Join us as we take a look at the role drinks play in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.
It begins in the very first 007 adventure, Casino Royale, with the immortal line, ‘shaken and not stirred’ and The Vesper martini, christened in honour of Bond’s great love, Vesper Lynd. From then on, strong, carefully crafted drinks are at the heart of every 007 story.
Ian Fleming was very particular about the finer details of his hero’s lifestyle. As well as Bond’s drinking habits, his clothes, weaponry, cars and food are all described with precision, a narrative trait which is perfectly highlighted by his instruction on how to make the perfect martini.
Diamonds Are Forever
‘The waiter brought the martinis, shaken and not stirred, as Bond had stipulated, and some slivers of lemon peel in a wine glass. Bond twisted two of them and let them sink to the bottom of his drink. He picked up his glass and looked at the girl over the rim. “We haven’t drunk to the success of a mission” he said.’
The particular attention that is paid to how eggs should be scrambled, how a car should be customised and how best to serve vodka, are all testament to the writer’s own preferences. Though many have debated how much of Ian Fleming there was in James Bond, there has always been agreement amongst fans that Fleming shared his own tastes and enthusiasms with his character. Along with the advocation of particular brands, these strokes of realism provide a layer of truth and help to bring the fantasy of James Bond’s world to within the readers’ reach. ‘All these small details’, Fleming wrote, ‘are ‘points de repère’ to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.’
Goldfinger
‘James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.’
In a feature titled ‘London’s Best Dining’ for Holiday magazine, Fleming provides a tip for American tourists on how to sample a decent martini, showing how much it mattered to him beyond the pages of his novels.
‘It is extremely difficult to get a good martini anywhere in England. In London restaurants and hotels the way to get one is to ask for a double dry martini made with Vodka. The way to get one in any pub is to walk calmly and confidently up to the counter and, speaking very distinctly, ask the man or girl behind it to put plenty of ice in the shaker (they nearly all have a shaker), pour in six gins and one dry vermouth (enunciate ‘dry’ carefully) and shake until I tell them to stop. You then point to a suitably large glass and ask them to pour the mixture in. Your behaviour will create a certain amount of astonishment, not unmixed with fear, but you will have achieved a very large and fairly good Martini.’
Paying attention to exact details are crucial skills for any spy who wants to complete a mission successfully and safely. The life of a secret agent is one of daring action and life-threatening peril. James Bond’s preference for the finer things in life suggests that when the moments of danger have passed, pleasures should be indulged. Enjoying the very finest dover sole and a glass of chilled champagne provides 007 with a reward and pushes his experiences to the height of sophistication and quality, in those brief respites from danger.
Live and Let Die
‘There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent… occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death.’
As well as enjoying the pleasures of drinking, alcohol serves to ease the conscience of a cold blooded killer such as 007, and provides moments of relief in a life of violence and upheaval. Drinks play a soothing role in the James Bond novels and offer a well-earned splash of luxury after a long day spent navigating the dirty business of spying.
Discover 50 cocktails inspired by the characters and plots of the 007 novels in Shaken: Drinking with James Bond and Ian Fleming, created by the team at award-winning Bar Swift in London’s Soho.
We sat down with Bond novelist Raymond Benson to talk all things Felix, Fleming, and The Hook and the Eye. Read on to learn more about the latest adventures of James Bond’s trusted friend and ally.
After a long break from writing for Ian Fleming Publications, how does it feel to be back with a brand new story?
It feels great! For one thing, the people at Ian Fleming Publications are fabulous to work with. Both now and back when I was doing the Bonds in the late 1990s and early 2000s when there was a completely different team in place. In the past I was fortunate to work with Peter Janson-Smith, the man who was Ian Fleming’s literary agent. He not only acted as editor and mentor in a professional capacity to me, but he was also my friend. I miss him a great deal. That said, I love working with you lovely folks at IFPL now. It’s been a uniquely rewarding experience doing The Hook and the Eye with everyone. I’m glad to be back.
How did you find reconnecting with Felix, was it challenging at first or did it feel like returning to an old friend?
I love Felix. I always have, ever since I first read Fleming’s books as a kid in the 1960s. Somehow I identified with him, maybe because he was a Texan (I was born and raised in Texas, too). And while several fine actors portrayed Felix in the films, we’ve never seen Fleming’s literary character on the silver screen. For one thing, in four of the six books Fleming wrote in which Felix appears, he has a prosthesis for a right hand. But there’s also a joviality to his personality that’s only in the books. He’s very much a “kidder” and he always stays upbeat. Having the opportunity to get to know Felix better and place him in his own adventure was indeed like returning to an old friend—and that includes revisiting the Bond universe itself.
What was the very first thing you did regarding your research for this project?
The first thing I did was re-read all the Felix passages in the Fleming books. I’ve read the novels numerous times throughout my life and I know them well. I just wanted to reacquaint myself with Felix’s speech, the way Fleming presents him, and also note the details of Felix’s life and history that Fleming gave us. There isn’t a lot about Felix prior to his meeting Bond in Casino Royale. But there are tidbits and clues… enough for me to take and then develop into something bigger. I then wanted to know exactly how his prosthesis would affect his life. Fleming doesn’t give us much info about the “hook.” When I first read the books, I pictured in my head a pirate hook. That, of course, is not what it would have been. In the time period I set the story—the early 1950s—Felix’s prosthesis would have been supplied by the Veterans Administration and similar to what actor Harold Russell had in the movie The Best Years of Our Lives. I sought out a prosthetics doctor who provided a lot of the information I needed to give readers a better understanding of how Felix deals with his disability and still manages to be something of a detective hero!
Felix Leiter is usually seen as a loyal ally to James Bond, but in this novel, he’s on his own. How did you approach writing from Felix’s perspective, especially in the context of a detective story as opposed to a Bond adventure?
I was certainly inspired by the pulp noir novels of the 1940s and 1950s, and certainly by Fleming’s 1950s-era novels. There’s a certain vibe that you get when you read those things. I’m not saying The Hook and the Eye is a pulp noir crime novel, but there are elements. I also wouldn’t call Fleming pulp noir nor “hard-boiled.” He was his own unique thing. I suppose I’ve fashioned the book more in his direction. I wanted it be as if Fleming had somehow developed an American voice and written the book himself in 1953. One thing that helped me immensely was the decision to write the novel in first person, from Felix’s perspective. This also helps generate that noir sensibility, but it also allows the reader to get to know Felix very, very well! We’ve never had a Bond novel written in first person, save for The Spy Who Loved Me, and that narrator isn’t Bond! So that’s a big difference in the way I’ve approached a Felix Leiter detective story as opposed to a James Bond adventure.
This project has been in the works for a long time. How different is the end result from your original concept?
Not very different at all! I’m not sure this is relevant, but way back in the late 1980s the very first novel I ever wrote was about a private detective who had a prosthesis. He wasn’t Felix Leiter. He was a different guy, but similar enough that down in my subconscious I was maybe thinking he was my version of a Felix Leiter. The title of the book was, coincidentally, Hook and Eye, Inc., as that was the name of the character’s detective agency. The story, locations, and time period were completely different from The Hook and the Eye. Peter Janson-Smith read the book and gave me some good feedback, but he agreed with me that it was the proverbial “first novel” and belonged in a drawer, never to see the light of day again! But it was a learning experience, and perhaps Peter saw then that, for future reference, I could begin a novel and, more importantly, finish it. Anyway, the current “true” conception of a Felix Leiter novel began after I had done my Bonds, which finished up in 2002. I wanted to see a Felix book in Fleming’s timeline that addressed his life and work in the early 1950s. The notion had come up occasionally in conversation with you at IFPL since that time, but doing a project like that just wasn’t in your plans then. Now it is! Last May 2024 I pitched the concept to Simon Ward, and that evolved into a full blown written proposal and outline, after which I received the green light. The concept and story hasn’t changed since. I suggested the title, The Hook and the Eye. I never meant for that to echo the title of my long lost unpublished first novel, but it better fits this one.
Aside from having a Texan background, are there any similarities between yourself and Felix, either in terms of personality, values, or life experiences? How much of yourself do you see in him, and did that influence your writing of his character?
Whenever any author uses a first person narrative, I believe a touch of the author’s own voice goes into that of the narrator. I don’t think it can be helped. I think I know exactly how Felix would sound in real life because I knew and know men like him. I don’t think Felix has an exaggerated Texas drawl. He spent time in Europe and Washington DC. His accent would be tempered, much like mine. My Texas drawl was drilled out by being in theatre for so many years! I left Texas in my early twenties and moved to New York City. I have lived in other places in the north since then and now the Chicago area. Maybe Felix talks like I do, perhaps slower. As for other character traits… I’m sure my values match Felix’s, but we are of different generations. Felix would have been in my father’s generation, having served in World War II. That, in and of itself, makes our world outlooks markedly different. Felix did military service and worked in government afterwards—all that is foreign to me. But I know enough about those things and I have known men who have had those life experiences. It’s more about Felix’s personality. That is closer to me. I like to think I’m as upbeat as Felix. When I’m with my pals I joke around like Felix. I enthusiastically praise whatever food and drink we’re having in Felix fashion. I’m not the heavy drinker or smoker that Felix is, that’s for sure, but, like him, I’m a jazz fan! Incidentally, there’s a member of my family who was born without a right hand. So, there’s that familiarity, too. Also relevant to my own life are the locations. I’ve lived in or been to all of the locations in the story. A certain national park plays a big part in the tale, one that I’ve visited numerous times because it was in close proximity to where I grew up. The route of Felix’s road trip is one I traveled a few times. The settings in The Hook and the Eye are some of my favorite places in America.
Your attention to historical detail, particularly with the placement of the story between Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever, adds a level of authenticity to the narrative. What were the challenges in fitting The Hook and the Eye into this established timeline, and how did you integrate the social and cultural landscape of 1952 into the plot?
John Griswold’s 2006 book, Ian Fleming’s James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming’s James Bond Stories speculated when in the real world that Fleming’s books took place. John used clues from the books and other factors and came up with believable conceits. He determined that Live and Let Die actually took place in January and February 1952. Diamonds Are Forever was in late summer 1953. Thus, my story for Felix could take place throughout most of 1952. This was fortunate for me because some real world events occurred that year that I felt could play into the tale. Once I committed to that setting, it became a matter of researching the period, especially the American landscape at the time in terms of roads, restaurants, and hotels that Felix would be using. I had to approximate what did and didn’t exist in 1952 in certain cities that are in the story. I was born in the 1950s. It really wasn’t too far removed from my own memories. The small town in Texas where I grew up was always at least five years behind the times of major urban areas like, say, New York… or even Dallas. There are a lot of places in the States, especially in rural areas, where remnants of the past still exist. Even today you can visit small towns in America and find a Main Street that was built in the 1930s or 1940s with vintage movie theaters, retail businesses, diners and coffee shops, and offices. Sort of a ”lost Americana” that’s hiding in plain sight. That’s what I was interested in conveying. When I could, I used real places that might have been prominent in 1952 but are now either a shadow of what they were or, usually, completely gone. I also had to be mindful of what things cost then. Then there were the social mores that existed then. All the smoking. The drinking. Repressed sex. The burgeoning jazz scene. The Cold War political environment. All of this plays into The Hook and the Eye.
Without giving too much away, how did you go about developing Felix’s love interest/sidekick, Dora? What can readers expect from her?
Well, to talk too much about her would indeed give a lot away! I suppose I was thinking about the old films noir that had femmes fatale. (A femme fatale in those old films was usually a bad woman who led an otherwise good man to his doom.) I wanted someone that evoked that kind of character… but mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Dora is a femme fatale. I wanted to give her an air of mystery that is compelling for Felix. Is she bad? Is she good? I’m hoping that she will keep the readers guessing, just as she keeps Felix guessing.
There is so much to love about Felix as a protagonist. What do you hope readers enjoy most?
I’m hoping that readers will connect to Felix’s personality and get to know him as a fully drawn character. The positive feedback I’ve received so far from beta readers, editors, and the IFPL board seems to concentrate on Felix himself and the voice I’ve given him. The mystery-melodrama story/plot is also something a bit different for the Bond literary universe, but I believe it’s something Fleming might have come up with had he decided to write a Felix Leiter novel himself back in the 1950s. At least I’d like to think so.
Find out more about Raymond’s writing process in our Hooked on Leiter video series.
We sit down with Michael Gillette, the man behind the colourful James Bond hardback editions.
How did it feel to collaborate to build on Fleming’s 007 legacy with us at the start of our self-publishing journey?
2018 was when I first had the idea to pitch these designs. I felt like it was inevitable that you would self-publish the books. I’m not sure you’d even decided to at that point [we hadn’t!] so I don’t know why I was so convinced. I had the idea for something really geometric, simple, bright and bold which hadn’t been done, that I could recall. I’m really glad you’re self-publishing. In the shifting sands, it’s the right thing to do. And I know it’s a massive venture. I started out doing sleeves for indie bands, and it feels a bit like that. Being part of a smaller unit, you’re much more part of the endeavor, and you want it to succeed. I want the books to succeed and I want you folks at Ian Fleming Publications to succeed.
I view my career as a rodeo illustrator. Certainly when I did the centenary editions, I was right in the middle of doing a million other jobs. And obviously, I never had any dealings with The Ian Fleming Estate then, just a shadowy missive every now and again that would come through Penguin. You don’t really build a relationship, you do the job and then it’s off and gone. It’s been really interesting to get to know you all, to see how it works, and to watch your progress too. I don’t want to conflate my experience with everyone’s experience, but it seems as things get more and more virtual, the relationships that sustain are the real world relationships. That’s the way I feel. It seems like The Estate has always been a bit like that anyway – more about direct relationships and for sure, it’s hard to get into, but it is loyal once you are in there.
There was no doubt that these books had to be designed by someone who understood the Bond book world. Do you think these new circumstances had an effect on the designs and the design process?
Yes definitely. At Penguin, there was a whole marketing department, a designer and an art director, John Hamilton, a legend. It did go very smoothly, but you’re being presented with something and told what to do. Even though it’s what everyone sees first, the artist is generally hired last. They know what they want, and then they pick an illustrator to do it. This project was completely the opposite, it was self-initiated. I could do anything I wanted, certainly to begin with. Take From Russia with Love. You’d already approved a different idea, but I thought this was better.
Does that extra flexibility facilitate your creative process? Do you wait for the flash of inspiration or do you go looking for it?
Well, initially the ideas came in a flood. I did this very geometric burst to begin with and then I just put them away until 2021. I was teaching a class on concept illustration which includes things like negative space and symbolism. I’d say to the students ‘your mind will give you as many solutions as you ask of it,’ which sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually true. Most people only ask for one idea, or ask for a couple of ideas, and then get very stuck. At the end of that class, I had a lull because Covid was still strong in California, so I took another two weeks. I had these ideas that were based on what I’d been teaching and showing the students, these graphic concepts. The designers I introduced them to were people like Saul Bass, and those ideas were absorbed into them too. So I did another two week burst of that, and then put them away again. I thought I could just be doing it forever.
I guess it’s just trying to keep things fresh. I teach my students that your subconscious is where all the ideas are, and your conscious is, you know, the little peak on the mountain, above the sea, and all the ideas that are going on underneath it, you just have to keep asking for them. If I got really stuck with an idea, I’d go back and read the book just to try and find a new direction on it. The other difference of this job is just how long it went on. I’ve never had anything go on this long. It’s been six years and I couldn’t show anybody at any point, apart from maybe my wife, who is a good sounding board.
With From Russia with Love, for example, there were at least four versions which are all very similar. Do you think a design improves the more times you do it, or can you overdo it?
Oh, you can kill something by over-polishing it. That one is a bit different, because it was a technical difficulty. I had an idea which I couldn’t find an easy way of executing. I could get it approximated quite quickly but making the image read without the face getting wider or distorted took a lot of shifting of dots by hand. It might have been a day and a half’s worth of shifting small dots to make it right. I’d spent so long getting it to try and work, and realizing that it was working, that I probably did ‘white knuckle’ it a bit and say, ‘no, this is the idea.’
Why were you insistent that we went with this cover in particular?
Because it’s an idea that I think is absolutely right for the book. It suits the story of the book. The two lures of the story are the cipher machine and the love interest. For those things to be married together in a single image with just two colors, it just works. Saul Bass is about symbolizing and summarizing. And that’s exactly what this cover does. I suppose there’s a point at which you’ve spent so much time on something that you will not let it go. Your mind has become shrunk to that idea. It’s like you’ve become a stalker for your own idea. I think that’s the only one that I really felt like that about. It was a good call. Well, it was a call.
The design process for these books was more like creating an object than just a cover. What did you learn from this?
With the 2008 books, I didn’t see them until they were physical products. Apart from the cover, I had no idea what the rest of it was. When I left college, I started designing for bands. That was my USP. I really loved it. I stopped because my illustration career took over, but I’ve always been into the idea of the total look of something. To be able to have that total look really excites me. I think that at this point in time to make a physical book, especially a beautiful hardback, there’s got to be a level of thought behind it that’s worth people buying it. You just think, ‘how does this look in the hand?’ That’s why I tried to make things look as close to the size they would be, like the bullets.
I’m not saying it’s a dying art, I think it’s just that designers are dying off because they can’t afford to do it as a job. You go into Waterstones and everything looks very much the same, the same typeface and the same treatment. With the self-publishing, you’ve done something more considered.
The endpapers really add to this. How did you go about making them?
I’ve got this sketchbook with lots of ideas, where I would just draw endlessly, like a bank of ideas. I always tell my students to use their sketchbooks. Draw, draw, draw. Sketch it out. You never know what you’re going to get. The muse comes when you’ve got a pencil in your hand. I couldn’t understand how I was still coming up with ideas, but they were working. Sometimes, the more ideas you’re having, the more ideas they have. I don’t know how it works, but that’s how it works.
Many of them are like optical illusions. This must have been fiddly and time-consuming?
They’re techniques I taught at college: concept art and digital design. So I know how to manipulate things that way and make them repeat. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Like for Thunderball with the silencer that almost looks like a crucifix – that’s a motif that worked really well. I was amazed at how I was still doing all the endpapers right down to the wire. It takes a long time. I want to give some value for money there. I know the expectancy of being a fan of something and the disappointment when it’s shabbily treated. I want to speak to that in the Bond world.
For the centenary editions, you decided not to use any guns. Why was that and what was different for these editions?
We just don’t want to glamorise guns, really. They’re still not gun heavy but they just work so well. I feel they draw on the action of the books a lot more than the previous covers. If there was a big wheel of things, this series draws on them: gadgets, some girls, some guns, some death, some bombs… The whole world of it has become so iconic that it’s so much fun to play around with that stuff. I’m not reinventing the wheel, just putting some good rims on it, trying to combine things in a new way to make you see them slightly differently. It’s so much fun just to play around with that stuff, it’s why everybody loves James Bond.
The wheel is a great analogy. The designs draw on so many elements, but then they feel cohesive at the same time. Was this hard to achieve?
That is the difficult thing to pull off. When I was at college, I could make really good images of things, but I could never make a second one the same. I couldn’t make a cohesive series of things, which is a bit like where AI is currently at. It can’t make a cohesive set of ideas. It’s taken me a long time to be able to pull that manoeuvre off. I do sometimes wonder how long it will be before AI makes that leap.
I try to ask myself, ‘what is a human response to this?’ Is this natural or is this synthetic? Leonardo da Vinci said that 98% of people create nothing but excrement. A lot of work that I’ve done wasn’t very good, but I was sharpening the axe to do something which was good.
What are you doing in your work to combat these fears? What would you teach to your students?
Look at Ian Fleming, he didn’t wait for the muse. He went on holiday and then bombed them out. But they’ve endured somehow. Something went on those pages that’s well beyond what you could ask a machine for. And I think it’s his complicated human nature that’s connected with people. Whether they know the books or not, there’s something about the complicated nature that he has put into James Bond that has endured. Bringing it back to the books, I view this as a vote for the continuation of holding something in your hand and connecting with it. I hope that the physical world is going to continue, and things like books had better be good in order to survive. We’ve all got to try a bit harder at it, I think, to be more considered. That’s why it’s so exciting that you’re doing it yourself. You know your product and your mind enough to know when something is right or not, and you know it’s not about what’s new, but what’s true. I think that’s what people want to respond to.
Check out more of Michael’s work here and find the full range of books at our shop.
Go behind the scenes of Felix Leiter’s adventures in The Hook and the Eye, with our exclusive video series, Hooked on Leiter. Author Raymond Benson takes you through each episode and gives insight into his writing process and inspiration. Be warned… each episode contains spoilers.
The Hook and the Eye paperback edition and ebook are out now at the ianflemingshop.com.
We speak to Fergus Fleming about his inspiration for his book, The Man with the Golden Typewriter, his developing view of his uncle Ian Fleming, and some of the correspondences he discovered while researching.
Why did you start the project?
A book of Ian’s letters was long overdue and, somewhat rashly, I raised my hand. Even more rashly, the offer was accepted.
Can you tell us more about Ian Fleming’s golden typewriter?
The golden typewriter was Ian’s great joke to himself. Just imagine his glee when it arrived in all its glittering splendour (smuggled in from America by his friend Ivar Bryce to avoid taxes). Serious-minded contemporaries considered it the height of vulgarity, but Ian didn’t care. Let them sneer! He had a golden typewriter and they didn’t. The machine in question was a Royal Quiet De Luxe and cost the princely sum (then) of $174. It wasn’t the only one in the world: the Royal Typewriter Co. produced a small run of them as an advertising gimmick. They were often given away as sports prizes or to favoured employees. None, however, have achieved the same iconic status as Ian’s. In 1995 an unknown bidder – rumoured to be Pierce Brosnan – bought Ian’s Quiet De Luxe for a sum that has been calibrated by the Guinness Book of Records as the highest ever paid for a typewriter.
Did Ian use it for the Bond novels? My impression is that he didn’t. It doesn’t seem to feature in any of the pictures of him at his desk. But who knows?
How much did you know about your uncle’s works and legacy when you were growing up?
Ian’s books were on the shelves when I grew up, but I don’t remember them being held in particular reverence. As he said to Raymond Chandler, ‘[I] meekly accept having my head ragged off about them in the family circle’. My father was so horrified by The Spy Who Loved Me that he made my mother read it under a brown paper cover. His brother Peter was also a writer, and his books too were on the shelves. So it was just an accepted fact of life that our family wrote books.
But I will say this. When checking a fact in You Only Live Twice, I used an original copy. And there, all at once, was the excitement of it. The Chopping jacket, the typeface, the Cape logo, the smell, the feel of the paper, the price – 16s. net – and the memory of something you will never find in a bookshop today. For a moment I caught the thrill that Ian, and his readers, must have experienced when the latest Bond came out.
Do you have any favourites from the correspondences you went through?
One of the best is Ian’s apology to Mrs. James Bond. Her husband was an ornithologist whose book Birds of the West Indies happened to be on Ian’s desk in GoldenEye when he wrote Casino Royale. In 1961 she caught up with him and demanded an explanation.
‘Your husband has every reason to sue me in every possible position and for practically every kind of libel’
Ian replied, adding that he had chosen James Bond because it was plain, masculine and anonymous – unlike Peregrine Carruthers or some such. In recompense,
‘I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may see fit. Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion.’
Did any of the letters mention ideas that he never used in his Bond books?
This is a sensitive matter that falls under The Official Publishing Secrets Act and as such I am not permitted to disclose the contents of any files that may or may not have come to my attention. That said, he did float the possibility of setting a Bond novel in Australia – which would have been interesting.
Did your opinion of Ian Fleming change after reading his correspondence and did you discover any new aspects of his character?
Ian has been portrayed so often in films and books as a callous, suave womaniser – in essence a mirror image of Bond – that I was prepared for something along those lines. To my surprise it didn’t materialise. Of course, this isn’t a biography and a fuller examination would probably confirm the accepted picture. All I can say is that his letters reveal a man who was witty, punctilious and kind, assailed by fits of self-doubt yet resolutely optimistic, who worked hard to make a living the best way he knew.
Do you think Ian was a true eccentric, or was the typewriter more a symbol of a persona he enjoyed cultivating as the writer of thrilling – and at times bombastic – fiction?
Ian wasn’t an eccentric. I would say he was more a romantic. He enjoyed turning dreams into reality and vice versa. He had an urge to tell stories. If he could make life a story – the martinis, the golden typewriter – then all to the good. If he could make a story out of life – to tell people what he saw, what he experienced, and how it inspired him – then so much the better.
‘Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings,’ he once said, ‘and since the main ingredient of living… is to be alive, this a quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.’ If writing made him alive, so did the imagination that underpinned it.
Writer Benjamin Welton looks back at Ian Fleming’s war years and how they influenced his literary creativity.
James Bond remains the quintessential cold warrior of fiction, and yet it’s not that conflict that animated his creator. Sure, the Soviet Union and her agents are the arch villains of Fleming’s oeuvre, and the mere existence of SMERSH (a real entity of history) is evidence enough of Fleming’s interest in using Bond as a loyal British ‘instrument’ in the service against a contemporary enemy. But despite Fleming’s journalistic attachment to current events, the engine driving his creation of Bond was World War II.
Described by Fleming once as a ‘very interesting war,’ the Second World War gave this former Etonian and child of privilege not only an insider’s view of intelligence work and covert operations, but also a deep sense of duty that he later bequeathed to 007. As a result, Fleming’s Bond novels are haunted by the specter of the 1939-1945 conflict, from the machinations of diehard Nazis like Sir Hugo Drax or former double agents like Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Bond’s overall excitement for what American President Theodore Roosevelt once called ‘the strenuous life,’ albeit one chock full of custom-made cigarettes, well mixed drinks, and beautiful, but slightly damaged women.
Salad Days
The military and the call to defend the crown were never far from young Fleming. His father, Valentine Fleming, had served first as a Conservative MP before being killed on the Western Front in 1917. The death of his father left a giant vacancy in the Fleming household, and his mother Evelyn pushed her sons to pick up the mantle left behind by their father. Fleming’s older brother Peter became not only an Oxford-educated adventurer and travel writer, but he also served as an officer in charge of military deception during World War II in Southeast Asia.
It took longer for such glory to come Ian’s way. After attending Eton College, where he collected an impressive array of sporting titles and trophies, Fleming was pushed by a disapproving housemaster at Eton and his mother to attend the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. While there less than a year, Fleming flaunted a good many of the school’s strict regulations and left after an indiscretion out in town.
After failing to achieve a commission, Fleming spent the interwar years performing an assortment of high-end jobs. Besides trying his hand at banking with Cull & Co. and being a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, Fleming’s most important role before becoming a novelist was his time as a journalist and sub-editor for Reuters. Although Fleming’s mother had lobbied for the job on behalf of her wayward son, Fleming proved to be an excellent journalist, which Anthony Burgess, in a preface to the 1987 Coronet paperback editions of Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels, blames for Fleming’s ‘clarity of…style’ :
‘It is important to remember, that, like Daniel Defoe, [Fleming] was a journalist before he was a writer of fiction, and a good journalist too. The clarity of his style in the novels proclaims this, the apt image, the eye for detail, the interest in world affairs on the one hand and, on the other, the fascination with the minutiae of everyday life.’
While on assignment for Reuters in 1933, Fleming covered the trial of six British engineers with Metropolitan-Vickers who were accused of espionage and sabotage while working in the Soviet Union. The trial was nothing more than a Stalinist show trial, but it did provide Fleming, who had only been with Reuters for eighteen months at that point, with a taste of the world of international espionage. While not his first taste (Fleming had earlier attended a private school in Austria run by a former British secret agent named Ernan Forbes Dennis), the Metropolitan-Vickers trial did however expose Fleming to the dangers of communism and the potential thrills associated with being a British spy abroad.
On His Majesty’s Secret Service
Later in life, Fleming admitted that: ‘I extracted the Bond plots from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain, and there was the book.’ Barring some exaggeration, Fleming could lay claim to being privy to some of the war’s more interesting elements. As a Royal Navy Commander attached to Senior Service, Fleming got to experience the ‘intelligence machine’ from the inside. While serving as a liaison between MI5, the Security Service, and SOE, Fleming regularly attended top secret meetings and had access to Bletchley Park, where men like Alan Turing and others were busy decoding the ciphers of the German Enigma machine.
Fleming wasn’t content to just spend the war as a go-between, however. As author Nicholas Rankin details in his excellent book Ian Fleming’s Commandos, Commander Fleming was instrumental in the creation of a commando force within the Naval Intelligence Division, which he labeled an ‘Intelligence Assault Unit.’ Called both 30 Commando and 30 Assault Unit, this collection of Naval intelligence officers and Royal Marine Commandos were tasked with ‘pinching’ secret material from the enemy. Along the way, 30AU saw action in Algeria, Norway, the Greek Islands, Sicily, and most disastrously of all, the assault on Dieppe.
While Fleming was not frequently on the front lines, he did however actively engage in overseeing the unit’s activities (he was also known to accompany them on certain assaults), plus he had a habit of concocting fabulous missions for his men. Examples include Operation Ruthless, which was a plan devised before the creation of 30AU in order to retrieve the Enigma codebooks while using what Fleming himself described as ‘a tough bachelor, able to swim.’ Operation Ruthless’s ideal operator not only prefigures James Bond’s grueling underwater storming of Mr. Big’s fortress in Jamaica in Live and Let Die, but Fleming’s description of the task reads like a synopsis of one of Bond’s many exploits:
TOP SECRET
For Your Eyes Only. 12 September 1940
To: Director Naval Intelligence
From: Ian Fleming
Operation Ruthless
I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:
Obtain from Air Ministry an air-worthy German bomber
Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit
Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service
Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port
Another Fleming-created operation was Operation Golden Eye, which centered on keeping the lines of communication open to Gibraltar if Spain decided to join the Axis. Like Operation Ruthless, Operation Golden Eye was closed down before it could be put into action.
The War Becomes a Best-Seller
When Fleming set out to write Casino Royale, the ‘hot war’ had turned cold. Britain’s main enemies were communism and the various post-colonial nationalist movements that helped to bring down the empire. And yet, in most of Fleming’s Bond novels, the action as well as the villains all have some tie to the older conflict. Moonraker deals not only with the lingering fear of the Nazis’s V-2 rocket, but also the idea that some former Nazi scientists in Britain and America were still enraptured by the Hitlerian philosophy. According to Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, the inspiration behind mining Mr. Big’s boat in Live and Let Die and giving the Disco Volantea trap door in Thunderball may very well have been the 10th Light Flotilla, a special unit of the Italian Navy that Fleming saw operate in the Mediterranean during the war. Of course, Bond’s most enduring enemy, Blofeld, began his life of infamy as a Polish double agent who sent secret items to the Nazis ahead of their 1939 invasion of Poland.
Even Bond himself is a product of the war, for while serving as Commander Bond in the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service, he earned his 007 title by killing what he describes in Casino Royale as ‘two villains’ — a Japanese cipher expert and a Norwegian double agent. And while Bond spends a small portion of the same novel conflicted over his role in the more morally slippery Cold War, he nevertheless decides to stay in the action as an agent tasked with eliminating or weakening some of the wrongs associated with the postwar fallout between the former Allies. In another way, the Bond novels can be read as a continuation of Fleming’s work during the war, as Bond, through fiction, reasserts British dominance on the world stage all the while re-living some of his creator’s experiences from his time as an intelligence officer.
Benjamin is a freelance journalist who has been published in The Atlantic, VICE, MI6-HQ, and others. He is a regular contributor to Literary007.com.
Raymond Benson gives us an insight into the life and origins of Felix Leiter.
I love Felix Leiter. Always have. Ever since I first read Ian Fleming’s novels in the 1960s. While it was certainly the character of James Bond who lit a fire under me at a very young age, I identified with Felix. After all, Felix was a Texan. So was I. In the premiere book, Casino Royale, Bond reflects that “good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.”
Where did the author find his inspiration for Felix Leiter? We really don’t know. Felix’s first name was one of the middle names of Fleming’s longtime friend, John Felix Charles Bryce (but everyone knew him as “Ivar”). The surname came from Fleming’s Washington, DC friends, socialites Tommy and Marion “Oatsie” Leiter. Neither of them were Texans. Did Fleming know any Texans? I am not aware of any evidence to that effect.
Unless one has read Fleming’s books, a Bond fan might not know the “real Felix.” While several fine actors have portrayed the character on film, a faithful incarnation of Fleming’s Felix has never been seen.
Allow me to paint a portrait of Ian Fleming’s Felix Leiter. Felix is Bond’s closest ally in six of the novels. At first, he’s with the CIA. After Felix loses a right arm and a leg to a shark in Live and Let Die, the CIA lets him go; however, he then finds work with Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Felix remains with Pinkerton’s until Thunderball, in which Allen Dulles (the CIA chief) puts Felix on the reserve force. Felix is again placed on the reserves in The Man With the Golden Gun.
When Bond meets him in Casino Royale, Felix is about thirty-five. He is tall and thin, and he wears his clothes “loosely from his shoulders like Frank Sinatra.” Although his movements and speech are slow, Bond gets the feeling that there is plenty of speed and strength in Felix, and that he would be a “tough and cruel fighter.” Fleming goes on to describe him in Chapter 7:
‘As he sat hunched over the table, he seemed to have some of the jackknife quality of a falcon. There was this impression also in his face, in the sharpness of his chin and cheekbones and the wide wry mouth. His grey eyes had a feline slant which was increased by his habit of screwing them up against the smoke of the Chesterfields which he tapped out of the pack in a chain. The permanent wrinkles which this habit had etched at the corners gave the impression that he smiled more with his eyes than with his mouth. A mop of straw-coloured hair lent his face a boyish look which closer examination contradicted.’
One of the ties between the Englishman and the American may be that they enjoy being barroom rivals. There is almost always an obligatory scene in which the two visit a bar and drink themselves silly. In Casino Royale, Bond educates Felix on the making of a “real” martini, and Felix remembers the formula in subsequent novels. In Thunderball, Felix seems to have studied martinis thoroughly, for he, in turn, educates a barman in a Nassau hotel on the ingredients of that real martini. Felix knows when he’s being had; the martinis at the hotel are served with inadequate portions of liquor. Felix explains to the barman: “… here’s one who’s dry behind the ears. A good barman should learn to be able to recognize the serious drinker from the status-seeker who wants just to be seen in your fine bar.”
Kingsley Amis, in The James Bond Dossier,seems to think that Felix has no personality. Nonsense! (Sorry, Kingsley.) Felix’s personality is clearly revealed in his manner of speech and the subjects about which he speaks, as well as through several of the character’s idiosyncrasies. For instance, Felix is a jazz fan, and he escapes a nasty scrape in Live and Let Die by “arguing the finer points of jazz” with his black captor. Felix tells Bond many anecdotes about America while giving him guided tours of New York, Saratoga, or Florida. He and Bond have a good laugh at the quaint citizens of St Petersburg, and they take pleasure in complaining about the commercialism of the Bahamas’ hotels.
Felix is actually a bit of a goofball! He is so buoyant that the sun always seems to shine on him when he’s around Bond. Even after his mishap with the shark, Felix retains his upbeat humor. He’s the kind of joker who comes up behind Bond (in Diamonds Are Forever), sticks his hook against Bond’s back, and says, “All right, Limey. Take it easy unless you want lead for lunch.”
Most importantly, though, is the fact that Felix reinforces the theme of Friendship running through the series. The bond between the two men is extremely heartfelt. Felix Leiter, of all of Bond’s allies, brings to the books a warmth and joviality which is missing most of the time.
When Bond first encounters Felix in Casino Royale, the Texan is amiable and boyish. Fleming succeeds in giving the character a personality that is distinctly American. But the CIA man is a mere shell of what is to come. Not much is revealed about Felix in Casino Royale, but he is an immediately likeable figure. Fleming was wise in using Felix as the “cavalry to the rescue” when Bond loses all his money at the baccarat table.
Felix is further developed in Live and Let Die, where he has a strong supporting role. His cheeriness is an excellent complement to Bond’s seriousness, almost a breath of fresh air. Felix acts as Bond’s guide to America, and much of Fleming’s sense of humor is revealed in the Texan’s speeches: “You can get through any American conversation,” advised Leiter, “with ‘Yeah,’ ‘Nope,’ and ‘Sure.’ The English word to be avoided at all costs,” added Leiter, “was ‘Ectually,’” Bond had said that this word was not part of his vocabulary.
The friendship between Bond and Felix comes to fruition in this second novel. From the first chapter, in which the American surprises the Englishman by greeting him in a hotel room, to the tragic incident in which Felix almost loses his life to a shark, the men are inseparable. They barhop through Harlem together, sharing meals, conversation, and clue-gathering. Despite their differences in background, the men hit it off as if they’ve been friends since childhood. Bond seems to depend on this alliance with a male friend—it means more to him, sometimes, than his relationship with any woman in the novels. Bond even has trouble keeping the emotion from choking his voice in Chapter 17 when he learns that Felix, after having lost half an arm and half a leg, will live after all.
‘Bond’s heart was full. He looked out of the window. “Tell him to get well quickly,” he said abruptly. “Tell him I miss him.”’
Interestingly, Fleming killed off Felix in the first draft of the novel. It was the author’s American literary agent, Naomi Burton, who objected and talked Fleming into keeping Felix alive. She recognised the appeal of the character.
One of the highlights of Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s reunion with Felix. Bond seems to remove his cold, stone-faced exterior when he’s around the Texan. Their tight friendship is apparent in their conversation and actions. Bond again allows some emotion to reveal itself when he says goodbye to Felix toward the end of the novel in Chapter 21:
‘Bond felt a lump in his throat as he watched the lanky figure limp off to his car after being warmly embraced by Tiffany Case. “You’ve got yourself a good friend there,” said the girl.
“Yes,” said Bond, “Felix is all of that.”’
Felix accompanies Bond to Saratoga and again pops up in the nick of time in Las Vegas. Now Felix is working for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, “The Eye That Never Sleeps.” Felix does not seem bitter at all about carrying a steel hook for a right hand or limping through life with a wooden leg. He is as good-humored as ever. Perhaps this conscious negation of his physical disabilities is one reason why Felix remains a useful friend to Bond. Their reunion on the streets of New York is a joyful moment: they immediately proceed to their usual form of entertainment, i.e., eating and drinking. Besides procuring Bond’s drinks, Felix takes the liberty of ordering the Englishman’s meal. Felix is once again very helpful as Bond’s tour guide. He “mansplains” everything Bond needs to know about the Saratoga race track, Las Vegas gambling statistics, and American life.
The character appears only briefly at the end of Goldfinger, again in the form of cavalry to the rescue. He saves Bond’s life and the Englishman admits that Felix is always good at doing so. Felix, who still works for Pinkerton’s, is the same cordial character who is so refreshing to have around. It’s too bad his appearance is so brief in the book.
Felix has one of his biggest roles in Thunderball. The alliance between Bond and Felix is the tightest it has ever been. The loyalty thesetwo men have for each other is one of the warmest qualities of the book—the sequence in which Bond meets the CIA agent at the airport and realizes it’s none other than Felix is an uplifting moment. Then it seems all they want to do is drink each other under the table after gorging themselves with meals. Describing the “chopped tenderloin of beef” at the Royal Bahamian, Nassau in Chapter 12, Felix complains, “This is hamburger and bad hamburger. The French onion rings were never in France, and what’s more, they’re not even rings. They’re oval.”
Bond and Felix constantly kid each other, much like how I understand the relationship between Ian Fleming and his American friend, Ernest Cuneo, would have played out. For example, in the following Chapter 14, the men are using the cover of a property-seeking English businessman and his American lawyer when they meet in a hotel restaurant:
‘Bond joined Leiter at a corner table. They both wore white dinner jackets with their dress trousers. Bond had pointed up his rich, property-seeking status with a wine-red cummerbund. Leiter laughed. “I nearly tied a gold-plated bicycle chain round my waist in case of trouble, but I remembered just in time that I’m a peaceful lawyer. I suppose it’s right that you should get the girls on this assignment I suppose I just stand by and arrange the marriage settlement and later the alimony.”’
Felix doesn’t seem to have any bitterness about the loss of his right hand and leg. Toward the end of the book in Chapter 22, the Texan insists on joining Bond in the underwater ambush of Largo’s men:
‘Felix Leiter interrupted. He said obstinately, “And don’t think you’re going to leave me behind eating Virginia ham. I put an extra foot-flipper on this”—he held up the shining hook—”and I’ll race you over half a mile any day, gammy leg and all. You’d be surprised the things one gets around to improvising when someone chews off one of your arms. Compensation it’s called by the medics, in case you hadn’t heard about it…”
Leiter turned to Bond. “You goddam shyster. Thought you were going to leave your old pal behind, didn’t you? God, the treachery of you Limeys! Perfidious Albion is right, all right.”
Bond laughed. “How the hell was I to know you’d been in the hands of rehabilitators and therapists and so on? I never knew you took life so seriously. I suppose you’ve even found some way of petting with that damned meathook of yours.” Leiter said darkly, “You’d be surprised. Get a girl round the arm with this and you’d be amazed the effect it has on their good resolutions.”’
The character’s final Fleming appearance is in The Man With the Golden Gun. Although there is no traditional drinking scene between Bond and Felix (a disappointing first), the sequences in which the Texan appears are high points. As usual, Felix pops up in the nick of time at the novel’s end, clearing the way for Bond to clean up the business at hand. And again, as usual, Felix is hurt and can’t participate in the final battle. Felix escapes this adventure by breaking his one good leg. Then, in a half-kidding, half-poignant moment in Chapter 15 as he leaves the hospital on crutches where Bond is under medical care, Felix tells Mary Goodnight:
‘“Okay, Miss Goodnight. Tell matron to take him off the danger list. And tell him to keep away from me for a week or two. Every time I see him a piece of me gets broken off. I don’t fancy myself as The Vanishing Man.” Again he raised his only hand in Bond’s direction and limped out.’
It is my great pleasure and privilege to be inserting into Ian Fleming’s timeline a special tale featuring someone I’ve considered a friend for a long time… Felix Leiter in The Hook and the Eye.
For more insights from Raymond, check out his book, The James Bond Bedside Companion.
Ever wanted to see a book being made? Come with us into the English binding workshop of the Stamford Notebook Company, to watch our Hummingbird Notebooks being made. Let’s go.
CREATING THE COVER
Soft leather or buckram fabric is selected for the cover – we offer a choice of two finishes. Cardboard panels are glued to the cover material, then trimmed, folded and carefully smoothed out. Custom metal dies and gold foiling are then used to blind emboss and hot foil emboss the hummingbird into the front cover. Slits are made in the back cover to allow elastic to be inserted, trimmed and glued in place.
CREATING THE PAGES
The notebook pages are printed in-house using British made, fountain-pen friendly paper milled in the Cumbrian town of Kendal.
Groups of printed sheets folded in the middle, called sections, are sewn together by a 1948 Smyth book sewer, which allows the book to open fully whilst remaining very strong. A piece of reinforcing paper is glued over the sewn sections, securing the endpapers in place. The pages are trimmed – first around each edge, and then the corners are rounded.
FINAL DETAILS
A bookmark ribbon is glued to the spine of the pages and trimmed. The book is then cased-in – the first and last pages are coated in glue, and the cover is attached.
The notebooks are sandwiched between sheets of protective cardboard, and then pressed in a hand-operated press to help seal the glue. As a finishing touch, they are then pressed in a separate machine to produce an indent along the spine – the French Groove – which allows the book to open flat.
THE FINISHED BOOK
The Hummingbird Notebook is available exclusively from our shop here in a range of colours and cover finishes.
Thomas Gilbert, artist on two of the newest Ian Fleming Publications releases, talks to us about his work.
In 2024 we released a new paperback edition of Ian Fleming’s children’s classic adventure, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The team first came across Thomas through his striking fan covers for Fleming’s Bond novels, and fell for his bold style. Publishing Director Simon Ward says, “From the moment we saw Thomas’ work we knew he’d be perfect for this beloved book. His imagination and knowledge of Ian’s classic car is second to none.”
Thomas is a graphic artist and illustrator, based in Warwickshire, England. Working primarily in the field of poster illustration, he has a passion for modernising vintage styles through a combination of traditional and digital media. A lifelong car enthusiast, Thomas has a background in car design. He graduated with a Masters Degree from Coventry University in 2011, and has since enjoyed creating several high profile cars for iconic British marques.
“I am a lifelong fan of Ian Fleming, so to be asked to illustrate one of his most iconic books is an incredible honour. In book and film form, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a story which has always been close by. I grew up somewhat surrounded by vintage cars (one in particular is a lot like my family’s very own Chitty!) so the notion of a car being alive and a part of the family just naturally resonated with me from a very young age. Chitty is a wonderful story, imbued with all of Fleming’s characteristic warmth, adventure, inventiveness and authenticity – I’m very excited to be illustrating it for a new generation of young readers.”
Thomas brings a vibrant new look to this treasured story, with a dynamic cover design and 30+ original black and white illustrations for the interior. Take a look at the evolution of the cover below.
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was inspired by a real life speed trial car. As a young boy, Ian Fleming witnessed Count Louis Zborowski driving his monstrous Chitty Bang Bang special over 100mph at Brooklands – and that is the car and the scene that he describes in the book’s foreword. So when I was preparing to illustrate the book, there was zero question for me that this HAD to be the car I would draw. It’s a brutish car, a sort of sledgehammer on wheels! But with such astonishing proportions and simple honest lines, it was a pleasure to draw. I only had to simplify the design very slightly for the illustrations, cherry-picking and combining the best of Zborowski’s various design iterations like the tapered tail and blunt heptagonal grille.”
Thomas has also created the striking cover for over very first solo Felix Leiter novel, The Hook and the Eye, by Raymond Benson. This he describes as ‘a dream project’ and depicts Felix, now a private investigator in year 1952, as a mysterious figure with a noir styling.
‘When I read the manuscript of The Hook and the Eye I was struck by its lovingly hand-crafted, analogue feel. To do justice to the warmth and authenticity of Raymond’s words, I felt the cover could only be an original piece, sketched by hand. I explored some wide ranging ideas – the book was a gold mine of possibilities! Pencil on paper gives an energy and texture that can’t be replicated – most of the pencil strokes remain in the final cover art.’
Discover more about Thomas’ work and process here.
As the publishers of Ian Fleming’s literary work, we are deeply grateful to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their remarkable stewardship and vision. Their imagining of James Bond on screen has created one of the world’s great film franchises and has led the incredible success of the British film industry.
We are enormously excited about the next phase of the James Bond story on film under Amazon’s creative leadership and are confident in their new stewardship of Ian Fleming’s extraordinary creation. James Bond will return!
The Fleming family would like to add to the tributes to EON and the Broccoli family – Cubby Broccoli in the early days and then Barbara and her brother Michael G. Wilson. Their achievement with James Bond is nothing less than astonishing – 25 films over a period of 60 years, all known and loved the world over. They have always respected the legacy of Ian Fleming and his words and his original depiction of Agent 007. We wish Barbara and Michael a happy future and send them our sincere thanks. We look forward to the future and await the dossier from M.
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