JIM BENN: In the very first Ian Fleming novel, Casino Royale, CIA agent Felix Leiter introduces himself to Bond, who responds, "Mine's Bond—James Bond." The shortened version, “Bond—James Bond” appears in the 1958 novel Dr. No when Bond uses it to introduce himself to Honeychile Rider. But when it came to the film version, the screenwriters liked the delivery so much they moved it to the opening scene of the film, when he introduces himself to Sylvia Trench at the baccarat table. There, they became the first words Sean Connery spoke as secret agent 007. And one of cinema’s most famous introductory lines.
Now that we’ve been properly introduced to the world’s most famous fictional spy, the question becomes, who exactly is James Bond? And where did he come from?
Commander Ian Fleming is a character in my latest Billy Boyle World War II mystery, The Ninth Circle. I dove into the research on his life, as I wanted to get a sense of the person he was. I found him to be complicated, infuriating, often selfish, but always interesting.
It’s fair to say that at the time of the events in my book—January 1945—Fleming had not yet conceived of James Bond. He had talked about writing a spy novel someday. But he had yet to emerge from the shadow of his wildly successful and devilishly handsome older brother Peter to whom success came as easily as it passed Ian by.
Peter had excelled at Eton and Oxford and then quickly become a travel writer and journalist. He traveled the world and produced multiple books. He became famous immediately..
Meanwhile, Ian dropped out of Eton, where he had excelled only at athletics. He went on to spend one year at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before he contracted gonorrhea and left in an undistinguished rush.
When WWII broke out, Peter Fleming was already a reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards and fought in the Norwegian campaign with a commando unit. He also found the time to write a satirical novella in 1940 about Adolf Hitler flying to Britain to propose peace. It was a literary success. Peter went on to serve in Greece and then in India as head of D Division, in charge of military deception operations in Southeast Asia.
While Peter was establishing his reputation, Ian was adrift. After the Sandhurst fiasco in 1927, his mother shipped him off to Kitzbühel, Austria. There, he was enrolled in a small private school run by Ernan Forbes Dennis, a former intelligence officer, and his wife, novelist Phyllis Bottome.
The idea was for Ian to learn French and German and prepare himself for the Foreign Office exam. The whole matter got off to a rocky start. Forbes Dennis states that Fleming "was really quite impossible when he first came to us.” After a visit by Peter, Forbes Dennis described the brothers’ relationship this way: Peter is “a glossy racehorse out in front, Ian struggling to keep up with him.”
Ernan Forbes Dennis and Phyllis Bottome were adherents of Alfred Adler, a member of Freud’s inner circle who specialized in education. Applying Adler’s democratic, non-authoritarian approach to Ian, they realized he was engaged in “an endless neurotic duel” with his brother who caused him to feel “dethroned or otherwise outdistanced.”
At one point, after Ian had impregnated a local girl who was dating a friend of his, they’d had enough of him. Forbes Dennis saw this as a reflection of Ian’s neurosis and wrote “The intense sibling rivalry he experienced with his brother Peter seemed to be replayed in his endless cuckolding of men he regarded as his friends.” They were ready to expel him and send him back to his mother, a notion which held little appeal to Ian.
This was a wake-up call. Ian begged for a chance at redemption which he was granted. Under the couple’s tutelage, he spent three years at Kitzbühel, where he perfected his German and greatly improved his French. He ultimately was not selected for the Foreign Office. But he returned home to England after three years in Austria a more confident and better educated young man. He had learned about the intelligence business from Forbes Dennis and writing from Phyllis, who encouraged him to work on short stories. Both were valuable assets, as was the Tyrolean scenery which Ian loved, and would later play a role in several books.
Ian returned to Britain and worked for two years as a journalist without much success. In 1933 he ended up at a London investment firm. He was unsuccessful as a stockbroker. He told a colleague at Rowe & Pitman, “My brother Peter’s the writer in the family and he’s terribly good at it.”
Alfred Adler might have said that Ian had found his place in life as the failed younger brother and was neurotically wedded to his persona.
But the Second World War was Ian’s salvation. After a string of failed enterprises, in 1939 he found himself at the center of an intelligence network where he was elevated to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Not that he’d had any naval experience. Even so, he was recruited to be the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence.
Whatever he lacked in military attributes, he made up for in organizational and planning skills. With his keen and devious mind, he generated a number of plans for intelligence operations. One of those plans became known as Operation Mincemeat, in which a body disguised as a British officer carrying secret documents was left on the Portuguese coast. The successful deception was aimed at drawing German troops away from Sicily in advance of the Allied invasion.
Ian Fleming wrote the original memo suggesting this general concept in 1939. It was operationally run by two other Royal Navy officers.
Even so, while Peter Fleming was fighting in Greece to slow the German advance, Ian could lay claim to being at the heart of Royal Navy espionage efforts. For the first time, he may have felt himself the equal of his older brother.
By the end of the war, Ian had a stockpile of ideas for the spy novel he’d always wanted to write. Each James Bond novel has roots which harken back to WWII.
Early in his Royal Navy career, Ian had watched M16 double agent Duško Popov run a massive baccarat bluff at the Casino Estoril in Portugal. Popov placed a huge fifty thousand dollar bet to unnerve an unpleasant opponent. Fleming was astounded, and more than a decade later that scene was recreated in the opening of his first book, Casino Royale, which was written between February 17 and March 18, 1952, at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. Coming in at 43,790 words, it’s more novella than novel.
Popov was a daring spy and a dashing playboy. He is one of the many real-life agents it is thought Fleming based James Bond on. Bond also shared many of Ian’s own attributes. He smoked the same cigarettes, drank the same liquor, used the same barber, was the same height, and shared the same rank in the Royal Navy.
Fleming himself had very specific ideas as to what Bond should look like. Early on, he likened Bond’s looks to the entertainer Hoagy Carmichael.
Fleming also commissioned a sketch of James Bond for a comic strip that ran in British newspapers. This is what he thought Bond should look like.
I think it’s pretty obvious who James Bond really was. Fleming described 007 as having dark, clean-cut looks, cold grey-blue eyes, straight black brows, and a "cruel" mouth. Meet Peter Fleming in close-up. Need we look further?
No one can ever really know, but I have the feeling that Ian finally figured out how to one-up his older brother. By combining Peter’s good looks with his own wartime experiences, Ian crafted a persona that no one could ever get the better of. Accomplished in both the civilized graces and the brutal underworld of espionage, Bond stands alone.
Ian Fleming was no longer dethroned.
What Fleming accomplished was also important for readers in his native Britain. As postwar Great Britain faced a reordering of global power, Bond carried forward the flag of the Empire with style and panache He masked the national decline and made London the center of world again, if only on the page and the silver screen.
As Carly Simon sang in the theme for the 1977 film “The Spy Who Loved Me,”
Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you're the best.
Well, that does it for my armchair psychoanalysis. But as an only child, how can I be certain of anything about brothers and sisters? So tell me, my sibling-supplied friends, what do you make of this - would there have been a James Bond without Peter Fleming? Does sibling rivalry spur healthy competition?
Signing off, it's me.
Benn. James Benn
James R. Benn is the USA Today best-selling author is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was selected as a Top Five Book of the Year by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee, A Blind Goddess was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee, and The Devouring was a Macavity Award nominee.
In The Ninth Circle (number 21 in the series) Billy Boyle is thrust into an investigation of a murdered Royal Navy intelligence officer in Havana. He is brought in by none other than Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who needs a fresh set of eyes to gather intel from sources inside Havana’s criminal underworld, including the notorious gangster Meyer Lansky. As the body count grows, it becomes evident a Nazi spying is behind the violence.
