The Man Behind Secret Agent 007
Our Sleuth in London Tracks Down Author Ian Fleming, Creator of the World’s Currently-Most-Popular Fiction Tough Guy.
By Arthur Veysey (Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 18, 1962)
That impeccable, unique Britisher, Ian Fleming, sat in the bar of London’s Ritz watching two rough chunks of ice swirl lazily thru his late-afternoon double Scotch. A romantic blonde, tantalizing as a Caribbean breeze, studied him from the settee across the room. It was obvious she found most pleasant his large tanned face, his wavy, almost curling black hair laced with gray and worn long in the London fashion, his ocean-blue pin-striped suit from Saville row, his boldly striped shirt and tie.
James Bond, British Secret Agent 007, would have been at her side in a moment. But Fleming merely gave his glass another twirl. With women, he said softly, he’s shy—unlike Bond, who frankly, is something of a cad.
“I envy him his success with women,” said the author and creator of the world’s currently-most-popular tough guy, “but I can’t really say I much like the chap.”
It takes only a few minutes with Fleming to realize how much of a real-life figure this fabulous creature of his virile imagination has become to him. Though Fleming devotes only six or eight weeks each year to writing the newest of Bond’s wild adventures, just about everything Fleming hears, reads, and sees all year long is sifted for situations, sites, or even words to give new spice to next year’s tale.
The way Fleming tells it, Bond, like Topsy, just grew. It happened 11 years ago when Fleming, then a 43-year-old bachelor, became bored during a long winter vacation at his Jamaican seaside hideaway.
“I have a puritanical dislike for idleness,” he said. “So I decided to write a book. At the rate of 2,000 words in three hours each morning, the book dutifully produced itself.”
Fleming, son of a wealthy Conservative member of parliament, was at the time a successful London newspaper man—foreign manager for the Kemsley chain of British newspapers. He had attended Eton and Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point, and universities in Geneva and Munich. He had been a correspondent for Reuters, the British-owned world news agency, and had gone into London merchant banking and the London stock exchange. During the war, he was assistant to the director of British naval intelligence. An older brother, Peter, was famous even before the war as a writer and explorer.
Upon his return to London from Jamaica, Fleming packed away his book. But two weeks later, an old friend, the chief reader for the Jonathan Cape publishing house, discovered accidentally Fleming had written the book and asked to read it.
“Adolescent tripe,” Fleming said of it, but surrendered the manuscript. Much to his surprise, Cape’s, which had not handled a thriller in many years, published it. More to his surprise, the London Times praised it, and the public found it amusing and exciting and lined up to buy it.
Within weeks [sic] Fleming quit his job and career to become an author. He also married Lady Rothermere, former wife of the head of the Kemsley papers.
Only an hour before Fleming and I met at the Ritz, he had delivered to Cape’s the last chapter of his 12th book. “What do you think of Belles of Hell as a title?’ be asked. ‘Or should I play safe with something like, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service?”
The hero, of course, as in all previous 11 books, is Bond, who now is Britain’s best selling mystery fiction character, replacing the entire entourage of Agatha Christie. In America, Bond’s popularity has risen fast since President Kennedy declared him his personal favorite. Altogether, more than six million Bond books have been sold in a dozen languages.
This fall, Bond, in the image of a 29-year-old one-time Glasgow building laborer named Sean (pronounced Shawn) Connery, is flashing onto world movie screens. For the first of a series, United Artists chose Dr. No. The film, shot in Jamaica, recently premiered in London.
Many British literary critics are harsh with Fleming and Bond. Published statements include: “School boy shockers”…“Trash with an Oxford accent”…“A maze of extravagant absurdity”…“Gentlemanly chronicler of bizarre and ungentlemanly adventure”…“The old recipe of blood and thunder, with pain, wine, and off-beat sex thrown in.”
But Sir Ronald Howe, former deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard, says Fleming is “the most readable post-war writer of adventure stories.”
Fleming says his books are thrillers and calls himself a “kiss-kiss bang-bang” writer. He says he’s happy to go on turning out Bond stories so long as the public will buy them. His plots, he says, are “not very clever but always something is happening.”
As a writer, Fleming says he is not ambitious and is “incapable of writing on a high level.”
“Anyway, I have nothing to say on that level,” he adds. He is happy, he says, if his Bond tales give people a few hours’ relaxation. He thinks men like them “because most men hope the things that happen to Bond will happen to them some day but they know jolly well they won’t.” Women, he says, like them because “the female characters are always getting bashed about.”
If the books do raise blood pressure, what, he asks, is wrong in that? If he had to label his books he would choose three words:
“Good, healthy fun.”