James Bond book collection sells for £31,000

A rare collection of James Bond novels owned by the man who is said to have been the inspiration for the fictional spy has been auctioned for more than £31,000, reports The Telegraph.

The full set of Ian Fleming's 007 books came from the library of the late Maj Gen Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a former soldier, diplomat, adventurer and Conservative MP.

The collection, including personal papers and pictures, went for well above valuation at an auction in Edinburgh.

Maclean's passport, invitations from a French ambassador to cocktail parties, visas and photographs of the diplomat with Tito in Yugoslavia were among the items sold.

The early editions, some signed by Maclean, were bought by the London book dealer Adrian Harrington, a Bond specialist.

John Gilbert, who made the purchase, said: "The books will be used as background material for a bibliography I am writing on Fleming.

"They will prove invaluable to my research. I have the full support of the Fleming family and the book will be published in the next 18 months."

Maclean's passport was issued on June 1, 1938, and gives his residence as the British Embassy in Moscow.

It was used on his journeys in Asia and has stamps for China, the USSR, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Poland, Estonia, France and Italy.

Simon Vickers, of the auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull, said there were competing claims about who had inspired the Bond character but Maclean was "one of the most plausible".

He studied at Eton and Cambridge and like Fleming came from an Anglo-Scottish background.

He joined the diplomatic service in 1933 and befriended the 007 author before World War II. His distinguished career was peppered with Bond-like incidents.

Winston Churchill chose him personally to lead a mission to Yugoslavia in 1943 where Tito and his partisans were proving a thorn in the German side.

Maclean's mission, as he put it, was to "find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more".

He later recounted his adventures in Soviet Central Asia and the Western Desert Campaign, where he specialised in commando raids behind enemy lines, in his memoir Eastern Approaches.

When the Cold War was at its height he was asked to gather information about a possible Soviet invasion of Turkey and was debriefed on his return by the double agent Kim Philby.

He was involved in the kidnapping at gunpoint of a Persian collaborator with the Nazis, and in 1943 was due to leave Cairo on a plane for London when he received last-minute instructions to delay his departure.

The plane mysteriously crashed into the sea of Gibraltar, killing everyone on board.

His son Sir Charles Maclean said the books had been in his father's library and the family decided they should be sold so that they could be treasured by a collector of Fleming's works.

He added: "They gave my father much pleasure and I hope they will bring someone else the same."

Maclean, whose Scottish home was at Strachur in Argyll, refused to comment on claims that he inspired Bond. He died 12 years ago, aged 85.

Fleming went to Sandhurst after Eton, joined the news agency Reuters in 1931 and during the war began gathering information for his future novels while he was assistant to the director of naval intelligence at the Admiralty.

After the war, he started writing the Bond stories at his home in Jamaica. Casino Royale, the first book, was published in 1953.

Over the next decade, until his death in 1964, over 40 million copies of his books were sold.

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