His legacy advanced the espionage genre beyond mere policing mentality. But he never allowed it to be a joke. Ian Fleming's 007 become legendary because he successfully incorporated fantastic action with human emotion. Danger, fear, revenge, courage, intimacy, and trust were integral and real emotions from the outset of the series.
The following article is a fabricated attempt at supposing what might have been different had Ian Fleming been born in 1954, putting the writing of his first novel "Casino Royale" in today's 1997, instead of the actual 1952.
To do this I had no choice but to alter the timeline and historical events of Fleming's life into a modern concoction of the World War II veteran. I hope no one takes to task or brickbat small things, like the exact date Fleming began his novelist career. One source gives a definitive date in January, another goes by his wife's diary entry suggesting the following month.
I am not writing a transplated factual account. So much would have been different. The purpose of this is to lead to the statement made in the epilogue. Please, new fans, do not confuse this as a true retelling of the life of Ian Lancaster Fleming. It will hopefully, however, demonstrate how Fleming was a man of his time.
Closing the jalousies from the side of the window casing, Ian Fleming settled into the main living room of his Jamaican retreat. His imminent marriage to the pregnant Ann Rothermere weighing upon the man who believed matrimony was an admission of defeat, Ian Fleming needed an outlet for his fears. He had spent time in the Royal Navy, achieving the rank of Commander, but the experience had left him drifting. He had longed for exciting entanglements to escape the bourgeois life he had survived as a stockbroker.This yarn of time advancement has no logical outcome. Ian Fleming often surprised all those around him as well as himself. Maybe he would have trudged through the cookie-cutter corporate entertainment world of 1997. Maybe his works would have only been in literary form. Maybe he would have met a singular visionary producer like Albert Broccoli. Maybe he would not try.The great escapades of the two World Wars enthralled the forty-three year old man ensconced at his desk. Fleming was now working as a reporter for the Kelmsley line of newspapers. Ian himself had to ponder daily which publication he was contributing to, syndication wires now owning the line. He enjoyed a leisurely vacation allowance of two consecutive months a year. An old family friend, Lord Kelmsley, had secured that stipulation for the crusty Etonian before selling off his shares. Ian enjoyed his work, but felt growing resentment at the constant changes brought on by the publishing business.
The two months away from his Carlyle Mansions flat were spent at the Jamaican retreat he had constructed. He called it Goldeneye, after an English World War II operation to outmaneuver and frustrate the Nazis. Always fascinated by how things work and little about who people were, Fleming nevertheless had met influential friends. He got along inimically with some of the nouveau poets his societal fiance introduced him to. He had formed a surprising one-upmanship bond with an aging homosexual writer who resembled Noel Coward. He bantered with the other vacationers who continued to inhabit the island many years since it had been such a focal tourist attraction.
But most important to the budding author were his military and political contacts. Fleming dreamed of producing the definitive espionage novel, which he felt had never been approached. Len Deighton had sold hardbacks painting the secret agent as little more, Fleming felt, than bureaucratic businessmen with false identifications. Tom Clancy had been heralded as an "insider" but Ian could see his books were merely repositories for promulgating his political persuasions. Other thrillers went too far in one extreme or another. He also rued the television vehicles produced in the United States when he was still in English private school. Full of invigorating ideas, they ultimately failed to have that patriotic edge, that sense of duty, of which Ian Fleming could feel pouncing behind his eyes when reading reports of Britain's old war exploits.
He had met a former army intelligence officer, Hilary Bray, and once he replaced Ian at the brokerage firm, they became golfing buddies. He also was close with a reporter and historian named Richard Hughes, a burly Australian capable of outdrinking even Ian himself. Close friends Ivar Bryce and Tommy Leiter shared time in military service with him and were favorite visitors full of illuminating stories as well. The information gleaned made Ian Fleming yearn to be of another era.
He stared at his computer. Fleming had been beyond wary of the world domination these bloody machines had wrought. He feared the complete loss of personal contact. However, his job required one (provided they paid for the training, he stipulated) and they then had allowed him this contraption free of cost at his vacation retreat. "Might as well milk the cow," thought Fleming.
He started to type the first line. "Scent and smoke and sweat hit the taste buds with an acid thwack at three o'clock in the morning." After a look he thought better of it and he blocked out the sentence, selected a Gill Sans font, ten inch, and plinked out, "Scent and smoke and sweat can suddenly combine together and hit the taste buds with an acid shock at three o'clock in the morning." "Damn," he muttered aloud, "even worse." Hitting the NEW selection from the menu and leaving the incomplete paragraph unsaved, Ian saw his reflection in the monitor. *footnote*
He was not clear how to proceed. He was stuck between his desire to write about what events had affected his life personally in the past two decades, and how the lack of excitement those events left a stale taste on his palette. He considered current events to place his character into. An obvious one dealt with the turnover of British controlled Hong Kong to the Communist Chinese. But Ian felt it couldn't work, at least not for his idea. He loved the old Communist's Cold War battles, but concluded he couldn't believably write a story involving Hong Kong without an experienced agent as the lead character, someone who is battle weary, someone who already has a series of books written about him instead of a first adventure.
Fleming had already defined some parameters about his main subject. One was someone young enough to dedicate his career to eradicating a common enemy. Having met Harry Bond and James Aitken as school chums, Ian long before had fancied an unobtrusive name from them, though at first he could not decide which inversion read better. When he sat at Goldeneye and saw the throwaway purchase he'd bought for his wife Ann to keep her company while he locked his focus into the small room which the beautiful rolltop desk that stored his notes, and the cheap Sauder computer desk he typed at, he then KNEW the character's name. The book for Ann, "Macmillan's Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies", was authored by an American ornithologist named James Bond. Ian needed a simple, non-elegant name to encounter the amazing events in his head. Harry Aitken had been defeated. James Bond it was.
Fleming also intrinsically knew a period story without contemporary familiarities, would have trouble attracting attention from many readers. Despite his subconscious desires to have motion pictures derived from his works, Ian feared a period piece would be a one-time shot to most publishers, who would insist on something more current to base a continuing character. Ian felt a series of books, which he realized the bevy of ideas needed were already in his head, set in the 1940's or 50's would not be culpable to modern day paperbacks of John Sanford, David Wiltse or Scott Turow, or the mindless violent fare of the Hollywood establishment. He cringed at the sight of his character personified by Steven Segal, or one of the amplified advertisements for it, sure to mention "the best since Harry Palmer."
Still, Fleming could not let go of the idea. His studies and first hand accounts of Her Majesty's intelligence forces waging a secret war against Germans in the second World War, and the Cold War battles pitting America's Central Intelligence against Mother Russia's K.G.B. were archaic in some respects. But they were still viable to Ian Fleming. Particularly SMERSH, the Russian's ultra-secret organization committed to the creed of "death to spies."
Ian placed his aged hands on the 101-key Windows keyboard and decided to allow the muse to create and the man to succumb. He typed, "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning." That was it. He knew it. Fleming spent about two and a half more hours furiously pounding at the keyboard. Dizzy with a steady heartbeat, he stopped for a lunch of curried goat and grilled snapper and splashed about the warm Jamaican waters. He returned late in the afternoon and made corrections to his morning's work, requiring approximately another hour.
Always a structured person despite a lack of appreciation for formalities, Fleming decided that the work he had produced merited his feelings of using the Cold War 1950's as a backdrop for his novel. He would repeat the same daily regimen the following day, and the following, until he completed his tome.
About six weeks passed. Valentine's Day had just been crossed from the calendar when his Coward-like friend made his latest jaunt to the island paradise. Ian made him aware of the endeavor he had undertaken. His friend was enthused. Ian was putting his outlets on something other than his uptight fiancee. He was also happy Ian had not named him in it.
Ian chuckled at the name dropping of friends and relatives. He used Ivar Bryce's middle name of Felix combined with Tommy Leiter for one character. His brother had an unfinished story featuring a woman named Moneypenny. A Colonel who lived on the island had once served Ian a concoction he named a Vesper, which was then a mixture of iced rum, herbs and fruit. Ian embellished the contents and called Bond's drink a Vesper, toasted for the heroine of the book. He had not gotten them all, from his reporter friend Hughes who he called Dikko, to Ann's friend Loelia Duchess of Westminster, to Captain Edmund Pleydall-Bouverie, to former Foreign Office minister Arthur Ponsonby, to old chum John Fox-Strangways, to Bray, to a Jamaican boater called Red Grant, but he knew those colorful names would come in handy for future tales - if they occurred.
Energized, Fleming was also protective of his manuscript. He didn't much care for the "cardboard boobies" his fiancee kept in high regard though some had prominent pull in publishing. In fact Fleming didn't much care for the rigors of the publishing mechanism at all, much less the visual broadcasting back alleys. But he needed to add to his coffers to keep Ann in her high societal position.
Ian was still concerned about the viability of his book. He could accept minor phrase tweaking and word fixing by some young buck editor. But was his story marketable in 1997? Ian had written a chilling, morose tale of an agent who undergoes brutal genital torture, is saved by the enemy and does not get the girl in the end. He was resigned to the fact this was not a "90's" ending, but balls, it was truer to what he felt. Every inkling told him Bond would harden his heart after finding his true love was a turncoat agent. "The bitch is dead now" was the proper ending, save commercially. And if Ann drew a parallel to their impending nuptials, well he had heard Ann telling the "upper crusties" that she spent her vacation painting while he wrote pornography. Might as well take heed!
Frightful bloody cads! After a publisher friend of his, Amis Gardner, deduced Fleming was undertaking writing a book, he asked to see it. Impressed with the emotional content but not necessarily the structure or rough prose, Gardner still felt Ian had something. He was troubled by the almost Shakespearean construction with the climactic action (the villain Le Chiffre's death) occurring in the middle, as in the Bard's third act. By Act V Amis Gardner felt the "surprise" conclusion of Vesper's loyalty was too obvious. But more to the point, how did it translate to film? To find out, Gardner arranged for a reader to look at the work. The reader, employed by Unitone Pictures ("probably run by some Jap conglomerate," Ian thought) was enthused and recommended it to a studio executive. The exec, Bobby Gin, had counseled Fleming about what "updating" the screenplay would need to play for the right demos. (He also made many mentions of "demos" until Fleming had to be told it meant demographics.)
Every incorrigible idea Ian had avoided in himself now came to light as a possibility, leaving Ian's original story rolling like tumbleweed over the desert. From modern gadgets, to a sex filled romp, to a heroic ending, to a modern day setting, Bobby Gin clued Fleming in to how the successful work is done. How it had to appeal to teenagers and young adults to make money. How important that audience was. As if Ian gave a rat's ass. Fleming stared at the prig as the thought slammed his forehead like a carpet beater. How dare he write for someone else's standards! His entire point was to confront the combined ingredients of longing for a more enticing life and avoiding fear of marriage that had left a bitter taste. He had given his soul to a muse that was not "with it" in the contemporary landscape. What was the point of continuing? If he could not speak for himself, and have those words translated directly, better not to try perhaps. As Dick Hughes would put it, "they bludge."
The point of this fabrication is simple. James Bond can be successful in any era. He is a universal "blunt instrument" of service to his Queen and country. Countries are always under siege. But James Bond was necessarily born in 1952. The world then needed the shadow walkers, the men in the silhouettes, the intelligence gatherers, to protect their land. It is that distinctive composition that shaped the MI6 legend. Today we think of Bond as the ultimate hero. He can ingratiate himself any place, survive any situation, charm any woman, befall any enemy, win any war.
But that is because when he was created, the dangers and the villains were out there ready to prey upon us. As an American I remember the Evil Empire we were warned about in grade school, the monsters with the hammer and the sickle.
Today it seems our biggest fear has become fanatical terrorists and stockpiling militias. They are real threats. We have many law enforcement agencies from country to country to protect us. There is no more "Red threat" we are told.
But if that world peace is shattered by any unforeseen or unprepared event we still long for that unflappable man who can do it all. That soldier of country's fortune who can protect us. Someone who has lived in the past and can exist in the present. Ian Fleming gave us that past, that history. The future is ours to defend.
©1997 by Michael Reed
*footnote*
Andrew Lycett, "Ian Fleming - The Man Behind James Bond," ©1995 by Andrew Lycett, Turner Publishing, Inc.
Raymond Benson, "The James Bond Bedside Companion," ©1984 by Raymond Benson, Dodd, Mead, and Co. Inc.
Raymond Benson, "Zero Minus Ten," ©1997 by Raymond Benson, Glidrose Publications Ltd.
"The Ultimate James Bond : An Interactive Dossier" CD-ROM, ©1996 by Danjaq, Inc. & United Artists Corporation
"The Many Faces Of James Bond," ©1989 by Video Specials, a division of Amvest Video Corp.
Steven Jay Rubin, "The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia," ©1981 by Steven Jay Rubin, Arlington House
And of course, all the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, the ultimate inspiration.
Michael Reed previously wrote on the similarities of Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the premiere issue of HMSS.
The attempts at the first line of "Casino Royale" were reprinted verbatim from the Lycett book listed blow.
Some recreated events were wholly fabricated by the author. The factual input used was derived from the following recommended sources :
Special thanks to fellow HMSS contributing editor Robert Cotton for assistance needed to complete this piece.
