Is James Bond the spy least likely to be a success

James Bond is, on the face of it, an unlikely success story in the world of covert intelligence-gathering - reports The Telegraph.

Everywhere he goes, he introduces himself by his real name. He spends a good deal of time in black tie, and is invariably to be found wearing the most expensive watch, and driving the most expensive car – sometimes underwater – in a 20-mile radius. When he meets the people on whom he is supposed to be spying, his first instinct is to beat them humiliatingly at chemin de fer, poker or ping-pong, and then go to bed with their wives. His "secret" codename, 007, is known to all self-respecting villains.

Yet, since his birth in Ian Fleming's Jamaica home, Goldeneye, in 1952 – when he would have been 41, if the birth date ascribed to him by his biographer John Pearson is to be believed – Bond has saved the world from destruction countless times. He is the best known and least secret secret agent in the history of espionage.

Next week, he celebrates his 88th birthday. The blue-eyed killer waltzing through the explosions at this week's premiere of Quantum of Solace has come a long way from the man we first encountered, 55 years ago, in Casino Royale – amid the "scent and smoke and sweat of a casino... nauseating at three in the morning".

The Bond of Ian Fleming's novels – widely held to be a romanticised projection of Fleming himself – was a violent, sardonic man of a dry humour and formidable appetites. "I hate small portions of anything," he once declared. He particularly likes scrambled eggs, which he will eat at any time of day, and – until recently – he liked smoking. In Ian Fleming's novels, he smokes 60 untipped, oval-profile cigarettes a day – a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos mixed specially for him by Morland's. In recent years, he seems to have given up.

He's particular about his drinks – insisting that they be "very large and very strong and very cold, and very well-made". His stipulation that his martinis be "shaken, not stirred" is controversial among connoisseurs of the tipple (it results in a cold, but unacceptably dilute drink). He has been known to drink both gin and vodka martinis – though for reasons of product placement, recent films have seen him favour vodka.

Bond's romantic appetites, like those of his creator, are marked by a streak of sexual cruelty. Rosamond Lehman speculated that Fleming "gets off with women because he cannot get on with them"; his fictional alter-ego had a highly questionable attitude to sexual violence, noting of the first ever Bond girl, Vesper Lynd, that "the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape".

Bond's sexual tomcattery didn't preclude more serious attachments, though. In Casino Royale he contemplated leaving the service to be with beautiful, troubled Vesper Lynd; a course of action thwarted by her suicide. "The bitch is dead now," he reports, sentimentally. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service he went as far as to get married to beautiful, troubled Countess Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo – a union, again, thwarted by her death, this time in a drive-by shooting.

Fleming's Bond was also quite capable of fear. It took the film adaptations to make him superhuman. In the films, Bond became more promiscuous – he went to bed with an average of one woman per book, but three women per film – and more unreflectively murderous.

He also, oddly, became more happy-go-lucky. Almost as if Bond sensed he was in a lucrative ongoing franchise with an all-the-family audience, he seldom seemed to be in real fear of his life. A string of camp accessories and silly quips replaced grim and nervy determination as Bond hallmarks. "I'm Plenty," chirped Lana Wood in Diamonds Are Forever. "Well, of course you are," replied Connery's Bond with a glance at the cut of her dress. "Plenty O'Toole." "Named after your father, perhaps?"

Sean Connery's Bond was – in addition to being Scottish – by common consent the most charismatic screen depiction, and probably the toughest. Fleming initially regarded Connery as: "Dreadful. Simply dreadful." But he came round to Connery's Bond considerably – and gave his orphaned hero a Scottish father in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, apparently as a hat-tip to the toupeed Scot.

Bond was seldom more inscrutable than in his incarnation as Roger Moore. As Moore himself has commented, "I have three expressions: left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised, and both eyebrows down." Women continued to find him irresistible. His reversible safari-suits, murmured one-liners and ever more rococo gadgets caused them to melt into his arms. It was during this period – one adorned with comic Southern sheriffs and CIA agents in Hawaiian shirts – that Bond's campness reached its high water mark. The tide ebbed, slightly, with Timothy Dalton's handsome, boxy, dimple-chinned Bond, before a six-year hiatus in the early 1990s.

In recent years, Bond's character has become harder to pin down. Distinct, parallel franchises have emerged. Charlie Higson's highly creditable "Young Bond" novels have established a school-age Bond – precociously resourceful, conscientious but, in consideration of his youngish audience, relatively chaste. Sebastian Faulks's new Bond novel, this year's Devil May Care, was authorised by the Fleming Estate. It reset the franchise to the late 1960s, stirring a dash of the films' campness – the villain suffers from a "rare congenital deformity ... known as main de singe"; he literally has a monkey's paw – into a Flemish stew of eroticised sadism and old-school fogeyishness.

The Bond of the films, meanwhile, has switched back and forth. When Pierce Brosnan relaunched the franchise with Goldeneye. he updated Bond – giving him a female M in the redoubtable shape of Dame Judi Dench, and dropping him deep into the Information Age in Tomorrow Never Dies. Tonally, the Brosnan Bond steered a middle course between cheery absurdity (crashing through St Petersburg in a stolen tank) and action-thriller seriousness. Spin-offs from Brosnan's Bond – in particular, the colossally popular Nintendo 64 game Goldeneye – played on the latter part of the mix; and helped the brand reach a younger audience than would have remembered Connery or even Moore in the role.

But with Casino Royale – a probable acknowledgement, and repudiation, of David Niven's 1967 Bond spoof – the producers sought to re-invent the whole franchise. The incarnation of Bond as pouting, violent, unsmiling Daniel Craig – a portrayal especially popular among thirtysomething women and teenage boys – is hailed as a return to the echt Bond of Fleming's original novels.

In fact, it is far closer to being a wholesale, almost Oedipal attack on the established traditions of the character. And in commercial terms, it seems more obviously an attempt to ape the success of the self-consciously gritty, largely humourless Jason Bourne films (adapted from Robert Ludlum's self-conciously gritty, entirely humourless series of books).

Faithful, unfulfilled Miss Moneypenny has been entirely axed. Q has been axed. There's not a monorail or a white cat anywhere to be seen. And Bond is well on the way to abandoning his catchphrases. When asked in Casino Royale how he'd like his drink, Craig's Bond rudely demands: "Do I look like I give a damn?" In Quantum of Solace, he even declines – something nearly unprecedented in the films – to introduce himself as "Bond, James Bond".

By now, though, he probably doesn't need to.

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