The Affair Of The Lethal Ornithologist

"He touched her for the last time and then they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives."-- Moonraker, Ian Fleming, 1955

The name of the character was a private joke, bestowed by the author in good humor but with the sincere hope his readers would consider it the dullest possible name a sophisticated and ruthless killer could have been given by unimaginative parents...

Lancaster had the sort of problem which occasionally pops up in the better classes.  His lawyer grandfather entered the banking business in 1873, by way of the Scottish American Investment Trust.  Other financial deals followed; new firms were created.  The old chap would die the third richest man in the United Kingdom.  Not that this was of any real use to Lancaster: the prankster's mother now controlled most of the fortune and was of a mind not to overindulge a playboy son with too much cash before she left this world to join her late father-in-law...

Ian Fleming in a publicity photo used by Signet Books

Ian Lancaster Fleming: an heir without available millions...

He was also an avid bird watcher with a home on Jamaica.  Another island resident was an American-born ornithologist, James Bond, a mild-mannered fellow who had penned Birds of the West Indies, a guidebook Fleming knew well.  Like the future novelist, Bond briefly tried his hand at banking.  But once a man has seen the Orinoco River basin and pursued its feathered denizens, there is no place for gray pinstripe suits...

A Spy Is Born

Fleming contacted Mr Bond and asked permission to use his name for the protagonist of Casino Royale, a novel about international skullduggery.  The birdwatcher replied, "Fine with it."  Bond's agreement solved one of Fleming's immediate problems... 

Another problem, he later claimed, was the reason he decided to write a book.  He had the jitters.  He was engaged to Anne Charteris, widow of the third Baron O'Neill and recently divorced from Viscount Rothermere.  Fleming and Charteris had been mad about one another since meeting in the 1930s.  On the unfortunate occasion of her first husband's death, Anne expected Ian to propose.  His feet ran cold and she married another.  This second spouse preferred his wife not become pregnant by another man but Anne was not a girl bound by antiquated conventions...

Anne Charteris, Viscountess Rothermere 

Educated at Eton and on the continent at universities in Munich and Geneva, Fleming's greatest accomplishment (other than finally wedding Anne Charteris in a ceremony witnessed by friend and neighbor Noel Coward) may have been his wartime service to the United Kingdom... 

The fact he excelled at the business of war came as a surprise for those who knew him best.  True enough, his mother and grandfather thought he would make a dashing officer as had his deceased father, a Member of Parliament who improved his family's already considerable social standing by being killed in action during the First World War.  Unfortunately, Ian's appointment to the Military Academy at Sandhurst resulted not in an Army commission but rather expulsion for contracting a social disease...

Mortified, Mum sent her son to a boarding school in Austria where it became apparent he had a knack for learning languages.  He did not lose his talent for displeasing his mother simply by going to the Continent.  In Geneva, he became engaged  to Monique de Bottomes.  Evelyn St Croix Rose Fleming instructed her son to break off the affair, hinting at dire financial consequences if he failed to do this.  The lovely French-Swiss bachelorette remained a mademoiselle as 1931 became 1932...

Adolfo Celi as Emilio Largo, SPECTRE Number 2

Grandfather Robert and his daughter-in-law refused to give up hope.  Ian entered the banking world by gaining employment with the firm of Cull and Company in 1933.  He honed highly-developed skills as a heavy drinker, chain smoker, and womanizer but learned little about investments.  This was a few months after he returned to London from Moscow where he covered show trials of Joseph Stalin's political opponents for British newspapers.  Evelyn Fleming had personally twisted the arm of Sir Roderick Jones, family friend and head of the Reuter's news agency, to give her son a chance.  Before taking a stab at journalism, Ian thought he might have a go at Foreign Service.  Government bureaucrats unfortunately required he pass the written exam when simply taking it should have sufficed...

Artwork for "Thunderball"

Banking was not Fleming's forte.  Within two years, he moved on to Rowe and Pitman and four years of mediocre performance as a stockbroker.  Then he had lunch in May 1939 with another well-heeled family acquaintance.  Rear Admiral John Godfrey needed a personal assistant desperately...

No one, including Godfrey or Fleming, expected what followed when the spectacularly unqualified Fleming accepted Godfrey's job offer...

Admiral Godfrey was a blunt man who did not mind ruffling feathers.  This trait made it difficult for him to play well with others.  He felt Fleming would make an excellent liaison to the many offices (the Secret Intelligence Service, the Political Warfare Executive, the Special Operations Executive, the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Prime Minister, etc) where Godfrey had long since worn out his welcome.  Fleming succeeded admirably in convincing egomaniacs to work together...

Admiral John Godfrey

Fleming also realized war with Germany would happen within months.  He went to work devising plans to disrupt Axis operations and lure German surface ships and U-Boats toward British mines.  Less than thirty days prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Fleming and Godfrey provided the Navy with 29 suggestions designed to hamper the Nazi fleet.  One later formed the basis of Operation Mincemeat, a 1943 deception that allowed the Allies to invade Italy from North Africa...

The former banker-stockbroker-journalist noticed other deficiencies in British military planning.  Most glaring was a lack of readily available country studies for areas where the Armed Forces would likely engage in combat.  Godfrey and Fleming contacted Kenneth Mason, an Oxford University geographer, early in 1940 to solve the problem...

A James Bond Thriller

Later in the war, Fleming was given an assignment to work with "Wild Bill" Donovan, President Roosevelt's envoy to the British Intelligence community.  He traveled to Washington and helped Donovan draft a blueprint for the Office of the Coordinator of Information.  This bureaucracy later became the Office for Strategic Services (OSS) which ultimately morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)...

Working with the Yanks led to Fleming's attendance at an Anglo-American Intelligence Summit on Jamaica in 1942.  He'd found his earthly paradise.  Keeping a promise to himself to return, he built a house he called Goldeneye on the island shortly after the Axis Powers surrendered.  Navy service made Ian Fleming a valuable commodity in the post-war economy.  After the Kemsley newspaper group agreed to an annual three month holiday as part of his employment contract, he accepted the firm's offer to oversee its overseas operations as Foreign Manager.  Time to be spent with Anne at Goldeneye...

Ian Fleming was a sophisticated man who craved action, nightlife, exotic casinos, and restaurants... 

Supermodel Maud Adams as Octopussy in a film very very
loosely based on a Fleming novella of the same name

He, perhaps surprisingly, also loved to read and devoured "useful books" with the same passion he sipped fine wines.  The bibliophile in Fleming led to a personal collection of over 1000 carefully chosen titles.  Such affection for the written word may have been a reason he despised "Casino Royale," the first novel he described as clumsy and oafish.  It didn't help matters a friend read it and suggested he submit it to publishers under a pseudonym since it was not the sort of material one would associate with a gentleman's name...

Critics agreed with Fleming's friend.  Many people, especially in the more conservative parts of America, saw filmed versions of the Bond stories as a British import on a par with the Beatles as proof of a decline in moral values.  They saw nothing but sex and violence and sadism.  Disdain for Bond and his adventures continues today with those who see the character as no more than a cavalier anti-feminist interested in bedroom conquests...

My first personal experience with James Bond came on a sunny April afternoon in 1965 when I picked up a shiny copy of Thunderball, guaranteed complete and unabridged by Signet Books.  The novel had been re-released to coincide with its film version.  A new cover emphasized Claudine Auger's sexy swimsuit for the movie version of the story.  Auger, Miss France in 1958, played the role of Domino, mistress to sinister SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo.  I read the paperback quickly.  And I knew I would have to read more Fleming books... 

Miss France 1958 with actor Sean Connery
on the set of "Thunderball"

Largo had killed Domino's brother. He tortures her when he suspects her infidelity, tying her hands and feet to the corners of a bed in the yacht, Disco Volante.  Placing a bucket of ice cubes at his side, he puffs a cigar until the tip glows red.  Next, he bends over the nude body of this stunningly beautiful woman in a scene the author leaves largely to the reader's imagination... 

Domino will take her slow and grisly revenge on Largo in the placid azure waters of the Bahamas, using a spear gun and an octopus, in a scene the author does not leave to the reader's imagination, as she and her lover, James Bond, foil SPECTRE's  scheme to detonate a hijacked hydrogen bomb in Miami...

Tarot deck used in film version of "Live and Let Die"

Bond and Domino will eventually part ways.  I suspect it was her choice.  Fleming rarely speaks of those goodbyes between Agent 007, licensed to kill, and the many women the English spy loved.  He does so in Moonraker.  The excerpt quoted at the start of this essay is Bond's farewell to policewoman Gala Brand.  She and James have destroyed a maniacal Nazi madman who assumed the identity of English country squire Sir Hugo Drax.  The fiend intended to incinerate London with a homemade atomic bomb.  The plot begins to unravel when Bond's boss suspects Drax of cheating at cards at the club where both hold memberships.  A man who cheats at cards, M tells the agent he loves like a son, is capable of unspeakable evil...

Drax is dead.  England is safe.  Her savior's heart leaps for joy as he meets his date for a lazy lunch.  But what does that heart feel when a beautiful woman says "Do you see that young man over there, James?  I intend to marry him tomorrow afternoon..."

"The name's Bond.  James Bond."

Note: All photographs and artwork located through Google Images without additional source or ownership information.