“My name is Bond. James Bond.” These words by the fictitious character who made his author, Ian Fleming a multimillionaire and one of the 20th century’s most popular authors, will certainly ring a bell or two in anyone who hears them. 

James Bond put on the back burner the great sleuths of the past, Sherlock Holmes and Hercules Poirot, who strained their little gray cells so hard to find stolen jewels or solve a murder case.  Fleming’s character always goes for the quick fix never bothering to think hard. He lives in the world of posh hotels and exotic islands, luscious women and big-time gambling. 

James Bond inherited his penchant for high life from its maker, Ian Fleming, just like his adventurism and happily cynical view of life.  For some strange reason people tend to believe that big success is necessarily the result of hard work and endless compromises. Ian Fleming proves this tried and true adage all wrong - it was strong and motivated desires and red-hot temperament that eventually made him rich and famous. All his life this man did only what he really loved doing. He feared no one. He changed occupations and women and small wonder that his bubbling energy eventually brushed off on one of the most popular book and film characters of the past century.

Born in 1908 into the family of wealthy aristocrats, Ian Fleming grew up the member of a rare class of Englishmen to whom all options are open. He enrolled in the upscale Eaton College but was forced to leave before graduation over an incident involving a young girl. His career at the prestigious military academy Sandhurst proved just as undistinguished and he left without taking an officer’s commission for going AWOL. During those early years he was always just his elder brother’s kid brother and his father’s son. His father, Major Valentine Fleming, died in World War One when Ian was just 8 days shy of his 9th birthday. Winston Churchill wrote the obituary for The Times. His elder brother Peter, an honors graduate of Eaton and Oxford, was a popular journalist. By contrast, Ian was more on the sports and he also had a penchant for foreign languages and at one time, even studied Russian. Eventually, Fleming set his sights on the Foreign Service exam but, to his grave disappointment, did not make the grade failing in English. His mother used her connections to land Ian a job with the Reuters news agency. In 1933 he was dispatched to Moscow and this is when he purportedly started working for British intelligence.  

Disappointed by the low pay he was getting as a reporter, the high-living Fleming, capitalizing on his family’s name, joined a London banking firm which he hoped would make him rich. By 1939 it appears that Fleming had become bored with the plodding day-to-day existence of a banker. The ups and downs of the stock market apparently did not provide enough intrigue for him and so, later that same year, he started a more formal attachment to the intelligence service working with Naval Intelligence and spent the entire World War Two on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He supervised the evacuation of King Zog of Albania, coordinated Britain’s intelligence ties with the allies in the United States, led an operation to locate the secret laboratories where the Germans were developing their FAU missiles. That was the life he always craved! 

The Fleming flair also proved valuable in one other aspect: writing and that was something that really endeared him to his superiors. As assistant to one of Britain’s top spymasters, Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming was writing countless memos and reports. His excellent style and elegant arguments made the usual dry missives a pleasure to read. The war over, Ian Fleming retired from active service and, no longer thrilled by spying routine, he  decided to make his home in Jamaica where fruit lay rotting on the tress and fine rum flowed from the plantations. 

Fleming immediately began planning for his escape to paradise which he wanted to make his own…  Soon after he purchased a small bungalow, Goldeneye, which later inspired one of his novels about James Bond.  Always a ladies’ man, Fleming had for years been having an affair with a married woman, Lady Anne Rothermere. When it finally transpired that she was pregnant, the time seemed to have come for Fleming, almost 44 years of age now, to act like a grown-up man and marry. Just as Fleming waited in Jamaica for Anne’s divorce to become real, he wrote the draft of his first novel, “Casino Royale”. Henceforth, he would embark on his dangerous adventures in his imagination only along with his fictitious hero, James Bond whose name, so banal and nondescript to the British ear was exactly what a secret agent was supposed to have. Fleming had copied the name Bond from a prominent ornithologist who, much to his displeasure, started getting endless phone calls from young ladies asking for a date and was pursued by reporters. The poor professor’s wife sent an angry letter to Fleming who wrote back saying he was sorry and invited the couple to come over and stay with him in Jamaica. At the airport, customs officials carefully went over Professor Bond’s baggage and inquired whether he was carrying a gun…

Ian Fleming was 45 when his first novel about James Bond came out in 1953. More books followed printed in millions of copies in a soft cover, pocketbook, format becoming an inalienable part of American mass culture. In 1961 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy admitted that in his free hours he loved reading the James Bond series by Ian Fleming and that “From Russia With Love” was his favorite. Fleming viewed his literary effort with healthy cynicism which only added to his success. According to his own words, it was not the mind or heart he aimed at, it was somewhere in the lower underbelly he aimed for… Publishing a new book each year Ian Fleming was literally rolling in money. He bought an 18th century caste at Canterbury and a large estate in Wiltshire County. The screen versions of his novels earned him a huge fortune…

On August 12, 1964 Ian Fleming died of a heart attack. A decade-ful of breathtaking success and mind-boggling royalties had got it coming to the once dashing spymaster. Until his very last day he remained a chain smoker and consumed a pint of gin each day. In a word, enjoying himself, just like he always did…