Review: Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, a biography of James Bonds creator

July 25, 2024

Some years ago, I gave a talk to the graduating seniors at a local school. Whatever I said that night — probably something about the importance of books and reading — has utterly vanished from my memory except for three words. During the question period, a young woman stood up and asked, “Mr. Dirda, what fictional character would you most like to be?” A number of possibilities flashed through my mind, and I almost said Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, because then I’d be married to Elizabeth Bennet. But instead, I put on my most sardonic smile and silkily whispered into the microphone, “Bond, James Bond.”

It’s hard to imagine that I might have answered “Secretan, James Secretan.” That was what Ian Fleming initially called his hero in the typescript of “Casino Royale,” first published in April 1953. Fortunately, just as Arthur Conan Doyle realized that Sherrinford Holmes wasn’t quite the right name for the greatest of all detectives, Fleming recognized that he needed something punchier than “Secretan” for the greatest of all secret agents.

According to Nicholas Shakespeare, in his huge, immensely detailed new biography, “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,” there may have been two or three sources behind the final, seemingly inevitable choice. The 43-year-old Fleming, who was living two months of each year in Jamaica, regularly consulted “Birds of the West Indies,” by a Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond. And back when he was working in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, one operation was saved from disaster by a heroic Rodney Bond. Somehow, though, I can’t imagine we’d be watching movies today about Rodney Bond.

One of the strengths — or, arguably, weaknesses — of Shakespeare’s 821-page biography is its length. If not exactly too much of a good thing, there’s always a little more than seems necessary. Take the long central section devoted to Fleming’s wartime intelligence work. While documentation is sketchy, since the relevant records were either destroyed or remain classified, Shakespeare deduces that Fleming was far more than the deskbound assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence and quite probably the department’s guiding mastermind. In these chapters, he describes in detail espionage strategies, meetings with American spymasters and botched operations — all of which may well be catnip to students of military history but will send other readers off for a cat nap. In any event, Fleming almost certainly based Bond on a composite of several agents and commandos he knew, as well as himself and his intrepid older brother, Peter Fleming, who is now remembered mainly for the classic travel book “Brazilian Adventure.”

Overall, though, “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” is a dazzling, even dizzying achievement, despite that ludicrous-sounding subtitle. A “complete man,” Fleming believed, would resemble one of those swashbuckling Elizabethan all-rounders who were simultaneously poets, courtiers, lovers and soldiers. For Fleming, I think being a “complete man” remained largely aspirational. In his personal life, he was, by turns, a youthful rebel, a resentful mama’s boy, a modern-day Don Juan and a middle-aged melancholiac.

Consider his family background, tailor-made for psychological disaster. Grandfather Robert Fleming was Britain’s leading banker, one of the richest men in the world. After Ian’s father, Valentine, was killed during World War I, Winston Churchill, no less, wrote the obituary for the Times. From that point on, Val was held up to his four young sons as an unattainable ideal. His widow, Eve, would blackmail the boys into doing what she wanted by invoking their father’s spirit and example. As it happens, the eldest, Peter, excelled at everything effortlessly, from athletics to academics, was dubbed the “king” of Eton and was even regarded as a good bet to become a future prime minister. Born in 1908, Ian, the moody, insecure second son, dwelled in Peter’s shadow until the Bond novels reversed the relationship. The two youngest brothers happily entered the banking business but, like Scottish lairds, spent as much time as possible hunting and fishing on their highland estate.

Eve Fleming ruled Ian through her absolute control of the family purse strings. She even made him break up with the woman he wanted to marry by threatening to cut off his allowance. Mummy herself was extravagant in every way: A maid said that if it were raining, Eve would put on a new pair of shoes to walk to her waiting car and never wear them again. She never remarried, partly because her late husband’s will stipulated that she would then forfeit much of her enormous wealth. But this didn’t preclude an affair with the painter Augustus John, with whom she had a daughter, Ian’s half sister, Amaryllis.

As Ian grew up, he not only discovered an ability to charm women, he also used it. Again and again, Shakespeare notes his subject’s casual seductions, affairs with the girlfriends and wives of his friends, and, most disagreeably, a gigolo-like willingness to accept gifts and money from rich older women in his thrall — one gave him the equivalent of what would today be a quarter-million dollars to build his Jamaican compound, Goldeneye. While obviously whip smart and capable, Fleming nonetheless found nearly all his jobs, starting with a stint as a journalist for Reuters, through the interventions of fond women.

Yet, once hired, he would quickly win the almost paternal affection of his boss, whether Adm. John Godfrey of Naval Intelligence or Lord Kemsley, owner of the Sunday Times, who made him the paper’s foreign editor, with an exorbitant salary and two months of paid holiday each year. Fleming lived luxuriously even before the first Bond movies started to bring in the serious cash. While 007 might occasionally be an agent provocateur, his creator was always an agent-entrepreneur.

Again and again, Shakespeare’s biography reminds us of what a tight little island Britain could be for those of its privileged class. If you’ve read any of the books about the Brideshead generation, you’ll find many of the same people cropping up in Fleming’s life, including the critic Cyril Connolly, a former Eton classmate, and Evelyn Waugh, whose novels Fleming would like to have written more than his own. He even counted the multitalented showman Noel Coward as a confidant and once shared a wealthy girlfriend with Roald Dahl, to whom he gave the idea for a famous story, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

Then there was the socialite Ann O’Neill (nee Charteris), whose Etonian husband was killed in World War II while she was having an intense affair with the newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere, whom she eventually married. Soon thereafter, Ann broke Rothermere’s heart by sleeping with their friend Ian Fleming. Against the advice of almost everyone he knew, Ian married Ann in 1952, having kept his mind off the upcoming nuptials by writing “Casino Royale.” It took him just a month. A son was soon born, but the new Mrs. Fleming loved dinner parties and house guests, while her new husband was at his happiest snorkeling and playing golf. Neither was faithful to the other.

As with his excellent biography of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming, replacing a fine one by Andrew Lycett that appeared almost 30 years ago. Bond devotees, however, should be aware that there are no close analyses of the novels, and the only films discussed are the early ones with which Fleming was involved. But Shakespeare certainly recognizes that Bond’s creator, especially when young, behaved much like his hero toward women — in fact, much worse. He regularly comes across as a callous, sexist jerk, no matter how vehemently his friends, lovers and admirers testify to the man’s charisma, thoughtfulness and ability to light up a room. Not even Fleming’s book collecting — he focused on works that changed history — wholly improves his image: It seems to have been more for ostentation than for use. However, he did establish and underwrite Britain’s premier bibliophilic journal, the Book Collector, an act that pays many debts.

A far more likable, even mellow Fleming appears in his letters, edited by his nephew Fergus Fleming for the book “The Man With the Golden Typewriter” (2015). The creator of James Bond could be remarkably courteous in answering correspondents, even those who pointed out his factual errors or other slips. Didn’t he know that the perfume Vent Vert came from Balmain, not Dior, and that a Beretta is a lady’s gun rather than a proper weapon for a secret agent? The letters also make plain that the directors of the publisher Jonathan Cape despised the Bond books, regarding them as sadistic trash even though they ended up keeping the firm afloat.

Fleming died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 56 from cardiac disease, to which smoking 60 or more cigarettes a day doubtless contributed. Today, the real question is: Do the original James Bond thrillers stand up to rereading in the 21st century?

All too often, the only version of 007 most people are familiar with is the one created by Hollywood. Until the humorless, even unpleasant, albeit gripping Daniel Craig films, most of the Bond movies could be likened to commedia dell’arte, drawing on a set formula and softening the violence with cheeky quips, double entendres and even a weird campiness, as in the two films featuring Jaws, the assassin with steel teeth. The movies remain, above all, pure eye candy through their glamorous settings, expertly choreographed action sequences and one gorgeous “Bond girl” after another. Not that Bond himself isn’t the ultimate heartthrob. As I once heard a woman sigh, most men are boys, Sean Connery is a man.

Over the years, the movies have paid less and less attention to the Fleming thrillers from which they borrow their titles. In my experience, the original books — a dozen novels and two short-story collections — remain compulsive page-turners, while being grounded in their time, the Cold War era of the 1950s. Bond is nothing if not patriotic and deeply conservative. In “Casino Royale,” he maintains that “women were for recreation,” while in “Live and Let Die” the Black characters are largely stereotypes. Whether working for SMERSH or SPECTRE, Fleming’s villains invariably turn out to be “foreigners”: Even Sir Hugo Drax, from “Moonraker,” was born Hugo von der Drache.

Still, the best novels — “Casino Royale,” “From Russia, With Love,” “Dr. No,” “Moonraker” and “Goldfinger” — surmount any occasional drawbacks, energized as they are by elements from Fleming’s own life as well as by the speed and freshness of his prose. Who else could make a long chapter about a bridge game (in “Moonraker”) so riveting? Little wonder that poet Philip Larkin spoke of Fleming’s “mesmerizing readability.” What’s more, though the books emphasize action and violence, they don’t utterly shy away from elegance and lyricism, or even the occasional philosophical reflection:

“Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through — these are the vices of the herd.” Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. “I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac — a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That” — the black holes glittered blankly at Bond through the contact lenses — “is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”

Those last three sentences, and particularly the last, demonstrate that when Ian Fleming is on point, nobody does it better.

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Harper. 821 pp. $45

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