Ian Fleming`s biographer traces the origins of James Bond

It is 1952, wartime austerity is beginning to lift, and the 43-year-old Ian Fleming, a dashing senior executive on this newspaper, finds himself in a fraught situation - writes Andrew Lycett in The Times.

After years of sybaritic bachelor existence spent avoiding emotional commitment, let alone wedlock, he is finally forced to marry his long-term mistress, Lady (Ann) Rothermere. The background is complicated. The striking, dark-haired Ann had been his on-off lover for much of the previous decade. Appropriately, he met her in Le Touquet in 1935, on one of his regular cross-Channel jaunts to sample the casinos and nightlife of France. At the time, she was married to the Irish peer Lord O’Neill. After he was killed in fighting in Italy during the war, she let Fleming know she would happily become his wife. But he was not ready to take the plunge, so she married her other, wealthier but less exciting beau, Viscount Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail.

Fleming had his own agenda. He had been offered a job by a rival magnate, Viscount Kemsley, of The Sunday Times. Being the paper’s foreign manager was not dissimilar to his wartime role as personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence, except that he had foreign correspondents to oversee instead of spies. And he had negotiated the generous perk of three months’ holiday each year — because he had fallen in love with Jamaica while attending an Anglo-American naval conference, and had decided to build a house at an idyllic spot on the island’s north coast. He would call it Goldeneye, after a secret operation he had run during the war. The building project was to occupy his immediate post-war years.

But he could not forget the beguiling Ann, who continued as his lover, first at a cottage in Kent lent by their mutual friend Noël Coward, then at Goldeneye, where Coward (conveniently, a neighbour there as well) provided a more elaborate alibi for their adultery. Complications ensued when she became pregnant with Fleming’s child, who died shortly after birth. Rothermere learnt of his wife’s affair and prevailed on Kemsley to make sure his libidinous foreign manager backed off. But Fleming and Ann’s affair was too intense to be snuffed out. When she became pregnant by him again, he had no option but to do the decent thing. After a quick divorce, she joined him in January 1952 in Jamaica, where they were married two months later.

Fleming used that short interim period to write his first novel, Casino Royale, at Goldeneye. It took him just four weeks, and he later said he did it to take his mind off the horror of his impending marriage. That was a typically evasive Fleming remark, masking the fact that the impulsive, opinionated Ann was the catalyst that led him finally to embark on the spy novel he had long contemplated.

Its origins can be traced back to his first book, which was about as far removed from James Bond as possible — a collection of romantic poems called The Black Daffodil. He destroyed every copy, believing the contents were worthless compared with the mature output of his brother Peter, who was intellectually brilliant in a way he could never match. (If any example escaped the cull, it would be worth a fortune.) A sibling rivalry developed, particularly after Peter went to Oxford, whereas Ian, deemed B-stream material by his demanding mother, was shunted off to Sandhurst. Later, Peter wrote witty books about his travels while Ian vegetated in a stockbroker’s office. His career did not prosper until he joined naval intelligence. There, he found not only his feet, but a secret world to write about. By 1944, he was telling Robert Harling, a colleague who was to join him at The Sunday Times, that when the conflict was over, he was going to write “the spy novel to end all spy novels”. He was also seen doodling on his Admiralty blotter, sketching the house he would build on Jamaica.

The latter project took precedence, and, like marriage, the book was put aside, though something continued to stir. We know this because when he wrote his third novel, Moonraker, he touted it to the director Alexander Korda as “an expansion of a film story I’ve had in my mind since the war”. Fleming’s comments showed his fascination with direct and visual ways of telling a story. No respecter of Orwell’s concerns about the Decline of the English Murder, he drew inspiration from American movies and pulp thrillers, which he admired for their vibrant depiction of sex and violence. Straddling the two media was his favourite, Raymond Chandler, who had made his name with Farewell, My Lovely and the screenplay for Double Indemnity in the 1940s.

Fleming wanted to inject something of Chandler’s gritty realism into the British spy novel, which was still largely stuck in the gentlemanly era of John Buchan and William Le Queux. The 1950s seemed to offer a new canvas, even if Winston Churchill’s recent re-election as prime minister suggested otherwise. The Soviet Union was the new enemy, and Britain would shortly explode its first atomic bomb into a consumerist world. Anticipating John le Carré, Fleming wanted to write about an emerging culture of intelligence where spies were no longer amateur adventurers like Bulldog Drummond, but professional hard men whose nature was encapsulated in pithy names such as James Bond.

The year 1952 was particularly interesting, since Britain’s secret services were reeling from the discovery of traitors in their midst. The previous June, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to the Soviet Union, confirming the Americans’ worst fears about British incompetence. Fleming was fascinated by the development, which had been the main topic of conversation when he and Ann dined with Coward and Cyril Connolly in October. At The Sunday Times, he had had to react when the paper’s Far East correspondent, Richard Hughes, was approached to work for the KGB. He advised his reporter to play along, even arranging for him to be fed material by the SIS.

Fleming recognised that treachery offered a promising theme for a book, even if he needed to call on familiar colour, such as the casinos he had long frequented, and to recycle incidents such as the extraordinary feat of daring he had probably witnessed when the British double agent Dusko Popov cleaned out members of German intelligence across a roulette table in a Portuguese casino in 1941. But Fleming still required to be stirred to write. Some impetus came from the competition with his brother, who had stolen a march on him with his spy story The Sixth Column, satirising the bureaucracy of the security services. The real spark, though, came from Ann, with her sophisticated literary taste and her friendship with writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Connolly and Peter Quennell. They liked Fleming, but made it no secret that they found him intellectually inferior. Ann had only just arrived in Jamaica when she noted unsentimentally in her diary: “This morning Ian started to type a book. Very good thing.”

She was more than a mere motivator. Her influence was so strong that Fleming’s double agent metamorphosed from a seedy Cambridge graduate into a beautiful woman desired by his alter ego, James Bond. That reflected the deceits and betrayals his passion for Ann had endured. Like spies in the field, the lovers had overcome the hazards thrown in their way by two rival newspaper barons. And their affair had enjoyed the frisson of a shared enthusiasm for sadism, evoked in a notorious scene in Casino Royale, in which a naked Bond is strapped in a seatless chair and whipped with a carpet-beater. The book was Fleming’s wedding present to Ann. She took it to her writer friends, who made approving noises.

They were less polite with later Bond novels. On one awful occasion, Fleming returned from his club to hear them reading from one of his novels and roaring with laughter. He took off his shoes and tiptoed up to bed. But, in Casino Royale, he did achieve something original. The book’s passage to the screen has been beset with difficulties, but one reason for the delay has been its elusive literary quality.q

Andrew Lycett’s biography, Ian Fleming, is published by Phoenix at £9.99

That was then . . .

How does the new screen Casino Royale stack up with what Ian Fleming wrote in 1952?

BOND’S CAR

1952: “One of the last of the four-and-a-half-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 ... it was capable of touring at 90, with 30mph in reserve.” 2006: Aston Martin DBS. Top speed: whatever the stuntmen can take.

JAMES BOND

“(Vesper Lynd says:) ‘He is very good-looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael (right), but there is something cold and ruthless... ’”

“(Bond) examined himself levelly in the mirror. His grey-blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry and the short lock of black hair which would never stay in place slowly subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow. With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek, the general effect was piratical...”

LE CHIFFRE, played by Mads Mikkelsen, “Height 5ft 8in. Weight 18 stones. Complexion very pale. Clean-shaven. Hair red-brown, ‘en brosse’.

Eyes very dark brown with whites showing all round iris. Small, rather feminine mouth. False teeth of expensive quality... Large sexual appetites. Flagellant.”

VESPER LYND, played by Eva Green, “Her hair was very black and she wore it cut square and low on the nape of the neck... Her eyes were wide apart and deep blue and they gazed candidly back at Bond with a touch of ironical disinterest...”

FELIX LEITER, the CIA man, played by Jeffrey Wright, “His movements and speech were slow, but one had the feeling that there was plenty of speed and strength in him and that he would be a tough and cruel fighter ... A mop of straw-coloured hair lent his face a boyish look which closer examination contradicted.”

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