gift except the knack of shooting straight when firing at James Bond.

Snowballing Cult. Ian Fleming made this first excursion into adventure fiction "as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43." The bride was beautiful, Brunette Anne Geraldine, the recently divorced wife of Lord Rothermere, who had cited Fleming as corespondent.

Ian Fleming had been born with everything except money. The creation of James Bond made up for that lack. It returned him an estimated million dollars a year over the past decade and permitted the luxury of a London town house just across the road from Buckingham Palace, a vast apartment by the sea at Sandwich, a Jamaican retreat called Goldeneye, and comfortable, carpeted offices just off Fleet Street.

Both his parents were Scottish, and his father, Major Valentine Fleming, D.S.O., was a Conservative Member of Parliament killed in battle in 1916 on the Somme River. The major's obituary in the Times was written by his close friend, Winston Churchill. Ian attended Eton and Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, ended up as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Berlin and Moscow. Switching to high finance, Fleming worked six years as a stockbroker, even though "I never could figure out what a sixty-fourth of a point was." In the next six years of war, Fleming was in naval intelligence, and much of the first book was based on his wartime experiences. James Bond is a composite of commando and intelligence types Fleming knew. The big gambling scene in Casino Royale was suggested by a wartime encounter in Lisbon, when Fleming sat down opposite the top German agent in Portugal at the chemin de fer table.

At war's end Fleming returned to journalism as foreign manager of the London Sunday Times but stipulated he be allowed two months' vacation annually for his own writing. After Casino Royale was published to good reviews in 1953, Fleming produced a book a year, delighting his fans with hilariously preposterous plots hardly meant to be taken seriously. Even before the first Bond movie, Dr. No, came out in 1961, the James Bond cult had snowballed into a craze. Fleming's books have been translated into ten languages and had an estimated world sale of 18 million.

Irresistible Combination. The best detective-heroes have always been superbly attuned to their own age. Sherlock Holmes splendidly reflects a Victorian-Edwardian belief in rationality and cool logic; Dashiell Hammett's hard-nosed Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe were right for the Depression years.