This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, is a homage to Ian Fleming on the centenary of the author’s birth, and a celebration of James Bond, his greatest creation. It is not a biography of Ian Fleming – others, notably John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, have already performed that task admirably – nor is it a ‘biography’ of James Bond, for that, too, has been written. It does not purport to be a comprehensive guide to the James Bond phenomenon (for this, I recommend Henry Chancellor’s official companion). Rather, it is a personal investigation into the intersection of two lives, one real and one fictional.
As a journalist and writer of non-fiction, I have always been intrigued by the factual origins of fiction. In previous books, I went in search of the nineteenth-century criminal Adam Worth, the model for Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes tales, and Josiah Harlan, an adventurer who would win literary immortality in Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than any writer I know, anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. Espionage is itself a shadowy trade between truth and untruth, a complex interweaving of imagination, deception and reality. As a former officer in naval intelligence, Fleming thought like a spy, and wrote like one. This book is an attempt to explore a remarkable double life and to establish, as nearly as possible, where the real world of Ian Fleming ended and the fictional world of James Bond begins.
Ben Macintyre, April 2008