In Ian Fleming (Harper, Mar.), novelist Shakespeare chronicles the life of the James Bond creator and British intelligence officer.
With two major biographies of Fleming already on the market, why write another?
People tend to have already made up their minds about Ian Fleming, like I had, as a sardonic, moody, wife-beating bounder who strutted about pretending to be more important than he was. What convinced me to write the book was discovering that his war work was indeed significant, as well as how much kinder he was in life than his posthumous caricature suggested.
How did Fleming’s background in British intelligence inform his fiction?
Fleming was in the inner citadel, one of only 30 officers who were cleared to receive cryptanalysts’ reports from Bletchley Park. When he started to write Bond in 1952, he was imagining the adventures he might have experienced had he remained in intelligence, but placing the stories in a Cold War setting. This is why the Bond books endure. They are firmly rooted in convincing details that Fleming’s men had risked their lives over.
What was your first encounter with James Bond in print?
I came late to the printed Bond, having feasted on the films. What surprised me was how well-written and fast-paced they were, which Fleming attributed to writing each thriller in eight weeks. He gave young readers of my generation license to imagine ourselves in Bond’s shoes, navigating the postwar world.
In addition to biography, you also write fiction. Are there novelistic tools you find useful when writing biographies?
All writing depends on finding and then building the narrative arc. I’ve never understood why history or biography should be less consuming in this respect than a novel. I plunder fiction’s arsenal where I can. Characters need to cast shadows, fling open windows; pages need to be turned, readers need to be left suspended, twisting, on narrative hooks. But I also rely on my journalistic training as a documentary maker at the BBC, and then on the staff of the Times and Daily Telegraph. With a subject as raked-over as Fleming, the challenge is to produce something fresh.
Do you think Fleming created in Bond a character who, like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, appears to have no expiration date?
The sun may have set on colonialist misogynists, but not on Fleming’s addictive and unmistakable conception of an attractive, patriotic British male who is impossible to pay off. As a signature of Britain, Bond has proved impervious to time and changing mores. In his most tremendous leap, he has managed to survive in our contemporary world as an emblem of Britain’s vision of itself, despite the tidal shift in our notions of pluralism, diversity, and sexual equality.
