The war heroes, spymasters and beautiful women who inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond
Ben Macintyre writing in The Times

One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times, a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.
This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to sluice out the hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican home, “Goldeneye”, and began to type, using six fingers, on his elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line would read: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning…” Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of 2,000 a day. A month after he had started writing, he tapped out the words “…‘the bitch is dead now’.” Casino Royale was complete, and James Bond was born.
All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places, machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former intelligence officer, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one.
Like the character he had created, Ian Fleming was a great deal more complex than he seemed on first acquaintance. Beneath the sybaritic exterior, he was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and occasional cynicism. Bond is, in part, Fleming, and the exploits of 007 grew directly out of Fleming’s knowledge of wartime intelligence and espionage: he would teasingly refer to the Bond books as “autobiography”. Like every good journalist, Fleming was a magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places, plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from reality that would then be translated into fiction. He once remarked, “Everything I write has a precedent in truth.”

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