Ethan Trex
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Ian Fleming
by Ethan Trex - July 30, 2010 - 3:00 PM

Ian Fleming is best known for his terrific series of twelve novels and two short story collections detailing the adventures of British spy James Bond, and he also wrote the children’s classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Let’s take a look at five things you might not know about the author.

1. He Had a Lot in Common with Bond

Fleming was no Double-0 agent, but he wasn’t a total slouch, either. During World War II he worked as an assistant to the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Intelligence, and he eventually rose to the rank of Commander, just like Bond.

Fleming wasn’t just working in back rooms, though. He hatched a plan for a complex mission called Operation Ruthless that was aimed at capturing a German naval Enigma code machine. The basic gist of Fleming’s plan was this: the Royal Air Force would capture a German bomber, staff it with a German-speaking British crew, and stage a crash in the English Channel. When the Nazi rescue boat arrived, the “German” flight team would kill the ship’s crew and sail it back to England.

Fleming actually took a crew to Dover to wait for an opportunity to try this plan in 1940, but the operation fell through when logistical concerns over finding the right ship to commandeer and floating a stolen German bomber in the channel proved too complicated.

2. JFK Was a Fan

Fleming’s Bond novels weren’t initially big movers in American bookstores, but that quickly changed in March of 1961. Life magazine asked President John F. Kennedy to list his 10 favorite books of all time, and From Russia With Love made the cut. Suddenly, Fleming became a literary star on this side of the pond, too, and by that summer production began on the first Bond film, Dr. No.

At that point, Fleming and Kennedy were already somewhat chummy. The spy author and the political star had met at a dinner party in 1960, and Kennedy asked Fleming for advice on how to discredit and topple Fidel Castro.

3. He Didn’t Like Sean Connery at First

When the Bond novels made their leap to the silver screen in the early Sixties, Fleming helped with the casting of his signature character. The part was originally given to a male model who couldn’t handle the acting part of the job, and Fleming and the producers would eventually reject bigger stars like David Niven and Cary Grant.

As everyone knows, the part went to Sean Connery, much to Fleming’s dismay. Fleming saw an early screening of Dr. No and allegedly called the film “simply dreadful.” Gradually, though, he began to appreciate the way Connery portrayed Bond so much that he decided to give Bond some Scottish heritage. In the 1963 novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming delved into Bond’s father’s Scottish ancestry as a kind of nod to Connery. Bond’s mother, on the other hand, was Swiss.

4. He Was No Fan of New York City

In 1959 and 1960, Fleming made two trips around the world for the London Sunday Times and turned his travels into a series of essays on various international cities. In 1963, these essays were collected into the book Thrilling Cities, which is now out of print but worth picking up if you spot a copy and like reading about old restaurants and hotels.

There was only one problem with the book: publishers were afraid to release an American version because Fleming’s essay on New York was downright scathing. While he had nice things to say about Chicago, Las Vegas, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, Fleming really gave it to New York with both barrels; the first sentence of the essay is, “I enjoyed myself least of all in New York.” One of the subsections of the piece was pulled from an essay called “City Without a Soul.” Fleming blasted New Yorkers for being impolite, for greasing headwaiters’ palms, for loving scandals, and for being depressing.

In order to get the book published in the States, Fleming knew he would need to soften his view on New York. Rather than revising the essay, he called in Bond. Fleming added the short story “Bond in New York” in which the famous spy goes to his favorite shops and restaurants instead of doing any actual spying, and publishers agreed to release Thrilling Cities in the American market.

5. He May Have Had Some Posthumous Help

Fleming died of a heart attack in 1964, but his final Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, didn’t hit bookstores until 1965. Almost immediately, readers began to speculate that someone other than Fleming himself might have completed an unfinished manuscript the author left behind. The novel lacks the intricate detail that characterizes most of Fleming’s Bond works, and it’s a bit darker and more ominous in tone.

Critics wondered if the comic novelist Kingsley Amis, a great fan of Fleming’s who had published two works on Bond already, might have taken the reins and completed what Fleming left behind at his death. Although Amis denied these claims – as did many of Fleming’s biographers – they persisted for years. (In 1968 Amis did write the first official Bond novel by anyone other than Fleming, the entertaining Colonel Sun, which he published under the pseudonym Robert Markham.)

Fleming’s editor William Plomer similarly insisted that Fleming had completed the manuscript before his death. It’s also worth noting that Fleming had made wild stylistic departures earlier in the series; Bond really only appeared as a supporting character in The Spy Who Loved Me. Still, the true authorship of The Man with the Golden Gun remains somewhat controversial.

If there’s someone you’d like to see profiled in a future edition of ’5 Things You Didn’t Know About…,’ leave us a comment. You can read the previous installments here.

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Comments (18)

  1. I was always under the impression that Cary Grant turned down the role of Bond because he thought he was too old. (Him doing the first one would have been a one-shot deal).

    posted by Tim S. on 7-30-2010 at 4:09 pm

  2. And I believe that Niven did in fact play Bond, in the first production of Casino Royale. That said, by the time Dr. No rolled around, Connery had the part

    posted by tkrausse on 7-30-2010 at 4:30 pm

  3. So, did “Colonel Sun” become a movie (with the name changed)?

    posted by bubba on 7-30-2010 at 4:42 pm

  4. No, Colonel Sun never was made into a movie.

    posted by James St. John Smythe on 7-30-2010 at 4:54 pm

  5. TK, the film with Niven as Bond wasn’t the first production of “Casino Royale” — that was a TV production with American Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond. The movie came much later, after Fleming’s death (and several Connery films).

    Bubba, there were early rumors that the film that came to be “Die Another Day” would be a “Colonel Sun” adaptation, but there’s nothing of it in the finished product. At this point, it’s extremely unlikely that any post-Fleming novels will ever be adapted for the film series.

    posted by Kevin on 7-30-2010 at 5:06 pm

  6. I stand corrected. Thank you for the clarification

    posted by tkrausse on 7-30-2010 at 5:12 pm

  7. Incidentally, “Die Another Day” ended up including a large number of elements from Fleming’s “Moonraker” as the film with that title was absolutely nothing like Fleming’s novel. Also, the film “Moonraker” was ridiculous and terrible…

    posted by Tim on 7-30-2010 at 8:31 pm

  8. The movie “Moonraker” could as easily have been titled “Star Wars was rather successful, and we have a contract to make a Bond movie, oh, and there’s that cool-looking Space Shuttle thingy the Americans are working on — let’s dredge up an old Bond baddie who we can get cheap and throw something together.”

    Regarding the early TV version of “Casino Royale”, it’s also noteworthy because the eponymous villain is played by none other than Peter Lorre. (It wasn’t Lorre’s first spy movie, either. His first English-speaking role was in the original “Man Who Knew Too Much”.)

    posted by Calli Arcale on 7-30-2010 at 10:37 pm

  9. Originally the role for Dr. No was to go to Roger Moore, but he was busy with The Saint on television. The same thing happened to Pierce Brosnan with Remington Steele, so Timothy Dalton got the role instead.

    Interesting how both became Bond in later years anyway.

    I also liked how the nod to Connery’s Scottish heritage was done in OHMSS when that was the first Bond movie without Connery!

    posted by Wayne on 7-31-2010 at 10:07 am

  10. Ian Fleming’s literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, has previously confirmed that Kingsley Amis did indeed complete the TMWTGG manuscript. He’s never said to what extent, but if you look at the novel’s style and word choice, it doesn’t sound much like Fleming at all. The best guess is that all that Fleming left behind was an outline and some notes. It’s rather ironic, because most Bond fans don’t think much of the novel, but absolutely love Amis’ whole-cloth Colonel Sun — still regarded as the best post-Fleming 007 adventure.

    posted by Paul on 7-31-2010 at 11:22 am

  11. Fleming was also quite anti-Semetic.
    Which may account for his dislike of NYC.

    He also “borrowed” much of the Bond character from Doc Savage, the pulp superhero (the original superhero) published from 1933-1949. It’s widely thought that “Dr. No” was nearly a rewrite of the Doc Savage novel “The Fantastic Island.”

    posted by Monk Mayfair on 7-31-2010 at 6:02 pm

  12. This has been very entertaining. I learned a lot from the comments, posted… Thanks for a nice visit on the Net…

    posted by Janeyre on 7-31-2010 at 9:18 pm

  13. A nother great literary spy that was also written buy a spy was Doctor Stephen Maturin from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series.
    Patrick O’Brian worked as a British spy during WW2.

    posted by Ralph E. on 8-1-2010 at 10:03 am

  14. Both Sean and Roger were excellent Bonds but that is at far as it went. I have seen all the movies. The last two, “the hairy marshmello(actor)” and the Macho Muscular No Class(actor) were a total departure from the first two. Bonds, have to be classy and athletic/macho for sure.

    posted by Dave Wood on 8-1-2010 at 3:21 pm

  15. If you watch Goldfinger closely you can see the first successful KFC on 119th street & 7th avenue in Miami. The others around the country were not big hits. I grew up 5 blocks from there.
    The food there then was unbelievable….Al-

    posted by Alfred Herman Schrader on 8-1-2010 at 3:42 pm

  16. Actually, Fleming based Bond off of a Canadian born spymaster Sir William Stephenson, also known only as “Intrepid”.

    posted by Cori on 8-2-2010 at 3:37 am

  17. Something about Moonraker…
    I use to read MAD magazine when I was younger. At then end of MAD’s version of “The spy who loved me”. They said the next Bond movie was “For Fish Eyes Only” (really called “For Your Eyes Only”).

    So, they obvioulsy delayed this Bond movie for Moonraker to capitalize on the success of star Wars. I really wished they hadn’t bothered. Moonraker was really bad, even for a 60′s scifi.

    posted by Morris on 8-2-2010 at 4:55 pm

  18. I had heard an urban legend that Ian Fleming’s will stated that any Bond films made after his death could use the titles of his novels, but not the plot lines. That probably got started because movies like “Moonraker” had no relation to their namesake books, but I wonder if anyone else had heard that…

    posted by Brian on 8-27-2010 at 1:54 pm

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