The Scotsman looks back at Ian Fleming`s life - 40 years after his death

'Send in 007.’ How often that terse instruction from ‘M’ to his long-suffering, Bond-besotted secretary, Miss Moneypenny, was the opening gambit in yet another grudge match between special agent James Bond and the extraordinarily diverse range of enemies that sought to destroy him. To avid readers of the Bond novels, generically schoolboys aged between 12 and 90, those words signalled imminent action, as surely as Sherlock Holmes’s "The game’s afoot!" - reports The Scotsman.

Last Thursday marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. The author was, in many respects, a much more interesting character than the hero he invented. The novelist’s grandfather grew up in the slums of Liff Road, Dundee, but went on to found Fleming’s Bank, invent investment trusts and build a house with 44 bedrooms in Oxfordshire. By the time Ian was born in 1908, the family had been fully gentrified (his middle name was Lancaster, because his mother claimed descent from John of Gaunt).

Fleming was overshadowed by his father, who had been killed on the Somme; by his powerful mother; and by his elder brother Peter. In later life, this sense of subordination was reinforced by his marriage, at 43, to Ann Rothermere, whose smart literary set treated the thriller writer with mocking disdain. It was only at the time of his marriage - almost as if he was trying defiantly to assert his separate identity - that Fleming at last embarked on a serious attempt to become a novelist.

"The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it." With that well-crafted paragraph, the opening lines of Casino Royale, Fleming introduced himself to a reading public that, even within his lifetime, would buy more than 40 million copies of his books. That opening sentence originally read "Scent and smoke and sweat hit the taste buds with an acid thwack at three o’clock in the morning" - a limp travesty of the polished version. Dogged revision paid off.

How should Fleming’s books be assessed? They have stood the test of time. They are written in a good - occasionally inspired - prose style, which combines economy with the vivid conveyance of atmosphere and the impact of everyday things on the senses. As the quotation above shows, Fleming followed Proust in rating the sense of smell as one of the most dramatic links between man and experience. The plots, of course, are adventurous romps, far-fetched, not to be taken seriously. Yet the same might be said of John Buchan, today ranked as a classic author.

Fleming’s characters are among the most extravagant caricatures in English fiction since Dickens: Dr No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Rosa Klebb - a gallery of grotesques. One of his key inspirations is generally held to have been Sapper, the creator of Bulldog Drummond; but the rococo names of his characters - Auric Goldfinger, Francisco Scaramanga, Pussy Galore - suggest the influence of Dornford Yates. Yet James Bond is no clubland hero: he is too much of a loner and not entirely a gentleman.

Bond’s preoccupation with brand names made him a precursor of the consumer society. It was largely on such grounds that Fleming’s wife’s set condemned his novels as vulgar. Ann Fleming refused the dedication of Casino Royale which her husband offered her. As for Bond’s addictive womanising, even as late as 1953, when he made his début, there was still a vestigial prejudice in clubland against ostentatious poodle-faking. In one respect, however, the new popular hero was in the tradition of his predecessors: his patriotism.

Fleming made the Cold War cool. He conveyed to the public of the Free World, through the medium of his novels and the films they generated, some flavour of the evil that was the Soviet Union, about which, as a former intelligence officer, he was well informed. Most of his readers probably imagined that SMERSH, the Russian agency with which Bond regularly crossed swords, was as much a fictitious entity as SPECTRE, the criminal gang that supplied the opposition in other books. Yet here Fleming had a significant impact on the morale of the KGB.

SMERSH, the murder machine of the Russian security apparat, had executed such different targets as Leon Trotsky and 11,000 Polish army officers at Katyn. Stalin selected the aggressive name Smyert Shpionam (Death to Spies!), from a 1919 slogan of Lenin, when he reorganised the unit on April 14, 1943. By the time James Bond went into action, the name was obsolete, although the agency still functioned under the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.

In From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming caricatured Rosa Klebb, the fictitious commander of the Second Otdyel of SMERSH, as a pathetic crone attempting lesbian seduction. "Colonel Klebb of SMERSH was wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine... Below, she wore old-fashioned knickers of pink satin with elastic above the knees... She looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world." The reaction in Dzerzhinsky Square can only be imagined. Such was the wound inflicted upon the amour propre of the Chekist murderers that the KGB commissioned a series of novels featuring a Bond-style Soviet agent who regularly defeated his western opponents. That canon has not stood the test of time.

Bond, or rather Fleming, has. Just as it is still a pleasure to lift off the shelf a novel by Stevenson, Buchan or Sapper, the works of Ian Fleming will endure, as entertainment for generations to come. That legacy is the ultimate test of a writer.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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