Fleming’s Literary Diversion

The United Kingdom has given us many fictional heroes, including Sherlock Holmes, Borat, and of course Agent 007. With the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale, due out this next week, many people--moviegoers and reporters among them--are looking back to the source material from which that suave character comes.

Having been for many years an Ian Fleming nut, I can confidently say that the two best biographies of this author are by John Pearson (The Life of Ian Fleming: The Man Who Created James Bond) and Andrew Lycett (Ian Fleming). The latter had an interesting piece in The Times of London recently, in which he recounted the story of Bond’s birth. It seems that in 1952 Fleming was in Jamaica (where he’d built a home he called Goldeneye, “after a secret operation he had run during the war”), preparing to marry the “beguiling” former Lady (Ann) Rothermere, who--after their protracted affair--had divorced her newspaper magnate husband in order to be with Fleming.

Fleming used that short interim period to write his first novel, Casino Royale, at Goldeneye. It took him just four weeks, and he later said he did it to take his mind off the horror of his impending marriage. That was a typically evasive Fleming remark, masking the fact that the impulsive, opinionated Ann was the catalyst that led him finally to embark on the spy novel he had long contemplated.

Thereafter, Fleming wrote all of the Bond books at Goldeneye.

READ MORE: “Bond in Torment,” by John Lanchester (London Review of Books).