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‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’ The opening lines to Casino Royale conjure a world of intrigue, romance, glamour and danger. The world of James Bond.
At a typewriter in Jamaica in 1952, Ian Fleming produces his debut novel and creates the world’s greatest spy. Drawing on his experiences in Naval Intelligence in the Second World War, he begins to craft a version of the postwar world, and the heroes and villains inhabiting it.
‘The double-O prefix is not so entirely invented. I pinched the idea from the fact that, in the Admiralty, at the beginning of the War, all top secret signals had the double-O prefix. This was changed subsequently for the usual security reasons, but it stuck in my mind and I borrowed it for Bond and he got stuck with it.’
A reader of adventure fiction, a lover of fine food, fast cars, skiing, golf and the best things in life, a restless, curious mind, equally thrilled by flora, fauna and new technology – Ian Fleming brings all his passions and interests into his 007 adventures. He matches that with a vivid, relentless, economical yet poetic style of writing that produces twelve James Bond novels and two short story collections.
The Bond canon is fantastical. There are rockets being aimed at London, poison gardens in Japan, villains called Dr. No and allies called Pussy Galore. Our hero survives torture, bullets and a broken heart. Whatever the adventure, the man with a licence to kill, the spy who loved me, can only have come from the mind of Ian Fleming.
‘We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me, and perhaps you, is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.’
