Ian Fleming: A Study of His Life and Writing Advice

“Bond. James Bond.” This introduction is as iconic as the character himself. Double 007 has become one of the most recognizable characters in modern cinema and created a massive franchise. However, before the films came the books, and before the books came a troubled man—the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming. Originally trying out fiction for the first time as an excuse not to think about marriage—his own words—he ended up creating a character that became so popular he transcended the original fourteen pulpy and dated novels. Let’s dive into the life and writing of Ian Fleming to see what we can learn from him.

Fleming’s Life

Ian Fleming was born in 1908 in London, England, and had the life one might expect from someone who created a character surrounded by wealth and extravagance—he grew up surrounded by such things himself. His family was rich and prominent, and Fleming grew up “with every possible advantage”—his father was a Member of Parliament, and his mother was a socialite who held Winston Churchill himself as a close friend, according to this article from Nova Online.

Ian had three brothers, named Peter, Richard and Michael. Peter and Ian went to a boarding school called Dumford in 1915, where the young Ian Fleming began a “lifelong interest in reading, especially action novels and stories of far-off places,” according to this Warfare History Network article by Peter Kros. Only two years later, Ian’s father died—the Fleming family was so well-connected that Winston Churchill wrote a tribute to the man. A few years after that, in 1921, both Peter and Ian went to Eaton, where Peter excelled, and Ian was unhappy, even though he won two awards and excelled at track. A mere five years after that, and he transferred to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, but, similar to his experience at the prestigious Eaton, Ian was dissatisfied there, even though he’d initially set out to “carve out his own destiny” separate from his family, in the words of the Nova article.

He went to a small school in Kitzbühel, Austria, which was more to his liking, as it was finally there that “his education and personal life began to flourish,” as stated by Kros. Fleming used his family connections to get himself hired as an assistant to the editor, Bernard Rickatson-Halt, at the Reuters news service, and he excelled at writing that he got promoted to chase down news stories outside of the press room. He got an assignment to cover a spy trial in the Soviet Union, which sparked his interest in espionage.

During this time working for the Reuters news, Fleming made “extensive contacts in the British intelligence service,” according to Nova Online’s article, which he maintained during his years of working as a banker (1935-39), according to this Brittanica piece. That’s right, the man responsible for popular fiction’s most famous spy used to do work as a spy himself! When he was a banker, the Nova piece goes on to state, he did low-level espionage for Britain but increased his spy activities when he officially joined the British Navy Intelligence Office. There, he was the assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, who was one of Britain’s senior intelligence officials. Fleming was a good match for espionage work, and it also allowed him to “exercise his vivid imagination” when plotting dangerous and elaborate missions—for instance, according to this piece from The New Republic by Scott Bradfield, one of the most striking missions Fleming conceived was called Operation Mincemeat, which involved Naval Intelligence Officers attaching fake documents to a corpse and releasing the corpse into Spanish waters. The Spanish, believing the false information to be true, passed it on to the Germans, which resulted in them leaving Sicily wide open to an invasion of Allied forces.

While this may seem like an outlandish fictional event—and Fleming did get the inspiration from a detective novel called The Milliner’s Hat Mystery by Basil Thomson—Operation Mincemeat saved many lives, and the story of the event even got turned into a film in 2021.

Scott Bradfield writes that Fleming spent the first few decades of his life escaping things—as evidenced by him going from school to school, he also “evaded reality through every means he could find,” such as card games, golf, seducing as many women as possible, scuba-diving, travel and fine food. As such, the moment the war ended, Britain’s atmosphere was so grim that the rich Fleming was desperate to escape it—so he bought a home in Jamaica and moved there to work as a journalist.

According to this piece by Mhairi Graham, Fleming married Lady Anne Charteris in 1952, although they had already known each other for years—they met in 1936, but Ann refused to marry him and married another man who was even richer than Fleming, Viscount Rothermere. Despite this, Fleming and Ann kept on meeting up, and he eventually got her pregnant, so the viscount divorced her. The fact that Ann cheated on the viscount only foreshadowed the disastrous relationship she and Fleming would have together. For they are “one of history’s most dysfunctional couples” who lived a “debauched life [that was] set against a dark background of alcoholism and womanizing.” They could not stop cheating upon one another and hating one another. They soon became known for their “abusive masochistic liaison.”

Fleming’s awful attitude towards and treatment of women started with his own mother, who stopped him from marrying the first woman he fell in love with, and with whom he had a “very, very dysfunctional relationship” with, in the words of Lara Pulver in this eye-opening article by Megan Gibson. She continues to say his relationship with his mother impacted his relationship with all women going forward—as evidenced by his horrible marriage and by his writing. Graham described Fleming’s awful view of women and his poisonous marriage with brutal and uncomfortable accuracy: it was a “melting pot of violence and passion that contributed to the creation of one of literature's most iconic and murderous figures. It is clear that in writing Bond, Fleming wrote himself, or how he wanted to be.”

Fleming’s Books

According to this article from The National World War II Museum by Water Wolf III, when the war ended, Fleming told his close friends he wanted to write a spy novel based on and inspired by his experiences in the war. He wrote Casino Royale in only two months at his home in Jamaica, and he used his visit to Portugal in 1941 as a foundation for the story where he’d seen some Germans gambling. He guessed they were Abwehr officers and “daydreamed about bankrupting them in a game of Chemin de Fer.” Furthermore, in his own words, he wrote the novel to “take my mind of the shock at getting married at the age of forty-three,” and because his wife suggested he do something to take his mind off the pressure their marriage had caused. And so it was these two elements that drove Fleming to create the first James Bond novel, beginning the literary and, later, filmic, life of one of the most iconic characters in pop culture.

For many people, Casino Royale is the first title that springs to mind when they think of James Bond. While it was the first novel Fleming wrote about the character, it was the twenty-first movie in the series, and it was made a whooping fifty-three years after the book was first released. While the James Bond films of today are very well known for their daring feats and high-tech gadgets, you might not know that the films actually stray pretty far from the books they’re based on. This piece by Ross Browne compares the book to the film and finds many striking differences: for instance, the first image that comes to mind for many people when they think of Bond is as an indestructible action hero—but the second act of Casino Royale lingers on Bond in the “unfamiliar role of the helpless victim” as he gets tortured and act three begins with Bond staying in the hospital for four days with nothing to do except to think about the love interest for this story, a woman named Vesper. Act three “has little in the way of conventional action and focuses more on matters of the heart than intrigue, spycraft, and so forth.” In fact, Browne describes the entire book as a somewhat surprising origin story for the spy, as it’s “without a book-spanning mission, a somewhat disjointed story structure, no gadgets, no car chases, and a dearth of tropes from the movies.”

What this review suspiciously does not mention, however, is Bond’s view of women. Just like the man who invented James Bond, it’s impossible to escape the misogyny intertwined with the character and the series itself—it’s commonly just as famous for its long line of love interests as its spy work. While this blog from Supposedly Fun does write it’s a surprisingly solid introduction to the world of James Bond, the author also writes that the misogyny makes it outdated as well as uncomfortable to read. At one point in the book, Bond thinks having intercourse with Vesper would have “the tang of rape,” which is atrocious and disgusting on so many levels, and the book also states Vesper is prone to silly mistakes because she is a woman, and Bond thinks women should not be spies because it’d be too close to babysitting. Wow.  

Clementine Ford states in this article written by Christine Lehnen that, “Consent is an absent concept in Bond's world, but somehow audiences, and women in particular, are expected to embrace this as part of his cultural appeal. Are we to have a Bond who rails against the scourge of white supremacy, yet somehow overlooks the impact misogyny has on women?" She questions why Bond’s dehumanization of women is not considered an undesirable character trait but rather a trait that is central to him.

Fleming’s Legacy

While the movies have been overall more influential and stayed in the popular consciousness longer, the legacy that the books left behind is tainted with discomfort due to how the misogyny is received by a modern audience. What Fleming has to say about women—and gay people, people of color and people from Asia, as well—is inexcusable and utterly disgusting. Similar to the efforts put forth to censor Roald Dahl’s unpleasant and racist descriptions, the same is being applied to Fleming’s work in an effort to make the books more palatable. However, removing a few words from Dahl’s book is the easier task by far—here, the misogynistic nature of the stories are so interwoven with the character that separating them is impossible.

Fleming’s legacy is one that needs sanitization before it can get looked at without wincing in disgust. The Brittanica page on Fleming states that his books were “roundly criticized by many highbrow critics and novelists,” and that “feminists have long objected to Bond’s chauvinistic ways.”

While the film franchise is a staple of modern pop culture—they have their own fair share of treating women characters poorly or, in some cases, not even giving them names, as detailed in this article by Clementine Ford—their lack of Bond’s internal dialogue spares viewers the very worst: in the books, some aspects of Bond’s lifestyle are literally so intertwined with misogyny they cannot be separated—he compares the luck of gambling to a woman that can either be “wooed softly or brutally ravaged,” which is perhaps the most nauseating statement of them all.

Fleming was in a marriage he hated, and the hatred from the wife trapped them in a back-and-forth of endless cheating—he also was jealous of his wife’s social life, which made him feel isolated—and as such, Brigit Katz writes, Bond served “as an outlet” for Fleming’s libido and imagination.

According to Fleming’s Brittanica page, the Bond stories only grew in popularity—despite the landslide of criticism or perhaps because of it. Bond’s trademark “007” has become “one of the most successful in merchandising history,” with products such as toys, games and toiletries based around the spy and his adventures. Today the film series has grossed a reported one billion dollars, and the book series was even continued after Fleming’s death in 1964, with additional books by authors such as Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd. Surprisingly, there’s even a series of Bond books for young readers called Young Bond, as well as spin-off book series about other characters such as 2005’s The Moneypenny Diaries.  

Fleming’s Writing Method

While Fleming’s legacy and the books themselves are questionable by today’s standards, the methods he used to write those books can be used to achieve success in your own writing. On a purely technical level, Water Wolfe III argues in his article that Fleming’s books were worth reading for the writing style alone.

Fleming’s writing style is economic and fast; this style of writing makes the pages fly by. His economy with words comes from the time he spent being a journalist, which served him well when it came to writing fiction. He was “a master of short, punchy sentences and wildly evocative adjectives,” which is—in the opinion of Roland Hulme—why the James Bond books are so “eminently quotable:” because Fleming could convey more with a few words than others could say in a paragraph. Fleming used “the fastidious adjectives and metaphors” to reflect Bond’s point of view, which is a great method you can use in your own work to get inside a character’s head. Consider how they would view another character or object and then go one step further; rather than simply describing it, ask yourself what specific words your character would use. Then, you’ll be able to truly make your characters burst with life.

Fleming also eliminated all distractions when he wrote. While that seems like a dismissively simple piece of writing advice—and although it’s gained significance due to modern distractions compared to Fleming’s time—it bears repeating for the result it can give you. In this examination of Fleming’s writing methods, Kenneth Lange states that when you write in an environment with zero distractions, you “enter a flow mode” where your productivity and creativity are increased. So, turn off your phone and try writing in a distraction-free room, get thoroughly into your character’s heads by using words that match their personality and views, and you could end up writing something you’ll be proud of.