Movies have made Bond a global brand, but the books came first. Ian Fleming expert Henry Chancellor gives the low-down on the entire canon…

“ON FEBRUARY 17, 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his desk at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, and gazed out at the unbroken Caribbean Sea. He was a 43-year-old journalist, and he was trying hard to take his mind off his imminent wedding. Putting a fresh sheet of paper in the battered Royal portable in front of him, using six fingers he typed out a sentence. He crossed it out and tried again. Discarding that too, he finally came up with “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning”.

Suddenly he was off, writing in a fast, uninhibited manner and by lunch he had already typed 2,000 words. These were pulled straight from his memory and imagination, he had no notes, no plan of where he was going. Fleming claimed he had even found the name of his hero by chance: A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, by a certain James Bond, was sitting on his bookshelf.

Every morning for a month he stuck to this iron regime, until he hammered out the final bitter sentence: “The bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale, his first novel, was finished, and the phenomenon of James Bond was born…”

James Bond: The Man and His World

The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s Creation

By

Henry Chancellor

Highly Recommended guide to the books by Fleming…