In the Beginning: Just 2 weeks to go!

James Bond

Today's lesson on the history of James Bond is brought to you by the letters Q, M and the number 007.

The Bond Market

"Bond, James Bond" may sound suave to us now, but when Ian Fleming was dreaming up the name, he thought it was anything but. "I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could think of," he said. "James Bond seemed perfect."

The Book of Job(s)

It was at this that he finally excelled. Among Fleming's tasks was a training exercise that had him swim underwater and attach a mine to a tanker, a plot development that fans of his book Live and Let Die will recognize. He also conducted a number of other risky, Bond-esque activities "“ including some racy affairs with women who were otherwise attached.

After the war, Fleming worked as a manager at a newspaper organization, but his heart was in writing. In 1952 he married a very recently divorced socialite and moved to Jamaica. In his new manse, dubbed Goldeneye after one of his military operations, he found a book called Birds of the West Indies by one James Bond, an ornithologist. (In the film Die Another Day, Bond happens across a copy of the same book in Cuba and poses as, yep, an ornithologist.) With a suitably bland name found, Fleming forged ahead on writing the first of his 12 Bond novels, Casino Royale. The novels weren't a huge hit at first, although President John F. Kennedy did give From Russia With Love a nod in a speech, resulting in a slight uptick in sales. It was only later, when the movie Dr. No came out, that Fleming started to get a reputation as the man with the golden pen.

A Study in Character(s)

Several of Fleming's characters were based on real life people:
"¢ DuringWorldWar II, Fleming was a personal assistant to Admiral John H. Godfrey, who served as the model for "M," the head of MI6.
"¢ Vesper Lynd, the first Bond girl (introduced in the book Casino Royale; you probably know her from the movie of the same name), was partly based on the Polish-born British agent Christine Granville, famous for defending France against the Nazis.
"¢ What about Bond himself? Although Fleming's own louche lifestyle certainly served as a model, several others have also been cited. There's William Stephenson (or as he was
known to his spy friends, "Intrepid"), a high ranking British agent who Fleming himself
referred to as "the real thing;" a colleague, Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job, who joined
Fleming in extremely risky super-secret operations during World War II; and Dusko Popov, a Serbian double agent nicknamed Tricycle who was known for his wealth and playboy tendencies.
"¢ And what about that number? There are several theories on why it's 007 and not, say, 123. The one we like best is that Dr John Dee, a 16th century agent who would have been a sort of predecessor to Bond, used the code to send messages to Queen Elizabeth. The two zeros meant "for your eyes only."