Raymond Chandler Meets Ian Fleming

Richard Metzger's DangerousMinds.net has a good story on one of the greatest literary mashup interviews in radio history:

Philip Marlowe and James Bond are two of the greatest fictional characters of the 20th century, and this is what happened when their authors, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming met for a BBC radio program in July 1958.

Fleming and Chandler talk about protagonists James Bond and Philip Marlowe in this conversation between two masters of their genre. They discuss heroes and villains, the relationship between author and character and the differences between the English and American thriller. Fleming contrasts the domestic “tea and muffins” school of detective story with the American private eye tradition and Chandler guides Fleming through the modus operandi of a mafia hit while marvelling at the speed with which his fellow author turns out the latest Bond adventure...

When Raymond Chandler met Ian Fleming
2.02.2011
Paul Gallagher
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/when_raymond_chandler_met_ian_fleming

Lady Gaga: Should she do the next James Bond theme song?

http://music-mix.ew.com/2010/03/31/lady-gaga-james-bond/

Mar 31, 2010
Lady Gaga: Should she do the next James Bond theme song?
Simon Vozick-Levinson

Could Lady Gaga sing the next James Bond movie’s theme song? Uh, maybe. According to a report in the Sun that seems even sketchier than the U.K. tabloid’s usual standard, she’s been asked. The paper’s evidence for this assertion appears to be that Gaga’s name sounds like a Bond girl’s (does it really, though?), and that “a source” (anonymous, naturally) says she’d be “perfect on every level.”

We’ve reached out to Gaga’s reps to see if there’s any truth to this story. In the meantime: Would she be perfect on every level? I can see Gaga’s flair for the dramatic really working in a Bond theme. Her idol, Madonna, did an excellent job with 2002’s “Die Another Day.” Then again, I’m the guy who liked Jack White and Alicia Keys’ much-maligned Quantum of Solace song in 2008, so I might not be the best judge.

A typical SEAL? Think 007, not Rambo

http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/01/29/2188823.aspx

A typical SEAL? Think 007, not Rambo
Friday, January 29, 2010
Chris Jansing, NBC News Correspondent

CORONADO, Calif. -- The world looks very different from forty feet up, hanging onto a rope wall. My advice? Don’t look down.

A lot of phenomenally fit people, including world-famous athletes and Olympians, have frozen at the top of the wall, which is part of the legendary obstacle course on the Navy SEAL base here in Coronado. Who knew that vertigo routinely kicks in at forty feet withoamut a safety net?

SEALs have a reputation as the fittest and most fearless of the military’s special forces. Their legend grew even more after SEAL sharpshooters -- firing from a heaving ship at dusk -- killed three Somali pirates and freed Captain Richard Phillips after his ship had been hijacked in the Indian Ocean last year.

When I traveled to Coronado the day after the operation against the pirates, the SEALs’ reactions were consistently matter-of-fact. “It’s what we’re trained to do,” was a typical response.

Video: From high-tech weapons and underwater demolition to hand-to-hand combat and parachuting into war zones, NBC’s Chris Jansing takes a look at the making of a Navy SEAL.

And that’s what started my nine-month quest to find out what makes these guys tick.

The grueling physical challenges of SEAL training -- while fascinating to watch as long as you’re not doing it -- didn’t surprise. A couple of things did. One was the amount of mental challenges thrown at the SEAL candidates every day. As one told me, “They tell us from day one that it’s 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. And you don’t always believe that, but being here now, I’d say that’s definitely the truth.”

‘They’re all studs’

An instructor put it another way: “They’re all studs,” he said of the 18-to-28-year-old men who report for training. But often it’s the super-studs who are the first to drop out.

And that leads to the second surprise. You think SEALs look like Rambo? They don’t -- think more along the lines of Daniel Craig’s James Bond. The average size of a SEAL is probably 5ft.-10, 175 pounds.

The Navy commissioned Gallup to look at almost 8,000 attempts to get through the key SEAL training, known as BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL). It turned up very interesting findings about who’s most likely to succeed. The sweet spot? Twenty-two to 25-year-olds, college educated, and NOT from glamour sports (football, basketball and baseball players don’t do any better than non-athletes).

Who does? Water polo players are number one. Triathletes, lacrosse players, boxers, rugby players, swimmers and wrestlers, in that order, also fit the bill. Endurance sports are great predictors of success: mountain biking, climbing and rappelling, skiing and snowboarding. The study has helped the Navy re-make recruiting.

The man behind many of the SEALs’ recruiting innovations, Captain Duncan Smith, also has been looking to a totally new group: young men who probably never considered a military career. High on the Navy’s list are Arab-Americans and those whose families hail from such countries as the Ukraine or Kenya. They’re looking for young men with cultural backgrounds and language skills that will help them blend in wherever SEALs operate. The challenge? Finding an incredibly fit, intelligent, fearless 23-year-old American who also happens to speaks Swahili.

World hotspots

The SEALs I met can’t seem to get enough of being SEALs. They’re patriots, yes, but as one told me, most of all they love to be where the action is. And Iraq and Afghanistan and other dangerous hotspots around the globe are their playing fields.

A Master Chief -- that’s the highest rank for an enlisted SEAL -- put it this way: “What is it like? It’s the best thing in the world. It’s life on steroids. Everything's fast. Everything's exaggerated. … Everything is just extreme with us. That's what it's like. And I’m saying it's a good thing.”

Dean Martin as Matt Helm

http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php/site/comments/dean_martin_as_matt_helm/

Dean Martin as Matt Helm
09.25.2009
Richard Metzger

When I was a little boy, I used to love the Matt Helm films. Of all the sub-Bond spy movie imitators of the Sixties, I liked the Matt Helm series the most. They were flashy, colorful, cartoony and simple enough for a five-year old to understand. That’s how old I was when I discovered them. I thought Dean Martin was Matt Helm, agent of I.C.E. (Intelligence and Counter Espionage), first, and a singer second. “Matt Helm sings, too?” was kinda where my kid’s brain took it, it was even more confusing for me when “Matt” would listen to Dino’s records in the films.

The Matt Helm movies were fairly frequent “Movie of the Week” fare on network TV in the early Seventies. I’d watch them over and over again. I even read some of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels which you could always find at garage sales for a dime. They were much more serious than the Matt Helm films’ decidedly light-hearted approach.

Dean Martin, as he always did in nearly all his movies, played a fictionalized version of himself—see Kiss Me, Stupid for the best example— but in this case he was a jovial charming rogue of an alcoholic playboy super spy and not a jovial, charming rogue of an alcoholic playboy cowboy or a nightclub singer or airplane pilot, etc, etc. He was Dean Martin in James Bond drag, basically. And it worked. The Matt Helm films were some of the top grossing films of the Sixties. Even if they do seem dated and somewhat slow moving now, they were really popular in their day.

The ladies of the Matt Helm films were truly impressive, let’s not forget about them. Some of the finest grade-A Sixties pulchritude on the planet—Ann Margaret, Stella Stevens, Cyd Charisse (who was a very va va voomish 45-year old when she made The Silencers), Sharon Tate, Tina Louise, Elke Sommer (how I adored her!) and Nancy Kwan (ditto!)—were all on Dean’s list. You could certainly make the case that the Helm films rivaled the Bond films as eye candy for the male members of the audience. The ladies had Dino to look at, natch.

It’s interesting to note that although the Matt Helm series obviously grew out of a desire to copy the success of the Bond films with a home-grown Hollywood version, the Bond franchise took on a decidedly Matt Helm-esque flavor during the Roger Moore years.

There’s been a rumor for some time that Steven Spielberg wants to revive the series. I kinda hope that doesn’t happen. What’s the point after Austin Powers?

Clive Owen's 'International' Appeal

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/12/AR2009021200874.html

Clive Owen's 'International' Appeal
Friday, February 13, 2009; WE31

If "The International" were an article of clothing, it would be a steel-gray cashmere sweater. If it were a place, it would be the first-class lounge of a major metropolitan airport. If it were weather, it would be a wintry mix of drizzle with the occasional flurry.

And if this sleek, stylish thriller were a person, well, it would be Clive Owen, who happens to carry "The International" on his strong and handsome shoulders with the unflappable cool that still makes some of us rue the day he wasn't cast as James Bond. Owen plays Interpol agent Lou Salinger, a gruff, obsessed loner who for years has been on the trail of a corrupt bank (based on the real-life Bank of Credit and Commerce International). Now he's working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, specifically a comely assistant D.A. named Ella Whitman, played in an unobjectionable if undistinguished performance by Naomi Watts.

Directed by Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") with sober forthrightness, "The International" is in many ways a throwback to the monochrome urban thrillers of the 1970s, with the added and topical twist of having a diabolical financial institution at its center. Garbled at times (I'm still confused by a scene at a flower stand in Milan), the movie still hums along with attractive, smooth efficiency. The compulsively watchable Owen makes for an ideal leading man of both action and angst. The film's eye-popping set piece, a shootout at the Guggenheim Museum, is an extravagantly choreographed valentine to philistines everywhere.

-- Ann Hornaday

The International R, 116 minutes Contains violence and profanity. Area theaters.

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/rip-patrick-mcg.html

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's TV Visionary
By Scott Thill
January 14, 2009
Celebrity, Sci-Fi, Television

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" Patrick McGoohan's character Number Six shouted at the panoptic eye in the sky at the beginning of every episode of the revolutionary '60s sci-fi TV series The Prisoner. And although the character would come to dominate McGoohan's life and even chase him out of London following the series' controversial 1968 finale, "Fall Out," McGoohan is a prisoner no longer.

The actor died Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 80, a still-underrated legend whose influence will no doubt grow larger as this still-new millennium unfurls.

A cosmopolitan iconoclast in an entertainment world still teeming with conformists, McGoohan was known for both his brawn and brains, a rare combination. Born in Queens, New York, in 1928, his family soon moved to Ireland and eventually England, where McGoohan made his name.

He excelled in boxing and math at Ratcliffe College, and worked a variety of odd jobs before landing a gig as a stagehand at Sheffield Repertory Theatre, where he not only kick-started a brilliant stage career but also met the love of his life, actress Joan Drummond. According to popular lore, McGoohan continued to write her love letters even as old age beckoned, and remained loyal to his family until his final days.

It was perhaps that utterly romantic commitment, along with the fact that he first studied to become a Roman Catholic priest, that caused McGoohan to eschew violence and promiscuity once he became one of the most popular actors in England, after his first major series Danger Man (also known as Secret Agent Man in the United States) landed in 1960.

Unlike the brusque heavies he played in films like 1957's Hell Drivers or plays like Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew or Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed, Danger Man's John Drake was the ultimate cool customer, a globe-hopping fixer for NATO who nearly always solved major geopolitical tangles with brainy stratagems rather than sex or violence. McGoohan's resolute morality would eventually pave the way for others to become stars: He passed up both the roles of James Bond and The Saint's Simon Templar, opening doors for Roger Moore.

When Danger Man was resuscitated as an hour-long thriller in 1964, McGoohan flexed his muscle further, demanding more room to act, sharper plots and more friction with his superiors, which set the stage for the intelligence showdowns that would serve as the thematic center of every Prisoner episode.

He also became one of the highest-paid actors in England, which he parlayed into roles in spooky Disney films like Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and The Three Lives of Thomasina. Along the way, he impressed nearly without fail. Welles called his acting "intimidating;" billionaire Howard Hughes obsessively watched Ice Station Zebra, a nuclear thriller in which McGoohan appeared alongside Rock Hudson, Jim Brown and more; Secret Agent Man's eponymous musical theme, performed by Johnny Rivers, became a pop hit. He could do no wrong.

That is, until the controversial 1968 finale of The Prisoner, which — like the later cliffhangers of similar envelope-pushing programs like David Lynch's Twin Peaks or J.J. Abrams Lost — confounded conventional expectation and stoked a viewer outrage that McGoohan admits led him to leave London for Los Angeles for good. (For an extended analysis of Danger Man and The Prisoner's cultural influence, read Wired.com's feature, eerily published hours before McGoohan passed.)

As McGoohan would later explain of the destabilizing conclusion of The Prisoner in a 1984 retrospective: "If I could do it again, I would. As long as people feel something, that's the great thing. It's when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that's tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had."

From the outset, McGoohan constructed The Prisoner as an escape vehicle designed to tease brains and incite response. Its main character, Number Six, was, like John Drake, an intelligence agent, but one tired of the grind and looking to retire, much like McGoohan when he dreamed up the character after expressing a desire to leave Danger Man. He conceived the series nearly on his own, and wrote and directed several episodes, including some of the finest: "Many Happy Returns" and the last two episodes "Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out." When he first thought up the influential series, McGoohan wrote a 50-page Prisoner bible that explained everything actors, producers and other principals needed to know.

And there was a lot to know, given that the show skewed television stranger than most anything that had aired at the time, including The Twilight Zone. Though designed to last only a few episodes, The Prisoner's popularity and bravery stretched the show's run to 17, with the later installments like "Living in Harmony" and "The Girl Who Was Death" head-tripping off into the Western genre and surrealism, respectively.

From technological nightmares of surveillance and murderous inventions like the balloon Rovers to brain transplants and Clockwork Orange-like torture, The Prisoner challenged viewer expectation and experience with every episode. The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.

"I must have individuality in everything I do. It's not easy to find it always," McGoohan once explained. "I question everything. I don't accept anything on face value."

After The Prisoner's astounding conclusion, McGoohan left the madding crowd ironically for Los Angeles, where he continued to work in television and film. He won two Emmys for his work on Columbo, whose star Peter Falk was one of his good friends. He appeared in films like Braveheart, Treasure Planet and David Cronenberg's sci-fi crossover Scanners. He even lampooned The Prisoner in The Simpsons. But it was clear that McGoohan was picking and choosing his work after more than two decades of stunning productivity and cultural influence. And although director Nick Hurran and producer Trevor Hopkins tried hard to involve McGoohan in their forthcoming miniseries reboot of The Prisoner, due in November, his declining health made that a near impossibility.

Perhaps it is fate or coincidence that as Hurran and Hopkins previewed scenes from the 2009 version of The Prisoner last week in Hollywood, McGoohan had succumbed to an illness that would take his life mere miles away. But whatever it is, the fact remains that television has lost one of its most compelling, honorable stars.

Rest in peace, Patrick McGoohan. Your mark on the 20th century simply cannot be ignored. Your influence on the 21st century has yet to be fully measured, but when it is, one thing is sure: You will be more missed than the day you left us all.

Spillane's friend hammers out author's novel

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-10-08-spillane-goliath-bone_N.htm

Spillane's friend hammers out the rest of author's novel
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
10-8-8

Just before his death two years ago, crime writer Mickey Spillane called friend and author Max Allan Collins and asked him to finish a Mike Hammer novel he did not have the strength to complete.

The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), based on Spillane's rough draft, goes on sale Monday, 61 years after Hammer, the iconic hard-boiled private eye, solved his first case in I, the Jury. It will be the 14th Hammer novel.

"It's hard to imagine what popular culture would be like right now without Mike Hammer," says Collins, 60, who began writing fan letters to Spillane when he was 13.

"You would have no James Bond without Mike Hammer. You wouldn't have Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer or any of the tough detectives who use the bad guys' methods."

Spillane, who was 88 when he died, is the 20th century's best-selling American mystery writer, with sales topping 225 million.

The Brooklyn-born Spillane was so moved by the events of 9/11 that he stopped working on King of the Weeds, another Hammer novel, to write The Goliath Bone.

The indomitable Hammer is now in his 60s and reeling from the terrorist attacks. He's hired by a couple who are on an archaeological dig in Israel and find what they believe is the thighbone of the famous giant killed in a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines.

Hammer must protect the bone from the terrorists and government officials who will do anything to get it.

"The Goliath Bone is a collaboration but very much Mickey," says Collins (Road to Perdition).

Spillane left rough drafts of 10 of the book's 12 chapters. (Spillane and Collins co-edited four crime anthologies and collaborated on the 1990s Mike Danger comic-book series.)

Collins has just completed another Hammer novel, The Big Bang, based on a story Spillane began in 1965. Spillane bequeathed him incomplete manuscripts for three more Hammer novels, including King of the Weeds, which Collins plans to finish.

Carrying on the Hammer legacy is a thrill for Collins.

"I suppose I should say I'm intimidated, but I took Mickey Spillane books as vitamins when I was a kid. I was born to do this, and Mickey trusted me."

Top 10 most fashionable Bond girls

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3628924.ece

April 1, 2008
Top 10 most fashionable Bond girls
Ursula Andress's white bikini is only the beginning. We celebrate the looks of the best Bond women throughout the ages
Nicola Copping

10. Octopussy - Maud Adams (Octopussy, 1983)

As the only woman to play two Bond girls, Bond producer Cubby Broccoli clearly found something irresistible about this demure Swede. Surely it was the hair? Sporting the most pouffy, wispy, honeycomb nest of a bouffant since Dusty Springfield, it’s hard to notice the face when the hair enters stage left. Twin that with some equally wispy lingerie (does Octopussy actually get dressed during the film?) and you have yourself a screen siren. This is a master class in underwear as outerwear; it’s a shame it doesn’t stay on for long.

9. Pussy Galore - Honor Blackman (Goldfinger, 1964)

Welcome to the Bond Girl’s Guide to Power Dressing. Goldfinger filming may have taken place in the sixties – an era dominated by mini skirts, pansies and women who looked like schoolgirls - but hey-I’m-all-woman-and-I-have-a-husky-voice Pussy would rather jump out of an aeroplane than wear a skirt – she had trouser suits galore. With her perfectly sculpted bob, low-cut gold tops and the best Bond make-up ever seen, it’s not just the name that’s memorable.

8. Xenia Zaragevna Onatopp - Famke Jannsen (Goldeneye, 1995)

Vampiric, fetishistic and one hell of a hot lady. Onatopp’s S&M kit makes Lara Croft look like Tiny Tears. What does a woman who can crush James Bond between her legs wear? Well, apart from nothing, red leather or a military uniform. Oh, and blood red lips. At the casino it’s Sophia Loren style but with none of the sweetness – she smokes a cigar and she’s probably hiding a razor-sharp flick knife in her suspender belt. Evil never looked so good.

7. Teresa Di Vincenzo - Diana Rigg (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969)

The most glamorous death scene belonged to Teresa Di Vincenzo (a.k.a the only Mrs Bond). If you’re going to cark it, you might as well do it in an aquatic glitter cocktail dress, on a beach, with perfectly voluminous hair and feline, mascara-caked eyes. And of course, a look of desperation when you realise you’ve been married to the most eligible bachelor in the world for precisely five minutes. Were it not for the outfit, this would be tragic.

6. Melina Havelock - Carole Bouquet (For Your Eyes Only, 1981)

If you want an excuse for a nautical wardrobe, then film your Bond story at sea. Cue high waisted trousers, plenty of heat-reflective white t-shirts, and effortlessly straight hair – with not a sign of salt frizz (not even after being plunged into the sea tied up in ropes). The only woman in history to make a yellow jumpsuit look good – not even a leathery Roger Moore could pull that one off.

5. Vesper Lynd - Eva Green (Casino Royale, 2006)

Cue the twenty-first century and a harder Bond, and out comes the glamour quicker than you can say “hand over the pussy, Blofeld”. Given Roberto Cavalli’s involvement in the casino outfits you can already see the formula: sleek, sexy and sculpted. But Vesper Lynd’s forties locks, icy froideur and scant trace of a smile hardened the look in tune with Daniel Craig’s pithier 007. A master class in hauteur.

4. Solitaire - Jane Seymour (Live and Let Die, 1973)

How do you dress a psychic tarot card-reading virgin? Slap on the eye make-up (think Ming from Flash Gordon), give her some bling-tastic ethnic jewels and make her wear more maxi dresses than Talitha Getty at a Moroccan riad. One of the most beautiful and innocent of Bond Girls, Solitaire managed to look sexy, even when draped in a red satin tent. OTT? Absolutely. And this is why we love her.

3. Miss Mary Goodnight - Britt Ekland (The Man with the Golden Gun, 1974)

Yes, her ears stick out. Yes, she looks like Patsy Kensit. Yes, she has a ridiculous name. But Miss Mary Goodnight also benefits from the best ever Bond wardrobe. Cue geometric seventies prints, fabulous shades of turquoise, emerald and azure, and even a towel that was perfectly accessorised with her hair. She’s the Bond girl we want to be, and we’d run her over in an Aston Martin for her clothes.

2. Honey Ryder - Ursula Andress (Dr No, 1962)

Was it the body or the bikini that made Andress the most memorable (and lusted-after) Bond Girl of all time? Given that the remaining elements of her on screen wardrobe were significantly suspect (think pink satin Orient-inspired dresses and frizzy Jodie Harsh hair) the bikini had to be a force with which to be reckoned. Give the costume designer an Oscar for creating a white version that wasn’t see-through.

1. Miss Moneypenny - Lois Maxwell (Dr No, 1962 - A View to a Kill, 1985)

Miss Moneypenny is the consummate British Bond Girl. Granted, she has the advantage of an extensive wardrobe (an appearance per episode requires serious costume department strategising), but we love her because she never let James get a whiff of what was lurking beneath her twinset. Like Maggie Thatcher with a twinkle in her eye, her look was dominated by pussy bow blouses, pencil skirts and perfectly coiffured hair. Ursula may have had the bikini, but it was Moneypenny’s prim, trim and keep-it-all-in (and out of sight) that passed the test of time, and kept 007 guessing. What a woman.

Top 10 Bond villains

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3660946.ece

April 1, 2008
Top 10 Bond villains
Brendan Plant

A hero is only as interesting as the villains he defeats, and surely one of the key reasons for the enduring interest in the heroic exploits of James Bond is the variety of colourful enemies he has outfoxed over the years. Be they megalomaniacs or psychopaths, uncommon crooks or freaks of nature, Bond’s antagonists have always held a mirror to the fears and preoccupations of the times, and with their fantastic flaws and grandiose schemes, have always given us cause to laugh. Here’s a list of the ten best baddies who have been defeated by 007 for her Majesty’s protection - and our viewing pleasure.

10. Sir Hugo Drax (Moonraker, 1979)

Sir Hugo Drax had it all: immense wealth, a lavish estate, a royal knighthood, and an enduring fascination with establishing a new form of human civilization. Drax planned to destroy all humankind with an exotic poison, then to repopulate the earth with a new master race waiting aboard his space station, like some sort of Noah’s Ark for the space age. As played by the actor Michael Lonsdale, the seriousness of Drax’s demeanour was matched only by the sheer stupidity of his scheme and the obvious criminality in his choice of costumier.

9. Mr Wint and Mr Kidd (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971)

Philosophical, poetic and psychotic, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd were the deadly duo serving Bond’s arch-enemy Blofeld. More clever and creative than the average henchman, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd disposed of their targets in a number of imaginative ways, from live cremation to stinging by scorpion. After each murder, the ever polite couple would commemorate their act with a moralising aphorism, as though they were their very own deranged Greek chorus. In their final attempt to murder 007 disguised as waiters, Bond uncovers their fraud with his superior knowledge of wine, then hastens their demise with his lethal handling of a flaming shashlik skwere and a booby-trapped bombe dessert. Revenge is a dish better served cold, after all.

8. Rosa Klebb (From Russia with Love, 1963)

Over the course of many Bond films, 007 has confronted numerous female adversaries – henchwomen, as it were – most of whom have suffered the indignity of bearing even more ludicrous names than their male counterparts: May Day, Jenny Flex, Xenia Onatopp and, of course, Pussy Galore. But while Rosa Klebb was not entirely immune to this misfortune (her name is a pun on the Russian for ‘bread and roses’, the slogan for the international labour movement), she did escape the other calamity likely to befall other henchwomen: seduction by James Bond. Rosa Klebb was a ruthless and remorseless killer who joined the SPECTRE organisation after defecting from the Soviet counter-intelligence agency. She is best remembered for attempting to kill James Bond with a pair of poison-tipped daggers concealed in her shoes, an attempt which was thwarted by her former protégée Tatiana.

7. Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977)

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man born with webbed-fingers, Karl Stromberg was obsessed with the ocean, where he lived in a futuristic submersible fortress, surrounded by marine life and removed from the company of humans, whose annihilation he plotted to bring about by provoking a nuclear war between the Americans and the Soviets. The character of Stromberg was especially created for the film, which bears little resemblance with Fleming’s original book, so there is little coincidence that Stromberg has much in common with earlier Bond villains. Played icily by Curt Jurgens, the character of Stromberg was more than the sum of his parts, and proved a worthy and distinctive adversary for 007.

6. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977, and Moonraker, 1979)

The only henchman to appear in two Bond films was Jaws, the 7-feet-2-inch behemoth with the mouth of steel. As Stromberg’s henchman in The Spy Who Loved Me, Jaws was a fearsome and seemingly invincible foe who could brush aside any misfortune that befell him, from being crushed beneath an ancient Egyptian monument, to being thrown from speeding trains and high clifftops. But, as a sign of the camp silliness of the Bond franchise in the 70s, by the time Jaws returned in Moonraker as a minion of Drax, he was reduced to a farcical figure who fell in love with a blonde ingénue and who ultimately sided with 007 to defeat Drax.

5. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun, 1974)

Known to the world’s intelligence agencies only as ‘The Man with the Golden gun’, Francisco Scaramanga was a secretive hitman who enjoyed notoriety as the most dangerous and expensive assassin in the world. Believing he needed only a single bullet to complete each job, he preferred to murder his targets with a gold-plated single-shot pistol which could be disassembled into a pen, a lighter, cuff links and a cigarette case for easy disguise. Played with suave arrogance by Christopher Lee, a cousin of Ian Fleming, Scaramanga shared many similarities with 007: he was a cultured man with expensive tastes, and matched Bond’s own abilities as an assassin.

4. Dr. No (Dr. No, 1962)

The mad scientist par excellence, Dr. Julius No was Bond’s first on-screen antagonist, and is still one of the most memorable. A nuclear physicist with powerful metallic claws for hands – the legacy of a ‘freakish’ laboratory accident – Dr. No joined the villainous organization SPECTRE after his scientific services were rejected by both the Americans and Soviets. In revenge, he established an island lair in Jamaica, as any self-respecting evil genius must, and plotted to sabotage the launch of American rockets at nearby Cape Canaveral. While his end was hardly Shakespearean, there was a certain poetic justice to Dr. No’s demise, as he was undone by his own atomic obsession, boiling to death in the coolant tank of his own nuclear reactor.

3. Oddjob (Goldfinger, 1964)

A Bond film hardly seems worthy of the name unless it comes complete with a henchman armed with a gimmick. The Bond franchise has given life to all sorts of henchmen: some intimidating, others incredible; some scary, others just plain silly (yes, Goldie, I’m referring to you). But surely the best and most memorable of them all is Oddjob, the burly bodyguard of Auric Goldfinger, who combined genuine menace, sheer physical strength, and a unique killing method in the form of a flying razor-rimmed bowler hat. Although Oddjob, played by Olympic silver-medallist weight-lifter Harold Sakata, was apparently impervious to 007’s physical blows, he was vulnerable to Bond’s greater guile, and he was electrocuted to death in the vaults beneath Fort Knox.

2. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger, 1964)

With his all-consuming Midas Complex, Auric Goldfinger is another of the Bond villains who has earned a spot in the pantheon of greatest film foes. Not content to smuggle gold in the bodywork of a gold-plated Rolls Royce or to murder his treacherous assistant by smothering her in gold paint, Goldfinger schemed to increase the value of his own gold stocks by detonating a dirty nuclear bond inside the US Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, enlisting the help of Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus to do so.

1. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia with Love, 1963, and Thunderball, 1965, and You Only Live Twice, 1967, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969, and Diamonds Are Forever, 1971, and For Your Eyes Only, 1981)

As head of the global criminal organization SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld is 007’s nemesis, and the arch-villain of the Bond film franchise. He has appeared in six Bond films played by four different actors (Eric Pohlmann, Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas, and Charles Gray), and has become, with his trademark white Persian cat, grey collarless Nehru jacket, and large swivelling black armchair, one of the most imitated and parodied villains in cinema history. Without Blofeld, we’d have no Dr Evil in Austin Powers, no Dr Claw in Inspector Gadget, and no Mugatu in Zoolander. His grandiose schemes, unusual appearance and sheer persistence have earned Ernst Stavro Blofeld a permanent place in popular culture as the greatest of James Bond’s adversaries.

Top 10 Bond cars

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3552927.ece

April 1, 2008
Top 10 Bond cars
Brendan Plant

Fast cars and improbable chases have been key ingredients in the James Bond films since the series began in 1962. From modest beginnings in Dr No, when 007 outran his pursuers in a rented Sunbeam Alpine, the Bond car has grown in speed, sophistication and sex appeal. With each new model, James Bond has been able to impress us with his impeccable driving and unflappable demeanour and, more importantly, to transport us to a place where our fantasies and envy collide like so many henchmen in a car chase.

Here’s a list of the ten most impressive Bond cars in the 21 films to date.

10. Venetian Gondola (Moonraker, 1979)

Over 21 films, 007 has commandeered many unlikely vehicles: from a moonbuggy, to an old routemaster bus, to the odd fake alligator submersible. But the most memorable was the gondola which transformed into a faux-Venetian hovercraft in Moonraker. In that one surprising moment when Roger Moore drove off through the crowds in Piazza San Marco, he fired the imaginations of motorway commuters everywhere who’ve been longing ever since for their own hovercraft to escape the daily gridlock. Not even Q has come up for a solution to that yet.

9. Citroën 2CV (For Your Eyes Only, 1981)

Giving new meaning to the phrase ‘race to the bottom’, Roger Moore outran two decidedly unthreatening Peugeot 504s in an even more sluggish Citroën 2CV during a precipitous chase down a Spanish mountainside in For Your Eyes Only in 1981. Despite its unprepossessing appearance, the 2CV was one of the most heavily modified of all Bond cars, as just about every part of the original vehicle was replaced with high-performance components. But even with a few more cheveux under the bonnet, the little 2CV struggled just to keep pace with the humble Peugeots, leaving 007 to make-up for the lack of horsepower with some tricky driving and, as always, the best of British luck.

8. Aston Martin Vanquish (Die Another Day, 2002)

When Aston Martin returned to the Bond series after the brief BMW interlude in the late Nineties, it was in the muscular form of the 2002 Vantage, equipped with familiar gadgets like an ejector seat, rocket launchers, machine guns and ice-spike tyres, but also, somewhat absurdly, with a cloaking device which rendered the car invisible. The Bond films’ car chases were rightly famous for the fact that they involved real-live stunts, and this turn to computerised special-effects undermined one of the franchise’s key selling points. And who wants James Bond to have an invisibility device anyway, if it keeps us from watching him dally in the back seat with his latest lady?

7. BMW 750iL (Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997)

The BMW 750iL may have seemed more sedate than the sports cars Bond had driven previously, but it was no less spectacular during a chase around a parking garage in Tomorrow Never Dies. While this car featured a number of predictable enhancements like rocket launchers, reinflating tyres and wire cutters, Q added to it another surprise in the form of a remote control which allowed 007 to steer the car via his mobile phone: the ultimate in back-seat driving. More surprising still was the fact that Q engineered the car’s talking onboard computer with a fake German accent. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service indeed!

6. Ford Mustang Mach-1 (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971)

Having already conquered evil masterminds, the Soviet Union, and a temptress or two in the first three Bond films, it was only a matter of time before 007 tamed an American muscle car too. In 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery took a massive Ford Mustang Mach-1 on a wild spin around the Sunset Strip in Las Vegas, with a few scrambling police cars for company. In one of the more spectacular Bond car stunts, he flipped the Mustang up onto two wheels to squeeze it through a narrow alleyway. Unfortunately the film’s editors weren’t so skilful: in a famous continuity error, the car was filmed entering the alleyway on one set of wheels, but emerged on the other side driving on the opposite pair.

5. Toyota 2000GT (You Only Live Twice, 1967)

For filming in You Only Live Twice, Toyota cut the roof off two of its high-performance sports cars, the 1967 2000 GT. Rumour has it that the roof had to be removed because Sean Connery couldn’t fit inside the coupé, even though the car was only driven by Bond’s colleague Aki. The car included a TV, a cordless telephone and a voice-controlled stereo system: electronic gadgets which are virtually standard features on Japanese cars today.

4. Bentley Mark IV (From Russia With Love, 1963)

As James Bond’s car of choice in Ian Fleming’s novels, the Bentley Mark IV is almost as legendary as the DB5. It is legendary also in the sense that Bentley never produced a car under this name. What we see instead in From Russia With Love is a Derby Bentley convertible, which Sean Connery uses only briefly for the purpose of seducing Miss Sylvia Trench.

3. BMW Z8 (The World is Not Enough, 1999)

The BMW Z8 driven by Pierce Brosnan in The World is Not Enough was designed in homage to the famous BMW 507 roadster from 1956 (which, curiously, the first Bond girl Ursula Andress received as a gift from its first owner, Elvis Presley, in 1963). 007’s version was fitted with surface-to-air missiles and a remote control device and, as John Cleese’s character proudly boasted, no fewer than six cup-holders. The Z8 was still in prototype form when the film was being shot, so the car seen onscreen is in fact a Shelby Cobra kit car with specially-built replica body panels. Fortunately the facsimile bodywork was only made of plastic, as the car was ultimately cut in two by a giant aerial buzzsaw during a dockside battle. That voids the warranty, apparently.

2. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977)

Second in the Bond car hall of fame is “Wet Nellie”, the sleek white Lotus Esprit with the hidden talent of transforming into a submarine at the flick of a switch. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore escapes his hunters by driving the Esprit off a pier into the sea, where it transforms into a fully functioning submarine. Armed with surface-to-air missiles, depth charges, underwater sight screens and torpedoes, Bond was able to despatch a team of underwater attackers and an airborne helicopter before surfacing, with all the calm and camp which Roger Moore could muster, at a nearby holiday beach. So popular was the Lotus Esprit that it was brought back for the next film, For Your Eyes Only, only for its self-destruction mechanism to be triggered by thieves early in the film. It was later replaced by a red Lotus Esprit Turbo, at which point Lotus’s involvement in the Bond films ended.

1. Aston Martin DB5 (Goldfinger, 1964)

It started with an ejector seat. Without doubt the most famous of the Bond cars, and one of the most iconic cars in cinema history, is the Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger. This car started the trend for gadgetry which has become a hallmark of the Bond series of films, as it was fitted with an innovative array of extras, including machine guns, an oil slick deployer, bullet-proof glass, rotating licence plates, and an ejector seat. That these devices have become staples of spy films ever since is a testament to the enduring popularity and influence of this charismatic car.

Sean Connery apparently opposed the inclusion of these technological gimmicks in the DB5 because he feared that the technology would overshadow the character and his remarkable driving prowess. But he needn’t have worried: the DB5 has become so synonymous with James Bond that the prestige of each reinforces the other. The producers have played on this association over the years, and have used the DB5 in later Bond films, including GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and the latest Casino Royale. (Scenes featuring the car were cut from the final version of The World is Not Enough.) The DB5 also made a cameo appearance, driven by Roger Moore, in the 1980s film Cannonball Run.

But despite its illustrious reputation, the DB5 retains to this day the dubious distinction of recording the slowest time on Top Gear’s Power Laps feature. Maybe if James Bond had been behind the wheel rather than The Stig, the result might have been different?

James Bond: a reader's guide

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3945358.ece

May 16, 2008
James Bond: a reader's guide
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.

For the next dozen years Fleming would repeat the pattern of writing a new Bond novel between January and March at Goldeneye, to be published in the spring of the following year. What he had begun “chiefly for pleasure, and then money”, quickly developed into a long-running saga, in which each book picked up where the last one left off, and Fleming occasionally felt obliged to tie up some of the loose ends of the previous adventure (particularly what happens to the girls) before sending Bond off on his next assignment.

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming once said, and this is true not only of his fantastic plots and locations but also of his alter ego, 007. The James Bond series is not only the continuing story of the world's most famous secret agent, it is also a direct reflection of the lives and loves of Ian Fleming himself.

CASINO ROYALE 1953

The first James Bond novel is a brief, airless affair, set in the French gambling resort of Royale Les Eaux. Here Bond, the best card player in the British Secret Service, takes on the villain, Le Chiffre, at baccarat. Le Chiffre is working for the Soviet spy-hunting organisation SMERSH (meaning roughly “Death to Spies”), and has misappropriated its funds. Bond's task is to bankrupt him to bring him into disrepute.

Fleming claimed that “there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.”

Fleming's life looms large in Casino Royale. Vesper Lynd, the beautiful raven-haired double agent bears a strong resemblance to Christine Glanville, the real-life spy with whom Fleming had an affair. Like Bond, Fleming was a lifelong gambler, and even claimed to have taken on Nazi agents at chemin de fer in Lisbon in 1941. Unfortunately, this story wasn't true, but Casino Royale's memorable torture scene was. In it, Bond's naked genitals are thrashed while he is strapped to a bottomless chair. The combination of high living and violence caught the public's mood: Casino Royale was, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “exciting and extremely civilised”.

LIVE AND LET DIE 1954

Bond, now fully recovered from his lashing by Le Chiffre, is sent to New York to investigate Mr Big, a voodoo baron and unlikely SMERSH agent, whom M suspects is behind a smuggling operation that is funding Soviet agents in America. Seventeenth-century gold coins have been turning up in Harlem and Florida, and M believes that these are part of a larger hoard buried in Jamaica by the Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan.

Bond goes up to Harlem, only to be captured by Mr Big, and interrogated by his mind-reading girlfriend Solitaire. When the story reaches the Caribbean Fleming pitches in all the local colour he can think of: buried treasure, underwater swimming, voodoo.

“It is an unashamed thriller and its only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader,” Fleming declared in a letter to Winston Churchill, sending him a copy of the book. “How wincingly well Mr Fleming writes,” The Sunday Times drooled.

MOONRAKER 1955

Unlike the previous two novels, Moonraker is set entirely in England. Bond, still sunburnt from his “passionate leave” with Solitaire, is asked by M to solve a problem. Sir Hugo Drax, a successful stockbroker and national hero, who has offered to donate his £10 million rocket The Moonraker to the defence of Britain, has been discovered cheating at cards. Fleming was fascinated by cheats, and it was inevitable that his beloved London clubland would make an entrance in his “autobiography”, as he teasingly referred to the Bond novels.

He spent a lot of time working out the crucial bridge hand, and a full 18 pages describing it. From Blades Club, Bond is sent to Kent to investigate the Moonraker rocket himself; he discovers that Drax is a Nazi and that the Moonraker is targeted on London. Fleming was loath to let anything go unused: Moonraker is really two stories; it began life as a film idea about an intercontinental missile, on to which Fleming admitted he had to graft the Blades club scenario, “to bring it up to the necessary length”.

Fleming received many complaints that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer's day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean. “We want taking out of ourselves,” declared one elderly couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, “not sitting on a beach in Dover.”

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER 1956

As if in response to disgruntled readers craving the exotic, the plot of Diamonds Are Forever delivers something of a geography lesson. It begins beside a scrubby road in French Guinea, at one end of a diamond smuggling pipeline, then proceeds at breakneck pace to Hatton Garden in London, New York, Saratoga, Las Vegas, Spectreville and Los Angeles.

The villains are Jack and Serrifimo Spang and their unpleasant sidekicks, Wint and Kidd. Diamonds, like gold, fascinated Fleming, and through some old school connections he found an entrée into the closed world of diamond trading.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE 1957

“Personally, I think From Russia with Love was, in many respects, my best book.” So said Ian Fleming, and many critics agreed. John F. Kennedy even included it in his top ten books of all time. The story is of SMERSH'S attempt to lure Bond to Istanbul then kill him on the Orient Express, “with ignominy”.

Rosa Klebb, a SMERSH colonel, proves a suitably extraordinary villain.

The biggest surprise is reserved for the final scene. Bond confronts Klebb and she lashes out at him with her boot, which conceals a poison-tipped steel knife. Bond crashes to the floor...

DR NO 1958

Rosa Klebb's kick had injected 007 with Tetrodoxin, a nasty poison extracted from the unlikely source of the sex glands of the Japanese globe- fish. After an extended leave, Bond returns to be punished by M for failing to kill Klebb (his trusty Beretta jammed - so Bond is issued with a Walther PPK), and he is then given a dead-end assignment in Jamaica. This leads 007 to Crab Key, a private island owed by a mysterious Chinaman, Dr Julius No.

Where From Russia with Love was rich in Cold War detail, in Dr No Fleming allows his imagination to run riot. The book teems with exotic wildlife, some friendly, most not, and No himself is a huge, worm-like man with steel claws, whose home is a “mink-lined prison” built inside a guano-spattered mountain and extending beneath the sea.

Fleming's inspiration for Crab Key was Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamas, a harsh tropical swamp he visited as part of an expedition to count the flamingos nesting there. He was particularly taken with the Land Rover mounted with huge tyres used to ride through the swamps, and this vehicle, to which he added a flame thrower, became Dr No's “dragon”.

GOLDFINGER 1959

Goldfinger is the longest and most dense of all the 007 novels. Bond is sent to investigate the richest man in England, Auric Goldfinger, whom he discovers is smuggling gold out of the country. Goldfinger's method is ingenious; his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is made of gold. Bond finds himself working for Goldfinger in his bold attempt to steal $15 billion of gold bullion from Fort Knox. As well as weaving in the impossibly named “Pussy Galore and the Cement Mixers” - a tough lesbian gang from Harlem - Fleming manages to include two of his lifelong obsessions, gold and golf. Fleming had a gold typewriter (that he didn't use), collected gold cobs and reals, and even had a gold top made for his Bic Biro. As for golf, Fleming played almost every weekend of the year, and the three-chapter scene between Bond and Goldfinger was Fleming's homage to a place (the Royal St George's at Sandwich) and a game he loved. Bond, like Fleming, played off a handicap of nine, and his weakness - a flat swing “like a housemaid sweeping the floor” - was exactly Fleming's own.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY 1960 (subtitled Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond)

By the time Fleming wrote this collection of short stories he was beginning to tire of “Bond and blondes and bombs”, and he wanted to try something different. Though short, these stories are essentially Bond novels compressed, as is The Hildebrand Rarity, a story inspired by Fleming's trip to the Seychelles but set in familiar territory, involving a millionaire, a yacht, a girl and a fish. Here Fleming's ecological awareness of marine life is to the fore, and he writes with anger about the poisoning of an entire reef to obtain the solitary fish of the title.

The story that really departs from the formula is Quantum of Solace, which is not a secret service adventure, but an anecdote about love and emotional cruelty, set in the claustrophobic world of Caribbean expat society. The tale is told to Bond by the rather stiff British Governor of Nassau, and it is based on a true story that Fleming heard from Blanche Blackwell, his neighbour and lover in Jamaica. He gave her a slim Cartier wristwatch in return.

THUNDERBALL 1961

Like Moonraker, Thunderball began life as a film idea, with the added complication that the original was not entirely Fleming's own work, and the wrangling over Thunderball's ownership would last another 37 years. By now Fleming's 60-a-day habit and relentless drinking were having a serious effect on his health, and Bond's medical record, read out by M at the beginning of the book, is a slightly modified version of Fleming's own. Thunderball is the Bond novel that above all others takes place underwater, and again Fleming drew on real wartime exploits for inspiration, particularly the Italian Gamma Group frogmen, who, “in the greatest piece of effrontery of the underwater war”, cut a trapdoor beneath the waterline of a rusting hulk in Algeciras harbour, which they used as a secret base to raid British shipping. Thunderball also marks the first appearance of Ernst Blofeld and SPECTRE, his international criminal gang, who would become his main adversary from now on.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME 1962

Here is an oddity in the Fleming canon. It is a Bond novel told from a female perspective, in the first person, by Vivienne Michel, the Bond girl. Fleming justified this unusual approach in a letter to his editor, explaining that he was “surprised” that his adult thrillers were being read in schools, and that “young people were making a hero out of James Bond”. He wanted to write a cautionary tale about 007, “from the other end of the gun barrel, so to speak”. He also claimed that this exercise in ventriloquism was the easiest book he ever wrote. It was also the shortest - which was probably just as well, given its reception. The Spy who Loved Me was a disaster. “Just one thing - you oughtna done it,” wrote one irate fan, who spoke for many: “This book does not belong in a public library any more than a packet of garbage does.” Certainly Fleming's descriptions of Vivienne's sexual awakening go farther than in any other book, but that was only part of the problem. Readers had to wait until chapter ten, two thirds of the way through, for Bond to appear.

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE 1963

This is a complex novel, involving two plots and the second appearance of Bond's enemy from Thunderball, Ernst Blofeld. Bond has spent the last year chasing Blofeld around the globe, and he is on the point of handing in his resignation when his nemesis turns up, posing as one “Comte de Bleuville”. Blofeld has contacted the College of Arms to authenticate his claim, and Bond follows this lead, making his way to Blofeld's Alpine hideaway in Switzerland. An unusual ending: not only does Bond marry the Bond girl, but she is then assassinated by Blofeld hours later.

As with golf and gambling, it was inevitable that at some point Fleming would draw upon his love of the Alps and use them as a backdrop for a book. Fleming had skied enthusiastically since the 1920s, and on one memorable occasion he was pursued then engulfed by an avalanche, which directly inspired Bond's own escapade in this book. The College of Arms was another closed world which, like the diamond trade, Fleming enjoyed prising open. He delighted in the serendipitous discovery that the coat of arms for the Bonds of Peckham bore the legend: “The world is not enough”.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE 1964

This is the 12th and last novel Fleming managed to complete before his untimely death aged 56 in 1964, after a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. The mood is dark and claustrophobic, and in it Bond finally comes to grips with Ernst Blofeld. The beginning finds Bond depressed and withdrawn after the death of his bride, Tracy. Given Bond's mental state, M revokes his licence to kill and sends him on a mission to Japan, where he encounters a mysterious Westerner within a forbidding castle.“Dr Shatterhand” is, of course, Ernst Blofeld in disguise, and after the usual capture and torture Bond succeeds in strangling his arch- enemy. Fleming was enchanted by Japan, and travelled the length and breadth of the country to collect the raw material for this novel. He drank sake and turtle blood, composed haiku with geishas, sought out curious eastern aphrodisiacs, and had a massage from a Bridget Bardot lookalike named Kissy.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN 1965

This was painful for Fleming to write, and it shows. He managed to complete the first draft months before his death in 1964, and the manuscript was then polished by Kingsley Amis and others before it was published posthumously in 1965. The story is weak, the characters sketchy, and the villain is not a brilliant megalomaniac with dark designs on the planet, but a mere three-nippled pistoleer named Scaramanga.

Apart from a few scenes, Golden Gun is an unfinished muddle, but it begins well. Bond returns to London from Vladivostock, having been brainwashed by the Russians, and his first act is to attempt to kill M. In this he fails, and after six months of “de-brainwashing”, Bond is back in Jamaica on the trail of “Pistols” Scaramanga (whose name, like Blofeld's, was inspired by a boy Fleming had disliked at Eton).

There are far more gadgets in this than in previous novels. These range from the “Fluoroscope” that takes a surreptitious X-ray of Bond as he walks down a corridor in the secret service, to 007's poison spray gun; a real assassin's tool that Fleming appropriated from Bogdan Stashinsky, a Soviet secret agent who had killed two men with it.

OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS 1966

This is a posthumous collection of short stories in which Octopussy and The Living Daylights are the main attractions. Written in the 1950s, in Octopussy, like Quantum of Solace, Bond is merely the catalyst for a tale of deceit. He arrives unannounced at the home of Major Dexter Smythe, an overweight ex-commando officer living on the north coast of Jamaica, who spends his days paddling around the reef and feeding his “pet” octopus, Octopussy (named after Fleming's coracle).

The Living Daylights is another taut tale. Bond - the best marksman in the service - is given the unenviable task of assassinating an assassin in Berlin. Fleming had visited the city a year earlier in the company of a spy, and he was fascinated by the skulduggery employed by both sides in this divided city.

He was also pleased to discover that Russian women excelled at rifle shooting. His cello-playing assassin, the golden-haired Trigger, is recognisably Amaryllis Fleming, Ian's ebullient half-sister, a concert cellist.

The spy who loved it

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3684635.ece

April 7, 2008
The spy who loved it
The creator of James Bond liked his women wealthy, double-jointed and able to make an incomparable Bearnaise sauce. What went on in the often dark sexual world of Bond girls and Ian Fleming?
Ben Macintyre

It is a mark of James Bond's cultural reach that, for better or worse, a “Bond Girl” has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when she is killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for new love interest.

She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond's women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and with some small physical flaw. Like Bond's cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an expansive sex life before the war, and the war had loosened sexual mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.

Bond is the first major British thriller hero to lead an active sex life. Bond's attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. But even those critics prepared to see Bond's bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond's sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond's sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. The Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just 14 women in 12 books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared with an astonishing 58 conquests in the first 20 Bond films.

Bond's approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming's own distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the times he lived in, the class he occupied and his own psychological and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been characterised as a philandering lounge lizard.

The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit, vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs, often with other people's wives, including those of close friends. Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship. “The direct approach to sex has become the norm,” he told one interviewer. His own approach was direct to the point of bluntness. He would ask a woman, often on slender acquaintance or first meeting, to go to bed with him; if she declined, he would simply move on, unashamed, unresentful and unembarrassed. He was successful as often as not - odds which he seemed to find perfectly acceptable. Sex was a sort of sport: “He looked on women as a schoolboy does. They were remote, mysterious beings,” said one family friend. “You will never hope to understand them, but, if you're clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.”

Fleming was tremendously interested in sex. Indeed, he studied and pursued the subject, in theory and in practice, with the same avid interest he showed in gadgetry, rocketry, science and politics. He assembled an impressive personal collection of erotica, which he liked to show to visitors, particularly female ones. Flagellation, which amateur psychologists like to trace back to his beatings at school, held a particular fascination. A certain amount of jocular whipping and slippering appear to have formed part of his marriage, and there are several references to these practices in Bond. Agent 007 periodically threatens to spank various women, including, rather courageously, Miss Moneypenny. Not one of the women seems remotely surprised by the suggestion.

More unpleasantly, Bond's apparently insouciant attitude to rape has long provoked debate. In Casino Royale, we learn of Vesper Lynd that “the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape”. Worse yet, in The Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel opines: “All women love semi-rape...” Fleming, under a barrage of criticism, tried to argue that The Spy Who Loved Me was an attempt to show young people that Bond was not a good role model. My own view is that Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock by reinforcing the idea of Bond's essential cruelty: if so, he shocked far more than he intended, and he still does, leaving a tang of toleration for sexual violence that is very far from sweet.

Yet there was, as so often, another side to this careless sexual conquistador. Fleming's longer-term relationships were not with the cocktail party poppets and sexual silhouettes of the novels, but with older, married women. He cultivated a roué air, but he also longed for emotional stability. His relationship with his eventual wife, Ann Rothermere (another wife of a friend, whom he married in 1952), was long, intense, complex and fierce, but also supportive and, at times, deeply loving. At one tempestuous juncture in their stormy marriage he wrote to Ann: “What we both want is more love and warmth but that is a fire we both need to blow on if it is to burn.” Bond could never have said that. It is entirely possible that for all his skirt-chasing, Fleming did not in the end like very many women, and understood even fewer. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann acutely observed: “The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.”

As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one. Fleming met Muriel Wright while skiing in Kitzbühel in 1935. Aristocratic, sporty and fun-loving, “Mu” worshipped Fleming; in return, he was consistently and blithely unfaithful to her. Fleming's reputation was well known to Mu's horrified family, and her brother Fitzherbert even turned up at Fleming's home with a horse whip, intending to administer the traditional punishment for cads, only to find that the couple had vanished. When Mu was killed in an air raid in 1944, Fleming was traumatised and guilt-ridden. Muriel Wright was the original Bond girl, beautiful, simple, and doomed, and her sad fate runs throughout Fleming's fiction.

Bond would have married Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, but she kills herself. Ten books later, there are distinct elements of Muriel in the well-born, golden-haired Countess Teresa (Tracy) di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond does marry Tracy, but soon afterwards she, too, perishes. Bond's distress over Tracy's corpse may be an echo of Fleming's anguish at Muriel's death so many years earlier.

A year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O'Neill, and future wife of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish, worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complicated and extraordinarily good company. Fleming's love affair with Ann started during the war; it continued after O'Neill's death and her marriage to Rothermere; and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life. “We are, of course, totally unsuited,” Fleming predicted on the eve of marriage. “China will fly and there will be rage and tears.”

There were, indeed, ample tears and flying crockery. Ann could be wounding, referring to his writing as “pornography”; he, in turn, made no secret of his dislike for her literary friends. After two years of marriage, he was already complaining, only half in jest: “In the old days I demanded or perhaps pleaded for three things in a wife. She should have enough money to buy her own clothes, she should be able to make incomparable Béarnaise sauce, and she should be double-jointed. In the event I got none of these things.”

The rows grew furious, and the marriage colder. Fleming conducted a long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party. She was jealous; he, characteristically, was not. When they were apart, they missed each other painfully. When they were together, they fought viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly.

Shades of Fleming's turbulent marriage are reflected in Bond's attitude to women. The “conventional parabola” of a Bond affair, described in Casino Royale, is a statement of unalloyed cynicism: “The meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.” Bond points out that if he got married, he would first need to divorce himself from M and the secret service. James Bond has no children, no siblings, and no parents. He is the empty vessel into which the reader decants his or her expectations. Women, Bond declares, are for recreation; he has no desire to tote the emotional baggage that comes from a serious relationship.

The qualities Bond admires are physical, practical and culinary: in Bond's eyes, the ideal woman should be able to make a Béarnaise sauce as well as they make love though not, presumably, at the same time. Character or intellect are purely secondary in Bond's estimation: “Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards...” Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women's fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond's lovers in lavish detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely an invention of the films.

Some critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond's sexual activity: “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism”, screeched Paul Johnson in the New Statesman, blasting the “mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent”.

Bond girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Their names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn from people or things that Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope's troupe who married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine skiing resort; “Solitaire” (Simone Latrelle in Live and Let Die) is named after a Jamaican bird.

Bond is heterosexual from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could on occasion be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals (“unhappy, sexual misfits”), or sexual equality, or even votes for women. His books, Fleming declared, were “written for warm-blooded heterosexuals”.

Outside the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James Bond. “Doesn't do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business,” M tells Bond gravely in From Russia with Love: “They hang on to your gun-arm.” All of this adds up to a very potent postwar daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Having played a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever you looked, but not in Bond's world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy, old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still the world's heroes, modern Saint Georges, who could slay the dragon and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak woman, who would love him unquestioningly, and then whip up a terrific Béarnaise sauce.

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury to coincide with an exhibition of of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009.
Available from BooksFirst at £18 (RRP £20), free p&p.

Was Ian Fleming the real 007?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/for_your_eyes_only/article3652410.ece

April 5, 2008
Was Ian Fleming the real 007?
The war heroes, spymasters and beautiful women who inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond
Ben Macintyre

One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times, a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.

This, then, was the man who, after a morning swim to sluice out the hangover of the night before, hunched over the desk in his Jamaican home, “Goldeneye”, and began to type, using six fingers, on his elderly Royal portable typewriter. The opening line would read: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning?” Fleming wrote fast, the words pouring out at the rate of 2,000 a day. A month after he had started writing, he tapped out the words “the bitch is dead now.” Casino Royale was complete, and James Bond was born.

All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places, machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former intelligence officer, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one.

Like the character he had created, Ian Fleming was a great deal more complex than he seemed on first acquaintance. Beneath the sybaritic exterior, he was a driven man, intensely observant, with an internal sense of romance and drama that belied his public languor and occasional cynicism. Bond is, in part, Fleming, and the exploits of 007 grew directly out of Fleming’s knowledge of wartime intelligence and espionage: he would teasingly refer to the Bond books as “autobiography”. Like every good journalist, Fleming was a magpie, collecting material avidly and continuously: names, places, plots, gadgets, faces, restaurant menus and phrases; details from reality that would then be translated into fiction. He once remarked, “Everything I write has a precedent in truth.”

But Bond is also, in part, what Fleming was not. He was the fantasy of what Fleming would like to have been – indeed, what every Englishman raised on Bulldog Drummond and wartime derring-do would like to have been. Bond is a grown-up romantic fairytale, a promise that Britain, having triumphed in the World War, was still a force to be reckoned with in the dull chill of the Cold War. In the grim austerity of postwar Britain, here was a man dining on champagne and caviar, enjoying guiltless sex, glamorous foreign travel and an apparently unlimited expense account.

Thirteen more Bond books would follow Casino Royale. By the time of his death, just 12 years later, Ian Fleming had sold more than 40 million copies, and given birth to a multibillion-dollar film industry. Today, more than half the world’s population has seen at least one Bond film. Even at the height of his fame, Fleming maintained an airy attitude toward his books. “I extracted them from my wartime memories,” he remarked, “dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.” This nonchalance was the purest bluff, something that Fleming, as a lifelong card-player and intelligence expert, was very good at. The idea for Bond had been gestating in his mind, and his personality, for at least a decade. Back in 1944, Fleming had told a friend in deep earnestness, “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.”

And that is exactly what he did.

Who was James Bond? Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up in one of his Bond books, and almost every character in his fiction is based on a real person, even if only by name. He plucked these monikers from his social circle, his memory, his reading, his favourite newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, and his imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and others found themselves transported into Fleming’s fiction. There are several theories as to the origin of the name James Bond. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the standard reference book.

People were named after things, and things were named after people. His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat named Octopussy, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the ancient guano tanker in Dr No the Blanche. The crime boss Marc-Ange Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is named after El Draco, the Spanish name for Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer, is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who provided Fleming with invaluable technical advice.

Like most fictional characters, James Bond is not one individual. “He was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war,” Fleming once declared. Chief among the contenders is, of course, Fleming himself. The physical descriptions of 007 recall his creator, with his “longish nose” and slightly “cruel mouth”. Fleming sometimes played up the autobiographical aspects of Bond, and sometimes downplayed them. “I couldn’t possibly be James Bond,” he told a friend. “He’s got more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome.” Peter Fleming, Ian’s hero-worshipped elder brother, may have come a little closer to that model, being good-looking, cultured, tough and, most importantly, a secret agent, having been drafted into the world of military intelligence and irregular warfare early in the war.

Behind the Flemings follows a parade of swashbuckling types, each with a claim to a little of the Bond myth: Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench, a spy Fleming had first met on the Austrian ski slopes in the Thirties when the older man was gathering information on German troop deployments as part of an amateur spy network made up of journalists and businessmen. Another strong candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served in the intelligence commando unit Fleming helped to establish in the latter part of the War. Dalzel-Job was a superb marksman who could ski backwards, parachute behind enemy lines and pilot a miniature submarine. On assignment, he wore an airman’s jacket with a compass hidden inside one of the buttons, and smoked a pipe with a hidden map-chamber. Serving in Norway in 1940, Dalzel-Job revealed a Bond-like streak of rebellion when he disobeyed a direct order and insisted on evacuating 5,000 Norwegian civilians from the town of Narvik who were facing imminent Nazi retaliation. By the time Fleming met him in 1944, Dalzel-Job had won a reputation for bravery just this side of lunacy. Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job was credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the association, but disarmingly pointed out: “I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style? And I only ever loved one woman, and I’m not a drinking man.” Other contenders include Michael Mason, a fur-trapper and successful boxer who operated as an agent in Romania during the war. Also Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, the station chief of SIS (MI6) in Paris, whom Fleming met in 1940. A regular at Maxim’s on the Rue Royale, exquisite in Cartier cufflinks and handmade suit, driving an armour-plated Rolls-Royce through Paris, Dunderdale had much of Bond’s style.

The real “M” may be easier to identify. The fictional Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG is based, in large part, on Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s boss at the Naval Intelligence Department. M is grumpy, rude and every inch the naval martinet, with “damnably clear” bright blue eyes; his underlings are terrified and loyal in equal parts. All these traits were apparent in Godfrey. Fleming described him as a “real war-winner”. The admiral would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-blooded killer. “He turned me into that unsavoury character, M,” Godfrey complained after Fleming’s death.

The original M may, in fact, have been Z. “Colonel Z”, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, and ended up a pivotal figure in the British secret service. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called Dansey “the only professional in MI6”; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, however, considered him “an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning”.

Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential subversives in Britain. Knight was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles. He was a man of many parts, most of them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos “M”, and was certainly well known to Fleming. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as “Uncle Max”, a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes for children.

There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s first biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Fleming’s mother. Certainly, “M” was Fleming’s nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared.

The principal model for the much-loved Moneypenny character appears to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart Menzies, director general of MI6, or “C”. In the first draft of Casino Royale, M’s secretary was “Miss Pettavel” or “Petty”, but Fleming clearly realised that was too close to reality, and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to C had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as a “formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the battleship type”.

Vera Atkins, executive officer with “F” (French) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage organisation organised by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”, was described in her New York Times obituary in 2000 as “widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny”. Another strong possibility is Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague, somewhat tartly, as “definitely James Bond, in his mind”. She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.

Fleming’s villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the Benzedrine-sniffing villain of Casino Royale, is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained notoriety in inter-war Britain as “the Wickedest Man in the World”. Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict. A master of Thelemic mysticism (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), he specialised in mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre seem positively sane.

Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for names. Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the magnificently festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an old friend of Fleming’s. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain without earlobes, was probably named after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, whose son Henry Blofeld is the much-loved BBC cricket commentator. Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in The Man with the Golden Gun, was named after yet another school contemporary, George Scaramanga.

Some people objected to seeing their names in a Bond novel, most notably Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished modernist architect. Fleming is said to have disapproved of Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for tower blocks, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evil-doers:

Auric Goldfinger, the gold-obsessed treasurer of Smersh. When Ernö obtained a proof copy of Goldfinger, he was enraged: Ernö was a visionary 6ft architect and Auric is a murderous 5ft megalomaniac. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger to “Goldprick” throughout the book. Fleming’s publishers eventually agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, “Goldfinger? This is 007.”

Bond’s women were echoes of Fleming’s women, and perhaps one woman above all. Muriel Wright was 26 and a fresh-faced English rose when Fleming met her in 1935. “Mu”, as he called her, was an expert rider, skied beautifully and was one of Britain’s foremost polo players. She came from the finest landed British bloodstock. With an explosion of blonde hair that earned her the nickname “Honeytop”, she was also exceptionally beautiful and refreshingly unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but nonetheless made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and, almost scandalously, swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel loved horses, dogs, parties, gossip and fun; but most of all she loved Ian Fleming, to the point of self-abasement. She would caddy for him on the golf links, and rush to collect his custom-made cigarettes when he ran out. One of his friends called her Fleming’s “slave”.

Fleming enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends, and annoying his family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Fleming was consistently unfaithful, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded. It is said that her lack of intellect stood in the way of his commitment, but then there is no evidence Fleming considered brains to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite a lot to suggest otherwise.

Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On March 14, 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of masonry hurtled through her window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once. Fleming was called from the card table to identify the body. He was distraught, and wracked with remorse at the way he had treated her. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been “too good to be true”.

The quality of being “too good to be true” is, of course, what distinguishes the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a claim to be the fons et origo of the species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but innocent, outdoorsy, physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and uncomplaining, and then tragically dead, before or soon after marriage.

Fleming’s plots, like his characters, are rooted in reality, emerging in many instances directly from the Second World War and the Cold War. Fleming was quick to point out that the reality of the espionage game was stranger than any fiction he could invent: “My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible.”

The most pleasing irony is that MI6 itself is happy to blur the question of where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website cannot bring itself to deny its greatest asset, pointing out that recruits will enjoy “a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the service of their country”. James Bond is an MI6 recruiter. A real spy agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury on April 7 to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009, and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Jack White, Alicia Keys Bond Over 007 Theme

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b148362_jack_white_alicia_keys_bond_over_007.html

Jack White, Alicia Keys Bond Over 007 Theme
7-29-8
by Natalie Finn

Here's a match made in…a lab?

With Amy Winehouse long out of commission, Alicia Keys has signed on to lend her sultry, soulful pipes to the new theme song being readied for the upcoming James Bond installment, Quantum of Solace, by alt-rocker Jack White.

The male half of the White Stripes, who wrote and produced the tune, called "Another Way to Die," will also play drums. The film's soundtrack is due out Oct. 28, while the movie itself, the second 007 flick featuring hunky blond Bond Daniel Craig, hits theaters Nov. 7.

Keys' involvement in the production was first reported by E! Online's own Marc Malkin.

White and Keys' collaboration marks the first time a duo have tackled the Bond song, which hopefully will be more "Thunderball" (Tom Jones = suave and sophisticated) than "Die Another Day" (Madonna = Pierce Brosnan getting his ass kicked in a Korean prison).

The tradition of having a specialized theme harkens back to English cabaret star Matt Monro's treatment of the title song from 1963's From Russia With Love.

Hitmakers who have lent their vocals for the use of her majesty's secret service over the years include Paul McCartney and Wings ("Live and Let Die"), Carly Simon ("Nobody Does It Better" originated on The Spy Who Loved Me soundtrack), Sheena Easton ("For Your Eyes Only"), a-ha (the purveyors of "The Living Daylights" as well as '80s favorite "Take on Me"), Duran Duran ("A View to a Kill"), Gladys Knight ("License to Kill"), Tina Turner ("GoldenEye"), Garbage ("The World Is Not Enough") and, most recently, Chris Cornell, who crooned "You Know My Name" for Casino Royale.

U.K. pop stars Leona Lewis and Duffy were also rumored to be in contention for Quantum of Solace honors before the job was handed over to White and Keys, who are sure to add a certain "that sounds like a marimba!" je ne sais quoi to the 22nd Bond adventure.