Salon.com > Ian Fleming

From the Civil War to James Bond in one quick step

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:08:00 +0000

When I set out in the early 1990s to write a short biographical piece on Col. William C. Oates, the Confederate commander of the 15th Alabama Infantry, who failed to dislodge Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment from the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I had no idea where the project would take me. For one thing, that brief sketch led eventually — some 15 years later — to my writing a biography of Oates, cradle to grave. For another thing, it showed me how close our connections are to the past and how relevant is William Faulkner’s comment that the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.

James Bond’s real-life inspiration

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Tell me about your first book, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, which is seen by some as the first modern spy thriller and said to have inspired the likes of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

Yes, it is a wonderful book both for the espionage aficionado and also for the yachtsman. It testifies to the fact that if you are writing any novel with a technical basis, it is good to do research and get it right. This is the only novel he wrote; he went on to become a very committed political fellow.

It is basically a serious novel about a sailor called Davies who invites a friend to join him sailing around the German coast from the Baltic to the North Sea. The narrator is Carruthers, a civil servant who works in the Foreign Office, and he is at a loose end in August because everyone has gone away. Suddenly he gets this invitation to go yachting from someone he used to be at university with. He packs his white shoes, cap, blazer and white trousers, only to discover when he gets there that this is not how it is going to be. Instead it is a rather dirty, two-man sailing boat. What they do is sail around the Frisian Islands and discover that the Germans have been building up resources to invade England. So there is this kind of mystery gradually unfolding as they explore those sandy channels in Germany’s North Sea coast.

James Bond: The least interesting man in the world

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

IN THE EARLY 1950s, Ian Fleming, an Englishman living in Jamaica, was working on a spy novel and, as he told The New Yorker a decade later, he conceived the central figure as “an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” Searching for a suitably boring name, Fleming found it on his bookshelf, in the name of the ornithologist who authored the field guide Birds of the West Indies: James Bond.

The inherent anonymity of those two syllables, and the blank slate they imply, hint at why the fictional British secret agent is at the center of the longest-running film franchise of all time. Skyfall, which opens this fall, will be the 25th Bond film (all but two made by the same production company), and it arrives 50 years after the release of the first, Dr. No. Bond may not have the thousand faces of Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero, but he has comfortably fit the features of six quite different actors, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig.