James Bond (literary character)

• 1. Introduction

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  James Bond, Commander, Royal Naval Reserve, code number 007, was born on the page on the 17th of February 1952. That morning, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica, and typed out 2,000 words. He was trying to distract himself from his forthcoming wedding to his pregnant girlfriend, Ann Charteris. The result, finished in just over a month, was Casino Royale. Fleming called it his "dreadful oafish opus". An ex-girlfriend told him not to publish it at all, and if he did, to use another name. He ignored the advice. What followed was a character who would outlast his creator, attract seven actors in cinema alone, and spawn novels written by authors ranging from Kingsley Amis to Anthony Horowitz. But who was Bond, really? Where did his name come from, his face, his vices, his limits? And what happens to a character when the person who invented him is gone?

• 2. The Man Behind the Agent

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  Fleming admitted that Bond "was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war". His brother Peter, whom Fleming described as someone he worshipped, had conducted behind-the-lines operations in Norway and Greece. Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, a skiing spy Fleming encountered in Kitzbuhel in the 1930s, contributed something. So did Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with distinction in 30 AU, and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale, the MI6 station head in Paris who wore cuff-links and handmade suits and was chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce. Sir Fitzroy Maclean's wartime work behind enemy lines in the Balkans was another possible ingredient, as was MI6 double agent Dusan Popov. A 2016 BBC Radio 4 documentary raised a further possibility: that author Phyllis Bottome, who was a mentor to Fleming, had provided a model through her 1946 novel The Lifeline, whose protagonist Mark Chalmers shares distinct similarities with Bond. Much of Fleming's own daily routine while working at The Sunday Times was woven directly into the Bond stories. The code number 007 was not arbitrary: Fleming assigned it in reference to British naval intelligence's breaking of a German diplomatic code in the First World War. The specific document cracked was the Zimmermann Telegram, coded 0075, one of the factors that led to the United States entering that war.

• 3. A Name Borrowed from a Birdwatcher

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  Dr James Bond, an expert on Caribbean birds based at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, had no idea his name would attach itself to the world's most famous spy. He was the author of Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936. Fleming, who was himself a keen birdwatcher, owned a copy of that guide. He explained to the ornithologist's wife that "It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born." In an interview published in The New Yorker on the 21st of April 1962, Fleming was more blunt: "I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, James Bond is the dullest name I ever heard." He wanted exotic things to happen around a neutral, anonymous figure. After meeting the ornithologist and his wife in person, Fleming described them as "a charming couple who are amused by the whole joke." A separate claim, raised in 2018, came from the family of James Charles Bond, who had served under Fleming in the Special Operations Executive, and who argued the name might trace to him instead.

• 4. The Body and Its Habits

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  In From Russia, with Love, Bond's physical description is consistent: slim build, 1.83 metres tall, 76 kilograms, blue-grey eyes, a 3-inch-long vertical scar on his right cheek, and short black hair with a comma resting on his forehead. Two characters in separate novels observe that he looks like Hoagy Carmichael, the composer, singer and actor. Vesper Lynd puts it precisely in Casino Royale: "Bond reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless." The cigarettes were custom-made by Morland of Grosvenor Street, blending Balkan and Turkish tobacco with a higher nicotine content than normal. Bond carried fifty of them in a wide gunmetal case. The three gold bands on the filter mirrored Fleming's own naval Commander's rank; Fleming had been buying from Morland since the 1930s. Bond's average intake was sixty cigarettes a day, though he cut back to around twenty-five after a stay at a health farm during the events of Thunderball. Fleming himself smoked up to eighty a day. During a single novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond consumes forty-six drinks, catalogued in precise detail: Pouilly-Fuisse, Riquewihr and Marsala wines, Taittinger and Krug champagnes, three bourbon and waters, half a pint of I.W. Harper bourbon, four vodka and tonics, three double vodka martinis, a flask of Enzian schnapps, and four steins of German beer, among others. His alcohol intake, the novels note, does not seem to affect his performance.

• 5. The Character's Moral Grain

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  Fleming said in a 1964 Playboy interview that he did not consider Bond particularly evil or good: "I don't think that he is necessarily a good guy or a bad guy. Who is? He's got his vices and very few perceptible virtues except patriotism and courage, which are probably not virtues anyway." The source material shows a character who is more complicated than his reputation suggests. In "The Living Daylights", Bond deliberately misses a target when he realizes the sniper he has been sent to kill is not a professional, but simply a young female cello player. He settles the decision by thinking to himself: "It wasn't murder. Pretty near it, though." Goldfinger opens with Bond working through the experience of killing a Mexican assassin days before the novel begins, turning the act over philosophically rather than dismissing it. At the same time, Fleming embedded his own prejudices throughout the novels. Throughout the books, Bond expresses racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes. Journalist Yuri Zhukov wrote about Bond's values in the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda in 1965. Fleming acknowledged he was a product of a particular era: "James Bond is a healthy, violent, noncerebral man in his middle-thirties, and a creature of his era." Academic Jeremy Black has argued Bond is a complex character even while serving as a vehicle for Fleming's biases.

• 6. The Gun, the Car, the Craft

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  Geoffrey Boothroyd, a Bond enthusiast and gun expert, wrote to Fleming to criticize the choice of a .25 ACP Beretta automatic pistol for Bond. He suggested a Walther PPK 7.65mm instead. Fleming used the suggestion in Dr. No, pairing the new weapon with a Berns-Martin triple draw shoulder holster as Boothroyd had advised. As thanks, the Secret Service Armourer who gives Bond his gun in the novel was named Major Boothroyd. Kingsley Amis, writing in The James Bond Dossier, noted that Bond is the best shot in the Secret Service, but is still beaten by the instructor, a realistic touch. Amis identified Bond as very good at skiing, hand-to-hand combat, underwater swimming and golf, but beatable by others in each. Over the fourteen Fleming books, Bond owns three cars, all Bentleys. For the first three novels, he drives a supercharged 1930 Bentley 4.5 Litre, painted battleship grey, bought in 1933. He wrecks it in May 1954 during the events of Moonraker, after which he purchases a Bentley Mark VI drophead coupe using winnings from Hugo Drax at Blades. In 1957, Fleming wrote to Rolls-Royce Chairman Whitney Straight asking for research help on a new car. Straight directed him to chassis number BC63LC, which had been delivered in May 1954 to a Mr Silva, and which likely inspired the car that eventually appeared in Thunderball.

• 7. The Writers Who Carried Bond Forward

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  John Gardner was approached by the Fleming estate in 1981 and, despite nearly declining, went on to write fourteen original Bond novels and two film novelizations, from Licence Renewed in 1981 to COLD in 1996. He brought Bond into the 1980s, gave him grey temples, switched him to low-tar cigarettes, and placed him in a Saab 900 Turbo before eventually returning him to a Bentley Mulsanne Turbo. Ill health ended Gardner's run in 1996. Raymond Benson, the first American to write Bond officially, took over that year and published six novels, three novelizations and three short stories before moving on in 2002. He changed Bond's gun back to the Walther PPK and put him behind the wheel of a Jaguar XK8. In a 1998 interview Benson described his Bond as "not a nice guy. Bond is a killer... He is an anti-hero." Kingsley Amis had written the first continuation novel in 1967, offered £10,000 by Glidrose Productions; he published it under the pen name Robert Markham as Colonel Sun in 1968. Sebastian Faulks was commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications for a novel released on the 28th of May 2008, the hundredth anniversary of Fleming's birth, titled Devil May Care. Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, released on the 26th of May 2011, restarted Bond's chronology entirely, stating the character was born in 1980. Anthony Horowitz's third Bond novel, With a Mind to Kill, published in 2022, ends with Bond deciding to leave the Secret Service, jaded enough that when he might be in a sniper's crosshairs, he expresses no concern about his own fate.