The Ian Fleming Miscellany (12 page)

Young women in Fleming's books don't wear many clothes but when they do, it's black lace rather than utility knickers and a set of hair curlers. A girl may be literally killed by gold, and of course she is an excuse to display diamonds. There is not much detail here; the reader – usually a man – can supply his own fantasy, but the wrapping is yet another expression of riches and luxury. A female character may be put firmly in her place at the commencement. ‘Be a good girl and ...' It was how Fleming often addressed the women in his own life. They seemed to like it.

He avoided giving readers any clues about real-life trickery that had worked. Ewen Montagu would undoubtedly have put his Operation Mincemeat on the desks of the right people before he published it in 1954, but Ian avoided sensitive material in his fiction. As to the extravagant gadgets, Ian once said that because he had worked in Naval Intelligence, he knew exactly how far he could go. In the real intelligence world, bag drops in parks did take place, and surveillance, and clandestine meetings with agents as well. His art lay in giving nothing away: getting them slightly wrong, either too obvious or too outrageous to be believable in real life. The same applied to gadgetry. Swordsticks could be bought in London shops, miniature cameras really were used, rooms were bugged and commandos did carry knives in their socks.

MI R(C) had been instituted during the war especially to come up with weapons for ‘irregular warfare' – it was known as ‘Churchill's Toyshop' – and the OSS set up a special department for working on this kind of thing. Ian simply took an idea and put knobs on it.

M makes a dismissive show of not being able to understand ‘our currency and bullion reserves and all that'. Gentlemen didn't: it was vulgar to discuss money. At least, so the reader is supposed to assume, though in fact Ian Fleming knew better than to open the traps: either boring the reader or revealing big holes in the plot. James Bond (Eton and Fettes), confronted with the prospect of a lecture on how all this financial stuff works, ‘felt boredom gathering at the corners of the room'. Fleming himself had been a lazy student. If your family owned a bank, there really wasn't much reason to understand how it worked; people were employed to do that sort of thing. Years later, at Ian's memorial service, Amaryllis had organised everything and the choirmaster required payment – 10 per cent of £100. Richard, then chairman of Fleming's, wondered aloud how much that was.

This was no doubt mere affectation, but it wasn't entirely a joke. Not understanding money was loaded with meaning. It signified that filthy lucre was so easily come by, you didn't need to bother about it. Another version of this underlay the inverted snobbery of the writers Anne knew, some of whom were not ashamed to live in comparative squalor, because it signified that they were artists, and an artist's inspiration was somehow sublime. Ian made a fetish of being mercenary over the books because he wanted to make it quite clear to Anne's sneering friends that he had no literary pretensions. In later years, he once walked in on a bunch of them when they were giggling over a particularly purple passage of his – making it sound a lot sillier than it was. He was humiliated. He couldn't win. They could pretend to great art while living in a hovel but had no compulsion about drinking his wine in his smart four-storied stucco terrace near Buckingham Palace while feeling free to despise his work.

And then there was science. He was deeply interested in the outcomes achieved by practical people. He had not personally been educated in that way; he was no Sidney Cotton. In Fleming's social world, people on the whole showed no enthusiasm or much curiosity about science, or engineering for that matter. So James Bond drove some pretty swanky cars but probably couldn't have described the workings of an internal combustion engine. He was ten years younger, roughly, than Ian Fleming but had Fleming's generation's outlook. At Eton, when Fleming was there, Science was all one subject, until you were about 17, when you could also do biology. And even if you intended to become a doctor, you couldn't get into medical school without Latin. It seemed more gentlemanly to specialise in the humanities. This outlook persisted, despite decades of protest that the German Gymnasia taught science much better, and certainly well enough to give German industry a massive advantage before the First World War.

In
Casino Royale
Le Chiffre (‘the total amount'), the villain, was allegedly inspired by Aleister Crowley, the humourless old drug-addict, self-styled wizard and alleged murderer, rumours of whose bizarre rituals thrilled London society in the 1920s. Eve may well have invited him to her parties in Chelsea, for he was quite a pet of London sophisticates at one time. Ian had known him during the war.

Each of Fleming's characters was generally inspired by more than one real person. There are several contenders for James Bond himself, for instance. But the in-jokes were in the names. In all the books he ever wrote, he used the names of characters from his own life. A John Blackwell, a friend of his, was related to the woman who became his lover, and the real Blackwell was unlikely to have had a heroin-addicted sister. A Mr and Mrs Bryce appear as a couple on a train. Ernest Cuneo, the lawyer, is a cabbie called Ernie Cureo. Smithers, who shepherded the SIS families across France in 1940, becomes Colonel Smithers, head of research for the Bank of England. James Bond himself, an American ornithologist, lunched at Goldeneye with his wife early in 1964. And poor Tom Blofeld, member of Boodle's and chairman of the Country Gentleman's Association, had his name used for an evil genius intent on taking over the world.

Patrick Dalzel-Job, one of several influences that contributed to Bond's fictional personality.
The National Archive

Architect Erno Goldfinger, whose name Fleming commandeered for the villain of his 1959 novel.
Washington Post

Fleming came a cropper with Goldfinger. Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect, was not noted for his sense of humour or equanimity of temper. He perceived, in the character given his name, sniping anti-Semitism. He engaged lawyers. They wrote a letter. Fleming retorted that in that case he'd call the character Goldprick and include a note to say why, which was unnecessarily rude. But it all died down, and Goldfinger withdrew, with his costs paid by Fleming, before the case came to court.

Fleming's plots – sub-plots were largely absent – had to involve life or death struggle. Both James Bond and his terrifying antagonist must have everything to play for and sometimes in the course of a real game. Baccarat, bridge and golf featured, and were games that Ian knew well. The big picture was the one that Fleming, who had conjured intrigue throughout a world war, was always aware of. So both parties, whether SMERSH or Goldfinger or British Intelligence, had to have access to shatteringly powerful means of destruction. Fleming knew he was an ignoramus about all this, and he had to stay the right side of science fiction. Whatever he came up with must be able, potentially, to work. So a shark really would have eaten a man, a limpet mine did exist and would blow up a ship, and a single individual who knew what they were doing (such as Bond) really could re-direct a nuclear missile away from a target. Everything must be checked and sources consulted. This was not easily done from a remote village in Jamaica, so the plots were carefully mapped out and researched as far as possible in the months before writing began. His recollections of reading First World War NID case files and his first-hand Second World War experiences seem too to have provided a wealth of ideas and plot inspiration. Documents that came to light in 2008 involving British spy chief William Melville's 1914 investigation of a possible German plot to blow up the Bank of England's gold reserves to bring about economic chaos in Britain may well have sparked a thought in Fleming's mind that led to his Fort Knox
Goldfinger
plot. Indeed, Gustav Steinhauer, Melville's German opposite number and author of the Bank of England plot, bore all the hallmarks of Auric Goldfinger's Teutonic persona. Known as ‘M', Meville was another character, in addition to Admiral Godfrey, who may well have influenced Fleming's thinking in terms of Bond's fictional boss.

Fleming was, without doubt, heavily influenced by real life events that were mostly within the public domain, but occasionally events that were, at the time, beyond the knowledge of the general public. He started in his first book
Casino Royale
as he meant to go on. There were a string of incidents in the book that were all based on fact. For example, the attempt to assassinate James Bond outside the Hotel Splendide had its root in an incident a decade before. SMERSH, the Russian espionage agency he had initially chosen as 007's nemesis, had given two Bulgarian assassins box-camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was red leather and the other blue. SMERSH had told the Bulgarians that the red case contained a powerful high-explosive bomb and the blue one an equally powerful smoke bomb that would allow them both to escape under the cover of the ensuing smoke screen.

One assassin was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. However, the Bulgars decided to play safe and press the button on the blue case first, thus concealing themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact the blue case also contained a powerful explosive device and both assassins were blown to pieces. This concoction was not as far-fetched as it sounded.

In fact this was very similar to the method used in a Russian NKVD attempt to kill the German ambassador to Turkey, the former Chancellor Franz Von Papen in Ankara on 24 February 1942. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they too were blown to pieces while Von Papen escaped with only superficial bruises. Other real life events that influenced Fleming plot lines were the tunnel from West to East Berlin that enabled MI6 to tap the Russian telephone system, the KGB spy Khokhlov and his bullet firing cigarette case and the MI6 diver Buster Crabb, who dived under the Soviet cruiser
Ordzhonikidze
in 1956.

On the other hand, he had no qualms in telling readers that certain events or locations referred to in the books were true or the background to a story accurate when he knew full well they weren't. In
From Russia with Love
, for example, he dramatically began his narrative with an ‘Author's Note' to the reader in which he claimed that SMERSH was a top secret department that actually existed at the time of writing and was a massive Soviet counter-intelligence organisation employing some 40,000 agents in Russia and abroad. He further claimed that SMERSH headquarters was, in that year of 1956, located at No. 13 Stretenka Ulitsa in Moscow and that his description of the building's interior that was to be found in Chapter 4 was ‘faithfully described'. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. SMERSH (a contraction of Smert Shpionnam, meaning ‘death to spies') had in reality only existed for three short years between 1943–46 as a small sub-section of the NKVD. No. 13 Stretenka Ulitsa was an address he had chosen at random and was actually a tsarist-era public apartment building that remained as such until its demolition in 2003. Likewise, the man who Fleming reveals to be its real-life chief, General Nikolai Grubozaboyschikov, was a non-existent figment of his fertile imagination.

He was, however, the first to admit to an honest error. While the proof readers and editors at publishers Jonathan Cape did their best, a certain amount of technical errors managed to evade their eagle eye. Readers in particular, loved to write in to him pointing out, for example, that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express had vacuum and not hydraulic brakes and that you have mousseline sauce and not bearnaise with asparagus. Such mistakes, he told the
Daily Express
, were really nobody's fault except the author's and caused him some degree of embarrassment to see them in print. He consoled himself, however, in the belief that the majority of the public either didn't mind the occasional error or more likely, didn't even notice them.