Fleming toyed with the idea of authoring an espionage novel from at least summer 1944, when he told war colleague Robert Harling that, once demobilised, he would ‘write the spy story to end all spy stories’. What is remarkable about Fleming’s idle boast is that it was accurate: the espionage template was changed for all time by Casino Royale and its sequels. Before he thus changed the landscape, though, Fleming was – like any other writer – merely the sum of his influences.
Asked in 1963 by Counterpoint which writers had influenced him, Fleming offered, ‘I suppose, if I were to examine the problem in depth, I’d go back to my childhood and find some roots of interest in E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sax Rohmer.’ Oppenheim wrote thrillers laced with vignettes of high living, convincing psychology and Edwardian morality. His famous works included The Great Impersonation (1920) and The Spy Paramount (1935). Rohmer was the creator of Fu Manchu, a Chinese criminal mastermind nicknamed the Yellow Peril on whom Bond villain Dr No seems to be heavily based.
Fleming gave a couple of notable quotes about Bulldog Drummond and his creator, Sapper (H.C. McNeile). When asked to describe Bond, he said, ‘Sapper from the waist up and Mickey Spillane below.’ In a posthumously published December 1964 Playboy interview, Fleming said, ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I mean, rather, I didn’t believe they could any longer exist in literature.’ Both quotes invoke Drummond/Sapper in a negative, or at least ambiguous, sense. The impression that might be gleaned from this is that Fleming had never liked Sapper, but, as John Pearson discovered, he had been partial to his writings when as a young boy they had been read to him by his headmaster’s wife at boarding school. Drummond was an ex-army man whose rough-hewn features created his nickname. Bored with life, he advertised in The Times for adventure. Fleming’s later conviction that Drummond’s escapades belonged to the past was probably not due to Bulldog’s oft-stated contempt for Jews, Germans, ‘wops’, ‘dagos’, ‘frogs’, ‘niggers’ and ‘greasers’: such racism would be pretty much matched by Fleming, whose hero detested Koreans and Germans, and almost all of whose adversaries would be foreigners. As alluded to in Fleming’s comments above, it was more likely due to the complete absence of the carnal in Sapper’s prose, plus Drummond’s unlikely preternatural abilities in physical combat. Moreover, Sapper had ‘no literary pretensions’, to use the peculiar phrase employed to describe those who can’t write very well – as though their lack of ability is both voluntary and a defiant statement of integrity.
Pearson found John Buchan to be another action author who featured in Fleming’s reading history. Buchan’s most famous protagonist was Richard Hannay, whose best-known adventure is The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Hannay was a departure from previous action-adventure protagonists in being vulnerable and flawed, and this was something that Fleming would bring to his own hero.
The character the Saint was introduced to the world by author Leslie Charteris in 1928 with Meet the Tiger. Many novels and short stories followed. He was brought to a wider public by movies and television. ‘It’s surprising that very little comparison is made between the Saint and James Bond,’ says Jeremy Duns, a Bond fan and scholar, as well as an espionage novelist himself. ‘It must be that Ian Fleming was aware of the Saint. He was a hugely successful character and there are an enormous number of similarities between the Saint and James Bond.’ Simon Templar – whose initials gave rise to his sobriquet – was a handsome, charming, dapper, hedonistic Englishman of action, as knowledgeable about gourmet meals as martial arts and weaponry. He was also catnip to the ladies, and his premarital sex life was explored in a relatively frank manner. Although there was a certain Robin Hood element to his persona, he was darker than Bond. Duns: ‘If you ever watch parodies of Bond, they actually tend to be more like the Saint. The Saint is a ruthless, devil-may-care rogue, whereas Fleming’s character was a much more straightforward sort.’
Somerset Maugham may have been an influence on Bond via Ashenden: or the British Agent, a 1928 volume of spy stories set in World War I. That Ashenden’s superior is known by an initial, like Bond’s boss M, may be coincidence, but indisputable is the fact that Maugham was a friend of Fleming and that Fleming’s 007 short story ‘Quantum of Solace’ is – uncharacteristic though it is of the literary Bond canon – modelled on Maugham’s stories of colonial domestic drama.
When Fleming submitted his first Bond novel, he was told by William Plomer – his friend and subsequent copy editor – that it needed revision. Fleming wrote back, ‘It remains to be seen whether I can get a bit closer to Eric Ambler and exorcise the blabbering ghost of Cheyney.’ Ambler was a writer much admired for his devising in the 1930s a new model for the thriller. We can infer from Fleming’s comment that he shared that admiration, although probably more for Ambler’s realism, deftness and literary bent than an unusually leftish perspective, which was for many a refreshing change from the elitism and/or racism of Sapper, Buchan, et al. Ambler became best-known for The Mask of Dimitrios, which had an Istanbul background. Fleming – who was acquainted with him – picked Ambler’s brains about that city and Byzantium in general when writing From Russia with Love (in that book Bond is to be found reading an Ambler).
Fleming’s putdown of Peter Cheyney wasn’t his only one. Despite being British, the crime writer popular since the late thirties devised Americanised titles such as Dames Don’t Care and Your Deal, My Lovely and gave protagonists handles such as Lemmy Caution and Slim Callaghan. Strangely, though, reviews of Fleming’s books often compared them to Cheyney’s. The one such comparison that really delighted Fleming was the occasion W. H. Smith’s Trade News columnist Whitefriar, reviewing Casino Royale, called him the ‘Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade’. Fleming made sure that Whitefriar received inscribed copies of his books from that point on.
The end of that Playboy ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types’ quote was, ‘I wanted this man more or less to follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes – believable people, believable heroes.’
Fleming was referring to purveyors of American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction (of whom Mickey Spillane was also an example, if a less refined one). They were the sorts of writers whose lowlife vignettes and wise-guy argot Cheyney attempted to imitate from the distance and incongruous surroundings of drizzly, low-key Britain. The private-detective heroes of these writers were cynics and loners, low-waged characters hired by wealthy clients to discreetly solve shameful mysteries and who faced the dangers that resulted therefrom with alternate muscularity and wryness. The writers concerned tended to be very good on colloquial dialogue, albeit with a suspicion of its being souped up with witticisms and street poetry beyond the average denizen of a back alley. Unlike Cheyney, Fleming ensured that, whatever trappings he co-opted from the hard-boiled genre, his protagonist was quintessentially English.
Jeremy Duns has alighted on what he feels is a clear but little-known inspiration for James Bond. At the end of his life, Dennis Wheatley was notorious for the likes of The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. However, before that tumble into the outré, he was known as a writer of thrillers. His protagonist, Gregory Sallust, and the adventures in which he became entangled were, for Duns, prototypically 007.
Duns says of Sallust, ‘He has a scar on his face. He’s a cynical, hedonistic British secret agent. He’s a freelance secret agent, so he doesn’t have quite the organisational, bureaucratic power behind him, but he has this M figure in Sir Pellinore, who he’s got a very similar, paternal relationship to, although it’s perhaps more friendly. The character is womanising, drinking, gambling – quite unusual for a hero.’ Moreover: ‘There is a surprising amount of sex in the Dennis Wheatley books.