Yet, while Fleming acknowledged other influences in interviews and journalism, he never mentioned Wheatley. Duns thinks that this is because he wanted to look cool in terms of his inspirations: ‘Wheatley is a very below-stairs writer.’
Fleming had the advantage of not having to draw his inspiration only from fellow writers. He had worked alongside – even directed the missions of – real-life action heroes. Asked about 007 on Desert Island Discs, he said, ‘He’s a mixture of commandos and secret-service agents that I met during the war, but of course entirely fictionalised.’ Merlin Minshall, Michael Mason, Commander Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale and Commander Alexander ‘Sandy’ Glen are all names that will be meaningless to most, but there is circumstantial evidence that the personalities and/or exploits of these intelligence colleagues and acquaintances of Fleming contributed to the character of James Bond. William Stephenson is fairly well known to the public – if only by his codename: Intrepid – and seems one of the strongest candidates of all. An operation engaged in by the MI6 employee in New York with Fleming by his side involved a break-in at the office of a Japanese cypher expert. It later became – in a heightened version – a mission that helped earn Bond his double-O status. Moreover, in 1941 Fleming participated in the exercises undertaken by students at a type of training school for saboteurs run by Stephenson in Canada. One of the tasks – attaching a limpet mine to the underside of a ship – turns up in Live and Let Die in a scene containing considerable verisimilitude. It seems logical that other techniques Fleming learned there also pepper the Bond canon.
Fleming’s ‘spy novel’ would not take place in World War II, however, nor any of the other conflicts around which twentieth-century spy fiction had so far revolved. Novels with a backdrop of World War I, World War II and early-twentieth-century anti-Bolshevism became, as soon as those conflicts were concluded, period pieces (if, in some cases, enduringly readable ones). The war of attrition and ideology that developed after World War II between Communist, totalitarian East and capitalist, democratic West was, however, a novelist’s gift that kept on giving. Although it was a war of low-level intensity, for several decades it genuinely seemed one without end and it was into that conflict – rife with fictional possibilities – that Fleming dropped his new character.
What, though, should he call him? ‘I wanted the simplest, dullest plainest-sounding name I could find,’ Fleming told the Manchester Guardian in 1958. ‘“James Bond” was much better than something more interesting like “Peregrine Carruthers”. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.’
It was long assumed Fleming got the name for his hero from the American author of Birds of the West Indies, a book on his shelves at Goldeneye. However, another Fleming biographer, Andrew Lycett, proffers a different story. When during the war Fleming spoke of his literary ambitions to C.H. Forster of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the latter asked him how he would choose names. Fleming replied that he would think of the first couple of names in his house at school and change – by which it seems he meant ‘transpose’ – their first names. Replied Forster, ‘In my case, the first names were James Aitken and Harry Bond. So you could have Harry Aitken and James Bond.’ Of course, the two stories don’t necessarily contradict each other.
Fleming met the ‘real’ James Bond in 1964 when he was writing his final 007 story, The Man with the Golden Gun. It was a convivial affair in which the ornithologist and his wife amusedly explained how their lives were now punctuated by ribbing from people in minor officialdom such as porters and airport staff to whom they had cause to reveal their names. In a letter to Mary Wickham Bond – Mrs James Bond – Fleming said the name was just what he needed because it was ‘brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine’. The name, though, was less prosaic and more in the poetical literary tradition than Fleming might have thought: ‘bond’ – another word for promise or pledge – was ideal for a character of patriotic duty and iron purpose.
Armed with his influences, his first-hand insight into intelligence matters, a facility with the written word and a name for his protagonist, Fleming set about amalgamating them. In devising his own angle on the espionage genre, he became known for several specific plot and style characteristics. Many assumed he invented all of them. This was partly because Bond’s phenomenal success took such characteristics from the ghettoes of pulp into the mainstream. It was also partly because no previous purveyor of this type of material had Fleming’s breeding or his personal contacts in the literary world. He was able to get his books reviewed in the ‘posh papers’ and the likes of The Times Literary Supplement. To reviewers in such outlets – who would never sully their hands with a Dennis Wheatley – his type of writing was new.
The trademarks he became known for were:
1 SEXUAL FRANKNESS: Public discussion of sex – particularly sex outside marriage – was largely taboo at the time Fleming began writing Bond books in the early 1950s. This state of affairs was due to the absence of reliable contraception, a situation that never really changed during Fleming’s lifetime. Those who depicted or discussed in art non-marital sex were often accused of encouraging immorality and undermining the cause of preventing single-motherhood. Fleming’s participation in the disregard of this taboo was therefore shocking. It was also thrilling. His matter-of-fact acknowledgement of sexual desire and depiction of, if not its mechanics, its preamble and aftermath were, on a base level, titillating. This was not least because he was clearly kinky: spanking is mentioned in half a dozen Bond novels, with the secret agent’s first thought of it occurring towards the end of earliest book Casino Royale, and his actually first threatening to take across his lap a wilful female in fifth book From Russia with Love. However, his frankness was also refreshing in a pure sense for people fed up with the circumspection then surrounding this most everyday and pleasurable of human functions, one groan-making manifestation of which was heroes in thrillers making their excuses and leaving when sex looked like raising its supposedly shameful head.
2 THE UNOBTAINABLE: The dreary austerity of an already pitilessly class-bound country provided a ready-made audience for Fleming’s semi-posh, jet-setting, casino-haunting creation. There was a notable authenticity to Fleming’s travelogues that added another dimension to their exoticness. ‘I rarely write about places I have not seen,’ he noted. Gambling was illegal in the UK except in private clubs, and even those forms of it that were legal were not allowed to be advertised or encouraged. Even the statement in Diamonds are Forever that Bond is taking his fourth shower of the day fits into this syndrome: hygiene in mid-fifties Britain was commonly a matter of a weekly bath, with showers virtually unknown even in well-to-do households.
3 BRAND NAMES: Fleming’s fascination with the non-generic was unusual. The mythical ‘ACME’ was usually posited as the universal manufacturer of the products that appeared in fiction, or else false names were substituted for familiar ones. Fleming once observed, ‘I see no point in changing the name of the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to an Hirondelle.’ Fleming claimed that he inserted such references as a sort of mooring as his settings and plots took off into the sphere of the fantastical – a way to make the reader feel ‘that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground’. However, he must have been aware of their function as product porn: his references to the likes of Chanel and Fleurs des Alpes served to provide a window on another world as much as did Bond’s games of chemin de fer.
4 CLASSY VILLAINS: Fleming’s baddies were not Nazi caricatures or belligerent cockneys. Rather, they were larger-than-life personalities with an etiquette incongruous in the context of their murderousness. A set-piece confrontation between Bond and baddie – over a dinner table or similar calm tableaux – became a staple of the part of the narrative just prior to the final, bloody showdown.
5 ANTI-HEROISM: