Introduction
This is part of A Spy is Born, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
A common view of Ian Fleming today is that he was a pulp novelist: that his stories are fun, but not to be taken seriously as literature. No full-length analysis of his work has been published since Kingsley Amis and O.F. Snelling’s books in the Sixties. At the same time, it’s a cultural commonplace that many of the thriller’s most popular conventions originated with James Bond, either in Fleming’s work or the films, and that Bond is therefore worth looking at as an originator in the genre.
I think both these views are wrong. I feel Fleming has been unjustly critically neglected and deserves recognition as one of the great writers of popular fiction, the creator of an iconic character whose appeal still burns bright today and who is as worthy of study as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith or Georges Simenon. But I don’t believe he originated most of the genre conventions it’s generally believed that he did—many of them were not merely well-established but hackneyed by the time he used them in his work. I think he was a great thriller-writer for other reasons.
This short book has had a long gestation. In 2005, Ajay Chowdhury was putting together the first issue of a new James Bond magazine, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and asked me to write about the literary roots of Fleming’s debut novel, Casino Royale, in advance of the release of the film adaptation starring Daniel Craig. While researching the article, I looked again at the ‘usual suspects’ from the clubland era, but as I dug more deeply I started to wonder if a thriller-writer who had come after them had not been much more of a significant influence. I first read Dennis Wheatley’s spy thrillers as a teenager, but on rereading them thought I sensed something much closer to the Bond novels than John Buchan and Sapper. There was virtually no mention of Wheatley as an influence on Fleming in the previous literature, but rereading him had thrown up several similarities that seemed unmistakeable.
After I wrote that article, Cold Male, I started out on a similar one examining Live and Let Die, but the magazine folded before it was published. However, my research into Fleming’s second novel also threw up striking similarities with Wheatley’s books, and I decided the subject warranted closer analysis. This took me a couple of years (Wheatley was very prolific), and I also expanded my reading to other writers in the genre to fill gaps in my research and make sure I wasn’t taking unjustified leaps or succumbing to confirmation bias. The result was a much longer essay, The Secret Origins of James Bond, which is the basis for this book. Since publication of it on the website Spywise.net in 2010, a domino effect has led to Wheatley becoming much more widely identified as one of Fleming’s major influences, including by his current publisher—but that wasn’t in the air at all when I started researching this topic.
In the last decade or so, I’ve edited and added to the Spywise essay, expanding my analysis with more context and research, including digging into newspaper archives and declassified M.I.5 files. I was greatly helped in this by the publication of Phil Baker’s wonderful biography of Wheatley, The Devil Is A Gentleman, which threw me down many new avenues. This fresh version is over double the length of the previous one; unlike Wheatley, I haven’t kept myself working through the night with cigarettes and Champagne, but instead have mainly relied on strong Swedish coffee. I feel this now makes the case as best as I can while also, I hope, providing an interesting look at the development of the British thriller, some of the ways in which intelligence activities fed into the genre in the 20th century, and the intricacies of novel-writing. I hope you enjoy it.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, May 2019