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Journalism aside, writing had long featured in Fleming’s life. At Eton, he produced a magazine called The Wyvern, which published his first piece of fiction (‘a shameless crib of Michael Arlen’). In 1926, Fleming attended a finishing school in Kitzbühel, Austria, run by Ernan Forbes Dennis (an ex-spy) and Phyllis Bottome. When he was around nineteen, Bottome encouraged Fleming to write. One result was a short story entitled ‘A Poor Man Escapes’, another a story called ‘Death, On Two Occasions’. Not long after leaving Reuters, Fleming wrote and privately published a collection of poetry called The Black Daffodil, although shortly became so embarrassed by it that he burned all copies.

Fleming toyed with the idea of authoring an espionage novel from at least summer 1944, when he told war colleague Robert Harling that, once demobilised, he would ‘write the spy story to end all spy stories’. What is remarkable about Fleming’s idle boast is that it was accurate: the espionage template was changed for all time by Casino Royale and its sequels. Before he thus changed the landscape, though, Fleming was – like any other writer – merely the sum of his influences.

Asked in 1963 by Counterpoint which writers had influenced him, Fleming offered, ‘I suppose, if I were to examine the problem in depth, I’d go back to my childhood and find some roots of interest in E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sax Rohmer.’ Oppenheim wrote thrillers laced with vignettes of high living, convincing psychology and Edwardian morality. His famous works included The Great Impersonation (1920) and The Spy Paramount (1935). Rohmer was the creator of Fu Manchu, a Chinese criminal mastermind nicknamed the Yellow Peril on whom Bond villain Dr No seems to be heavily based.

Fleming gave a couple of notable quotes about Bulldog Drummond and his creator, Sapper (H.C. McNeile). When asked to describe Bond, he said, ‘Sapper from the waist up and Mickey Spillane below.’ In a posthumously published December 1964 Playboy interview, Fleming said, ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I mean, rather, I didn’t believe they could any longer exist in literature.’ Both quotes invoke Drummond/Sapper in a negative, or at least ambiguous, sense. The impression that might be gleaned from this is that Fleming had never liked Sapper, but, as John Pearson discovered, he had been partial to his writings when as a young boy they had been read to him by his headmaster’s wife at boarding school. Drummond was an ex-army man whose rough-hewn features created his nickname. Bored with life, he advertised in The Times for adventure. Fleming’s later conviction that Drummond’s escapades belonged to the past was probably not due to Bulldog’s oft-stated contempt for Jews, Germans, ‘wops’, ‘dagos’, ‘frogs’, ‘niggers’ and ‘greasers’: such racism would be pretty much matched by Fleming, whose hero detested Koreans and Germans, and almost all of whose adversaries would be foreigners. As alluded to in Fleming’s comments above, it was more likely due to the complete absence of the carnal in Sapper’s prose, plus Drummond’s unlikely preternatural abilities in physical combat. Moreover, Sapper had ‘no literary pretensions’, to use the peculiar phrase employed to describe those who can’t write very well – as though their lack of ability is both voluntary and a defiant statement of integrity.

Pearson found John Buchan to be another action author who featured in Fleming’s reading history. Buchan’s most famous protagonist was Richard Hannay, whose best-known adventure is The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Hannay was a departure from previous action-adventure protagonists in being vulnerable and flawed, and this was something that Fleming would bring to his own hero.

The character the Saint was introduced to the world by author Leslie Charteris in 1928 with Meet the Tiger. Many novels and short stories followed. He was brought to a wider public by movies and television. ‘It’s surprising that very little comparison is made between the Saint and James Bond,’ says Jeremy Duns, a Bond fan and scholar, as well as an espionage novelist himself. ‘It must be that Ian Fleming was aware of the Saint. He was a hugely successful character and there are an enormous number of similarities between the Saint and James Bond.’ Simon Templar – whose initials gave rise to his sobriquet – was a handsome, charming, dapper, hedonistic Englishman of action, as knowledgeable about gourmet meals as martial arts and weaponry. He was also catnip to the ladies, and his premarital sex life was explored in a relatively frank manner. Although there was a certain Robin Hood element to his persona, he was darker than Bond. Duns: ‘If you ever watch parodies of Bond, they actually tend to be more like the Saint. The Saint is a ruthless, devil-may-care rogue, whereas Fleming’s character was a much more straightforward sort.’

Somerset Maugham may have been an influence on Bond via Ashenden: or the British Agent, a 1928 volume of spy stories set in World War I. That Ashenden’s superior is known by an initial, like Bond’s boss M, may be coincidence, but indisputable is the fact that Maugham was a friend of Fleming and that Fleming’s 007 short story ‘Quantum of Solace’ is – uncharacteristic though it is of the literary Bond canon – modelled on Maugham’s stories of colonial domestic drama.

When Fleming submitted his first Bond novel, he was told by William Plomer – his friend and subsequent copy editor – that it needed revision. Fleming wrote back, ‘It remains to be seen whether I can get a bit closer to Eric Ambler and exorcise the blabbering ghost of Cheyney.’ Ambler was a writer much admired for his devising in the 1930s a new model for the thriller. We can infer from Fleming’s comment that he shared that admiration, although probably more for Ambler’s realism, deftness and literary bent than an unusually leftish perspective, which was for many a refreshing change from the elitism and/or racism of Sapper, Buchan, et al. Ambler became best-known for The Mask of Dimitrios, which had an Istanbul background. Fleming – who was acquainted with him – picked Ambler’s brains about that city and Byzantium in general when writing From Russia with Love (in that book Bond is to be found reading an Ambler).

Fleming’s putdown of Peter Cheyney wasn’t his only one. Despite being British, the crime writer popular since the late thirties devised Americanised titles such as Dames Don’t Care and Your Deal, My Lovely and gave protagonists handles such as Lemmy Caution and Slim Callaghan. Strangely, though, reviews of Fleming’s books often compared them to Cheyney’s. The one such comparison that really delighted Fleming was the occasion W. H. Smith’s Trade News columnist Whitefriar, reviewing Casino Royale, called him the ‘Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade’. Fleming made sure that Whitefriar received inscribed copies of his books from that point on.

The end of that Playboy ‘I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types’ quote was, ‘I wanted this man more or less to follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes – believable people, believable heroes.’

Fleming was referring to purveyors of American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction (of whom Mickey Spillane was also an example, if a less refined one). They were the sorts of writers whose lowlife vignettes and wise-guy argot Cheyney attempted to imitate from the distance and incongruous surroundings of drizzly, low-key Britain. The private-detective heroes of these writers were cynics and loners, low-waged characters hired by wealthy clients to discreetly solve shameful mysteries and who faced the dangers that resulted therefrom with alternate muscularity and wryness. The writers concerned tended to be very good on colloquial dialogue, albeit with a suspicion of its being souped up with witticisms and street poetry beyond the average denizen of a back alley. Unlike Cheyney, Fleming ensured that, whatever trappings he co-opted from the hard-boiled genre, his protagonist was quintessentially English.

Jeremy Duns has alighted on what he feels is a clear but little-known inspiration for James Bond. At the end of his life, Dennis Wheatley was notorious for the likes of The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. However, before that tumble into the outré, he was known as a writer of thrillers. His protagonist, Gregory Sallust, and the adventures in which he became entangled were, for Duns, prototypically 007.

Duns says of Sallust, ‘He has a scar on his face. He’s a cynical, hedonistic British secret agent. He’s a freelance secret agent, so he doesn’t have quite the organisational, bureaucratic power behind him, but he has this M figure in Sir Pellinore, who he’s got a very similar, paternal relationship to, although it’s perhaps more friendly. The character is womanising, drinking, gambling – quite unusual for a hero.’ Moreover: ‘There is a surprising amount of sex in the Dennis Wheatley books. There’s lots of spanking in it. Sallust seems to be absolutely obsessed with spanking women. And so was Fleming.’ Sallust made his debut in Contraband, published in 1936. Duns: ‘That whole first chapter. Hang on a bloody minute: this is a British secret agent with a scar on his face in a casino in northern France … A beautiful woman comes in on the arm of a villainous aristocrat who also happens to be a dwarf … It feels like you’re reading Casino Royale. Come into My Parlour is the one that I would really single out. That very much feels like a prototype of From Russia with Love.’

Yet, while Fleming acknowledged other influences in interviews and journalism, he never mentioned Wheatley. Duns thinks that this is because he wanted to look cool in terms of his inspirations: ‘Wheatley is a very below-stairs writer.’

Fleming had the advantage of not having to draw his inspiration only from fellow writers. He had worked alongside – even directed the missions of – real-life action heroes. Asked about 007 on Desert Island Discs, he said, ‘He’s a mixture of commandos and secret-service agents that I met during the war, but of course entirely fictionalised.’ Merlin Minshall, Michael Mason, Commander Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale and Commander Alexander ‘Sandy’ Glen are all names that will be meaningless to most, but there is circumstantial evidence that the personalities and/or exploits of these intelligence colleagues and acquaintances of Fleming contributed to the character of James Bond. William Stephenson is fairly well known to the public – if only by his codename: Intrepid – and seems one of the strongest candidates of all. An operation engaged in by the MI6 employee in New York with Fleming by his side involved a break-in at the office of a Japanese cypher expert. It later became – in a heightened version – a mission that helped earn Bond his double-O status. Moreover, in 1941 Fleming participated in the exercises undertaken by students at a type of training school for saboteurs run by Stephenson in Canada. One of the tasks – attaching a limpet mine to the underside of a ship – turns up in Live and Let Die in a scene containing considerable verisimilitude. It seems logical that other techniques Fleming learned there also pepper the Bond canon.

Fleming’s ‘spy novel’ would not take place in World War II, however, nor any of the other conflicts around which twentieth-century spy fiction had so far revolved. Novels with a backdrop of World War I, World War II and early-twentieth-century anti-Bolshevism became, as soon as those conflicts were concluded, period pieces (if, in some cases, enduringly readable ones). The war of attrition and ideology that developed after World War II between Communist, totalitarian East and capitalist, democratic West was, however, a novelist’s gift that kept on giving. Although it was a war of low-level intensity, for several decades it genuinely seemed one without end and it was into that conflict – rife with fictional possibilities – that Fleming dropped his new character.

What, though, should he call him? ‘I wanted the simplest, dullest plainest-sounding name I could find,’ Fleming told the Manchester Guardian in 1958. ‘“James Bond” was much better than something more interesting like “Peregrine Carruthers”. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.’

It was long assumed Fleming got the name for his hero from the American author of Birds of the West Indies, a book on his shelves at Goldeneye. However, another Fleming biographer, Andrew Lycett, proffers a different story. When during the war Fleming spoke of his literary ambitions to C.H. Forster of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the latter asked him how he would choose names. Fleming replied that he would think of the first couple of names in his house at school and change – by which it seems he meant ‘transpose’ – their first names. Replied Forster, ‘In my case, the first names were James Aitken and Harry Bond. So you could have Harry Aitken and James Bond.’ Of course, the two stories don’t necessarily contradict each other.

Fleming met the ‘real’ James Bond in 1964 when he was writing his final 007 story, The Man with the Golden Gun. It was a convivial affair in which the ornithologist and his wife amusedly explained how their lives were now punctuated by ribbing from people in minor officialdom such as porters and airport staff to whom they had cause to reveal their names. In a letter to Mary Wickham Bond – Mrs James Bond – Fleming said the name was just what he needed because it was ‘brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine’. The name, though, was less prosaic and more in the poetical literary tradition than Fleming might have thought: ‘bond’ – another word for promise or pledge – was ideal for a character of patriotic duty and iron purpose.

Armed with his influences, his first-hand insight into intelligence matters, a facility with the written word and a name for his protagonist, Fleming set about amalgamating them. In devising his own angle on the espionage genre, he became known for several specific plot and style characteristics. Many assumed he invented all of them. This was partly because Bond’s phenomenal success took such characteristics from the ghettoes of pulp into the mainstream. It was also partly because no previous purveyor of this type of material had Fleming’s breeding or his personal contacts in the literary world. He was able to get his books reviewed in the ‘posh papers’ and the likes of The Times Literary Supplement. To reviewers in such outlets – who would never sully their hands with a Dennis Wheatley – his type of writing was new.

The trademarks he became known for were:

1 SEXUAL FRANKNESS: Public discussion of sex – particularly sex outside marriage – was largely taboo at the time Fleming began writing Bond books in the early 1950s. This state of affairs was due to the absence of reliable contraception, a situation that never really changed during Fleming’s lifetime. Those who depicted or discussed in art non-marital sex were often accused of encouraging immorality and undermining the cause of preventing single-motherhood. Fleming’s participation in the disregard of this taboo was therefore shocking. It was also thrilling. His matter-of-fact acknowledgement of sexual desire and depiction of, if not its mechanics, its preamble and aftermath were, on a base level, titillating. This was not least because he was clearly kinky: spanking is mentioned in half a dozen Bond novels, with the secret agent’s first thought of it occurring towards the end of earliest book Casino Royale, and his actually first threatening to take across his lap a wilful female in fifth book From Russia with Love. However, his frankness was also refreshing in a pure sense for people fed up with the circumspection then surrounding this most everyday and pleasurable of human functions, one groan-making manifestation of which was heroes in thrillers making their excuses and leaving when sex looked like raising its supposedly shameful head.

2 THE UNOBTAINABLE: The dreary austerity of an already pitilessly class-bound country provided a ready-made audience for Fleming’s semi-posh, jet-setting, casino-haunting creation. There was a notable authenticity to Fleming’s travelogues that added another dimension to their exoticness. ‘I rarely write about places I have not seen,’ he noted. Gambling was illegal in the UK except in private clubs, and even those forms of it that were legal were not allowed to be advertised or encouraged. Even the statement in Diamonds are Forever that Bond is taking his fourth shower of the day fits into this syndrome: hygiene in mid-fifties Britain was commonly a matter of a weekly bath, with showers virtually unknown even in well-to-do households.

3 BRAND NAMES: Fleming’s fascination with the non-generic was unusual. The mythical ‘ACME’ was usually posited as the universal manufacturer of the products that appeared in fiction, or else false names were substituted for familiar ones. Fleming once observed, ‘I see no point in changing the name of the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to an Hirondelle.’ Fleming claimed that he inserted such references as a sort of mooring as his settings and plots took off into the sphere of the fantastical – a way to make the reader feel ‘that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground’. However, he must have been aware of their function as product porn: his references to the likes of Chanel and Fleurs des Alpes served to provide a window on another world as much as did Bond’s games of chemin de fer.

4 CLASSY VILLAINS: Fleming’s baddies were not Nazi caricatures or belligerent cockneys. Rather, they were larger-than-life personalities with an etiquette incongruous in the context of their murderousness. A set-piece confrontation between Bond and baddie – over a dinner table or similar calm tableaux – became a staple of the part of the narrative just prior to the final, bloody showdown.

5 ANTI-HEROISM: Any English professor will tell you that the lead character in a book is a protagonist, not a hero, but James Bond didn’t even fit that neutral term. Fleming would make more than one interview comment down the years indicating that the reader was not expected to like his creation. In a 1958 BBC radio duologue with fellow writer Raymond Chandler, for instance, he observed, ‘… he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man …’ In 1964, Fleming told journalist Ken Purdy, ‘I never intended him to be a particularly likeable person, which makes me wonder a bit about the real motives behind the people who treat him like a cult.’ Fleming told Michael Howard of his publishers Cape that he wrote tenth 007 book, The Spy Who Loved Me, as a ‘cautionary tale’ because ‘young people were making a hero out of James Bond’. Tied into this is the changed world in which Bond was operating. Fleming began work on Casino Royale just six months after the disappearance of British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The two men would not be publicly confirmed as having defected to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1956, but it was immediately widely assumed that they had been double agents, something that engendered national humiliation and anger. The members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, as it became known, were not the square-jawed types of espionage fiction but turncoats allied to one of the most monstrous regimes in modern history. With the changes created by this occurrence to public assumptions about heroism and the upper classes, Fleming would seem to have concluded that Bond could not be depicted as operating in a black-and-white world. Ethical ambivalence was now the order of the day. Bond had a clear morality about right and wrong in geopolitical terms – he hated the cruelties of Communism – but on a personal level made what many would consider transgressions, whether it be sleeping with married women or cold-bloodedly dispatching defenceless enemies. This in turn fed into a sense of modernity. That Bond was not a practitioner of the Queensberry Rules or an un-nuanced yes-man made him both an antidote to the stiff, Establishment figures of many previous spy books and attractive to a wider demographic. Even working-class people sceptical of values that they felt benefited only people in a higher income bracket could relate to a fornicating rule-bucker.

While with the above ingredients Fleming may have just been updating or refining already existing – if not necessarily commonplace – espionage elements, there are some things about his work that genuinely were revolutionary:

1 PROCEDURAL: Fleming’s naval espionage knowledge, though not always directly transferable and though not acquired from working in the field, provided a verisimilitude of protocol, mentality, terminology and backdrop. Moreover, where he needed more land-based expertise, he could rely on his brother Peter, who had worked in military intelligence during the war. Where Fleming had no direct knowledge or handy source to tap, he did his research, having meetings with, and sending out letters to, experts on relevant subjects and even allowing them to read through early drafts of his manuscripts.

2 TEXTURE: Because Fleming intended Bond as a cypher, he gave his character almost none of his own aesthetic bent, the type of which led to his amassing a culturally significant collection of first-edition books. However, that Fleming was a sensualist was written all over his Bond texts. Where previous writers would, in order to keep the action going and the cliffhangers coming, gloss over or even dispense with specifics of clothes, food, drink, travel and surroundings, Fleming would explore his hero’s observations and experiences in rich, leisurely and even digressive detail. Action and setup took an incongruous back seat.

3 VULNERABILITY: Despite occasional ruthlessness, Bond does not exult in violence in the manner of the likes of Templar or Drummond. He often ruefully reflects on having had to engage in it. Additionally, although good at his job, he is by no means a preternaturally poised operative, cheating death through serendipity as often as by ingenuity or bravery. He is also in the habit of availing himself of Benzedrine to sharpen his reflexes.

4 SALARY MAN: Perhaps Fleming’s most interesting departure from the espionage genre is the fact that his protagonist was not a freelancer. Bulldog Drummond and the Saint were adventurers of independent means, the American ‘gumshoes’ were self-employed, the protagonists of the works of Buchan and Ambler were often hapless ordinary people caught up by chance in forces beyond their understanding. There had, of course, always been salaried policemen and government spies in thrillers. However, rarely, if ever, had there been a man like 007. Bond got entangled in the most outrageous adventures, but they resulted from his job as a civil servant and, like anybody who answers to an employer, he was subject to rules, process and routine. For a society that universal education and decreasing deference had made more knowing and less credulous, this placing of the hero within the same exigencies of existence with which the average mortal had to contend was an intriguing and pleasing step forward. Moreover, Bond’s government job raised the stakes: his missions involved not some common-or-garden delinquency but risk to the world order.

Despite his background knowledge, Fleming’s depiction of espionage work was in no way the most authentic. Even the convincing procedural detail that often led up to his fantastical developments and denouements were sometimes nonsensical. For instance, Duns observes, ‘In real-life espionage, you already have your intelligence officer or officers in the city involved and have a network of people all over the world. When there’s a crisis in Paris, then the person who speaks fluent French who’s been in Paris for three years deals with it. The idea that you send in this one guy into all these places all over the world – that’s a fantasy premise.’

However, the espionage paradigm Fleming created was the one to which the world took more than any other. From a point within around half a dozen years after Bond’s entrée, every espionage story would be compared to Fleming’s tales and, later, the films derived from them. It therefore came to feel the most natural paradigm even if it wasn’t the most authentic. The shadow it cast over the genre was so huge that spy novelists and filmmakers to this day fight off accusations of imitation when they adhere to it, and are perceived to be almost comically self-conscious when they deviate from it.

That was then. Today, sex is ubiquitous, gambling is legal, global travel and brand names affordable and lack of deferentialism pretty much the norm. If published for the first time today, the values of the Bond books would not inspire the wonder they once did.

But, then, the mantle of the James Bond paradigm for espionage tales was long ago passed from the books to the films, which – as well as distributing it more widely – heightened it, stylised it, sanitised it and continuously updated it. One could even make the claim that Fleming deserves little credit for the James Bond cinema construct, which was already largely out of his hands even before his death and which has been expanded, traduced, refined and toyed with ever since. Nonetheless, the essential idea of Bond purveyed by his creator – a preternaturally able, unusually handsome, sexually voracious, epicurean British secret agent granted a licence to kill by his employer – has survived all the upheavals and redrawings of approach necessitated by box-office returns, alterations in actors and changes in cultural standards across the course of half a century. This must count for something in terms of Fleming’s legacy, to say the least.

As must one thing missing from the above list of ingredients in Fleming’s Bond books: high-grade writing. The genre wasn’t necessarily bereft of such before Bond. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and several post-World War II novels by Graham Greene are espionage tomes few intellectuals would be ashamed to have on their bookshelves. In an unusually non-self-deprecating comment, Fleming stated that his objective was ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’. He would never have been so immodest as to state whether he felt he had been successful in this object, but he assuredly was. He managed to weld the outlandish plots of pulpier writers to the smooth-flowing, economical, evocative and often exquisite prose style of the type of novelists who won literary awards.

While Fleming’s skill may be irrelevant to the millions who continue to flock to Bond films – most of whom have probably never read a Bond novel – it’s to be doubted that Bond would have become a filmable proposition without the springboard to mass public attention provided by the author’s classy template.

Moreover, the original literary incarnation of Bond has a purity and legitimacy no film – however well made – can ever claim. Not for nothing did, post-Roger Moore, ‘I went back to the books’ become a mantra for actors taking on the role of 007. This was not just an implicit repudiation of the way the film franchise had sagged into softness over the course of the seventies and eighties but an acknowledgement of the power and lodestar status of the source material.