Bond. James Bond. by James R. Benn

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.

Dinner with (imaginary) Friends

INGRID THOFT

There’s a standard list of questions that writers get asked. One of the favorites (it’s in the New York Times’ “By the Book” section every week) is: Which writers would you like to have dinner with—living or deceased? This question elicits interesting responses, but I think an even more interesting question is, which fictional characters would you invite to dinner?

So, who would I like to see around my dinner table? Whose brain would I like to pick? The personalities I’ve chosen are strong, so no doubt, it would be a lively evening!

James Bond (and yes, I expect him to look like Daniel Craig.)

Ian Fleming's super spy is licensed to kill, and he knows how to do everything.  Fly a helicopter?  Check. Disarm a nuclear weapon? Check.  Choose beautiful dresses for his female companions?  Check.  I’d want to hear about his adventures and near-death experiences, and I’d like to breathe in his confidence i.e. arrogance.
  

Quinn Colson

Full disclosure: I have a crush on the sheriff of Tibbehah County in Mississippi.  I know, I know, he doesn't really exist, but Ace Atkins' creation feels real to me.  The head of law enforcement in an area full of underhanded deals, backstabbing, and tangled family trees, Quinn navigates it all with a quiet strength. And biscuits. I'd like him to bring some biscuits.

Barbara Havers

Yes, she’d turn up looking unkempt, but Elizabeth George’s detective sergeant is whip smart and not afraid to speak her mind.  Often in the shadow of her handsome, nattily dressed boss, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Havers holds her own. Time and again, she  proves a critical member of the Met’s investigative team.

What about your dinner party?  Which fictional characters would get an invitation from you?

Francine Mathews--A View From the Shadows

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Okay, here's a really bad thing about BOOK JAIL. My friend Francine Mathews (aka Stephanie Barron) is in Dallas for a few days, staying downtown, and I CAN'T HANG OUT. Boo. I am so totally bummed out. I was really looking forward to seeing her. Fortunately, Francine understands, because she has a book to finish, too.

The good thing is, we all get to talk to Francine here on the blog, today. Francine and I go way back. You may know her better as Stephanie Barron, author of the Jane Austen mystery series, which I adore. But Francine also writes terrific spy thrillers. And she has the chops to do it, because she was a real spy. Here's Francine to tell you about it, and about her latest novel, an historical thriller set in 1943 and featuring Ian Fleming--yes, that Ian Fleming--as the protagonist.

Here's a synopsis:
A tense and enthralling World War II thriller: British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming races to foil a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

November 1943. Weary of his deskbound status in the Royal Navy, intelligence officer Ian Fleming spends his spare time spinning stories in his head that are much more exciting than his own life...until the critical Tehran Conference, when Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin meet to finalize the D-Day invasion.

With the Big Three in one place, Fleming is tipped off that Hitler's top assassin has infiltrated the conference. Seizing his chance to play a part in a real-life action story, Fleming goes undercover to stop the Nazi killer. Between martinis with beautiful women, he survives brutal attacks and meets a seductive Soviet spy who may know more than he realizes. As he works to uncover the truth and unmask the assassin, Fleming is forced to accept that betrayal sometimes comes from the most unexpected quarters--and that one's literary creations may prove eerily close to one's own life. 

FRANCINE MATHEWS:

THE VIEW FROM THE SHADOWS

I discovered the world of espionage early in life. I was the last of my parents’ six children, and thus was permitted a degree of freedom unknown to my five sisters. I suspect this was due to weariness with the whole business of parenting—there are as few photographs of me as a child as there were rules. Regardless, I was packed off to bed each night with the understanding that I would almost immediately creep back downstairs and sit behind my father’s wing chair in the den, where he would invariably be established with his newspaper, and the older girls would be watching television. As long as I made no sound, everyone would pretend that I wasn’t there. As a result, I saw a lot of movies and television I was not supposed to see. From toddlerhood, I found that lurking in the shadows gave the best view of life.

I grew up on Bonanza, Petticoat Junction, Wild, Wild West, and John Wayne films. Sometimes it was Laugh In or Lost in Space. But often it was Get Smart, which I absolutely adored. Never mind 007; I wanted to be Agent 99. Agent 99 was funny, glamorous, more intelligent than the men around her, and far more competent. Plus, she could wield any sort of weapon or gadget with an insouciance that was enslaving. In go-go boots.

Once I could read, I graduated to sitting in my father’s wing chair with my legs thrown over one arm, while I consumed the adventures of the Dana Girls and Harriet the Spy. This is the only book I know of that truly captures the mind and heart of an adolescent bent on observing, collecting and analyzing intelligence in an effort to understand and predict her uncertain world—until she’s blown, and the blowback from her espionage makes her that sad figure in diplomatic circles: persona non grata. It’s a wonderful object lesson in the necessity of cover.

 

From Harriet, I went on to the novels of Helen MacInnes—one of the great and unfortunately less-celebrated-than-she-ought-to-be novelists of the last century. MacInnes worked for the British SIS during World War II, and her books are filled with women who are glamorous, competent, and intelligent—Agent 99s, all of them. In one of my favorites, The Venetian Affair, the male protagonist—an amateur unwittingly embroiled, as men so often are, in a life and death episode of international intrigue—is astounded to discover that the innocent blonde he has his eye on is in fact a trained CIA professional; the Paris apartment he’s been sharing with her is a safehouse. Reason enough to love Helen MacInnes.

Bond is harder for a woman to love. I say that as someone who’s read everything Ian Fleming wrote, as well as biographies of Fleming himself, memoirs of him written by his friends—and even biographies of his friends written by total strangers. I’ve read nonfiction histories of World War II that Fleming haunts like an unquiet ghost—the best being rousing rales like Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat. 

But it’s Bond’s women that are the problem for female readers. Unlike Agent 99 or Helen MacInnes’s pros, they have ridiculous names and a habit of dying in pathetic ways. I’ve noticed this is usually because they have a fatal girl flaw—they trip while racing through the dark in high heels, or they can’t drive a stick-shift getaway car, or they drown when the chamber in which they’re imprisoned unaccountably fills with water, because their lung capacity is lower than men’s. 

This is a trope of Bond stories; Fleming must have had a fear of drowning. I give him that experience in my book, Too Bad to Die, which is the story of Ian Fleming going undercover as a spy named James Bond during World War II, in an effort to prevent the Germans from assassinating Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. But I also give him something much more valuable: Siranoush, an assassin trained by SMERSH—the division of the KGB’s wartime precursor, the NKVD, responsible for counterintelligence. (You thought Fleming invented SMERSH, didn’t you? Nope. He just followed its activities during his own operative period. SMERSH is a Russian acronym that translates as “Death to Spies.”) Siranoush knows all the tradecraft and techniques Ian Fleming lacks as a London-bound desk jockey. Plus, she introduces him to vodka—shaken, not stirred. I thought it was time Bond took lessons from a competent, glamorous, and intelligent woman for a change.

I often tell people that all writers begin life as readers—and that the things we’re obsessed with as children have a way of following us through the years.

So it can hardly have been a surprise that, having exited seven years of higher education without any skill beyond the ability to read and write, I applied to the CIA. One year-long FBI background check and a polygraph later, I found myself in the Agency’s Career Trainee program—required of those slated for the covert world, but granted like a special treat to a few of us destined for Harriet’s analytic life. For the space of several months, I got to do what every proto-spy dreams of. I rappelled off a helicopter skid with an M16 strapped to my back. I endured escape-and-evasion survival training, while helicopters with forward-looking infra-red hunted me from the air. I fired grenade guns at tanks and took agent meetings in safehouses and was fitted with a disguise by the Agency section we lovingly call Q branch, after the Bond films. I left exposed film cartridges in a discarded milk carton under a particular step on the Exorcist stairs that run between M Street and N Street in Georgetown—otherwise known as a dead drop. I tried to keep my husband from spilling the beans about my mysterious absences from “the State Department” each week while I lived at The Farm, the Agency’s covert ops facility.

I learned to admire and love any number of people who live life in the shadows. I learned to treat espionage, its risks, and its immense value, with appropriate seriousness. But eventually, I came back around to my Destiny—and quit the job to write about it.

Truth may be stranger than fiction. But getting to tell a story is most of the fun of living it.

What are your spy-girl fantasies, friends?

Until next time— 


DEBS: I am so ashamed to admit that I've never read Harriet the Spy. BUT, I discovered Ian Fleming's Bond novels when I was thirteen or fourteen, and loved them. Fortunately--I think--they didn't encourage me to wear high heels with bikinis, or drown. 


I loved Helen MacInnes, too, particularly The Venetian Affair, which I intend to revisit. Spy fantasies? Not a Bond girl. But a Helen MacInnes heroine, definitely. The latest? I loved Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.  (And as a fun side note, it's Ilsa who saves Ethan Hunt from drowning in the big underwater scene.)


REDS and readers, did you read Fleming? And what are your Spy Girl fantasies?

Francine Mathews is the author of 25 novels of mystery and suspense, including the Jane Austen Mystery Series, written under the pseudonym Stephanie Barron.

REAL MEN DON'T SHAVE--OR DO THEY?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Today we move from the sublime to the, if not ridiculous, at the least the very shallow. Has anyone else noticed the recent trend towards the absence of male body hair? It was very evident at the Olympics, of course--you won't see a stray hair on the manly chests of divers or swimmers or runners. Or, it seems, models or dancers or many movie stars.

Not that I'm lamenting the days of the full fur rug sported by the likes of Robin Williams or Burt Reynolds (or the fake one worn by Steve Carrell in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin--ouch!!!)--but I've decided I miss seeing a little normal body hair on men. Oh, for the days of Sean Connery and Tom Selleck in their quite modest swim trunks!

And now, having started noticing, I've become a bit obsessive. Does he or doesn't he???? My two most recent Nice Chest Hair awards go to Dominic West in The Hour, and Ewan McGregor in Salmon Fishing in Yemen. (Not that I wouldn't like either one of these guys with or without.)But they are brave about it, these smooth-chested (and smooth-thighed) blokes. Witness Channing Tatum here suffering for his art in preparation for Magic Mike. (Did I mention strippers in the above list of NO HAIR guys?) What about you, dear Reds? Do you prefer your men au natural? And would your fictional heroes wax for a good cause?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I can't discuss this.I can't even think about this. I've NEVER thought about this.  I am closing my eyes. I am closing my ears. La la la la la.

HALLIE EPHRON: I never got what the big deal was about men's or women's chests... well okay, I sort of do. Okay, I get it. But men's chest hair? Don't swimmers get rid of it because it slows them down, or is that a myth? Same reason they don't wear boxers. What I do miss, though I know you didn't ask this Debs, are those halcyon days when women didn't have to shave, period. We pretended we were European.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My first reaction was NO, but then I had to admit that there's a certain amount of manscaping that really improves the, shall we say, quality of my viewing experience. For instance: Nose hair, ear hair and eyebrows appearing anywhere on the face that isn't directly above an eye. Back hair. Ugh. Sorry, gentlemen of Mediterranean descent. I see men walking about on the beaches of Maine and all I can think of is "human shag carpet."

But chest hair? Who cares? Hairy is nice. Smooth is nice. Same for the top of the head. I like a full head of hair just fine, but I also LOVE the sexy bald look. Also beards. (This will not surprise anyone who's met my husband.) The most attractive thing about a man is his self-confidence, not his pelt (or lack thereof.)

DEBS: Hallie, I was never brave enough to go European. And obviously, that cultural trend has reversed itself. And Hank, you're too funny!

For the record, Duncan would never wax--unless it would help him solve a case.

What about you, readers? Are you embracing the smooth-men trend? And our guy readers--would you shave or wax? And would you tell if you did?

(Oh, and just for comparison, here's the latest Bond, Daniel Craig. Notice the difference?)