That said, it’s a richer reading experience, written with Fleming-esque brio and insouciance, with a feeling for the tragic aspects of his life as well as the ironic comedy of it. The amount of new testimony Shakespeare has truffled up about a man nearly 60 years dead is dizzying; he has secured fruitful interviews with the often tight-lipped Fleming family. Fleming’s niece Gilly reports that she was only allowed to meet him when she was past 18 as he was such a demonic influence, with his womanising and drinking; but everybody Shakespeare speaks to who knew him well adored him. “Like him? I’d go down on the knees and say prayers for his afterlife,” says Len Deighton, not always easy to please.
Shakespeare, a spy novelist himself as well as the author of an outstanding biography of Bruce Chatwin, is an elegant writer, although the book is not free of the odd duff metaphor – “Fleming… is [often] left out of the picture entirely, like the missing comma in the film From Russia with Love” – or confusing sentence: “On 15 January 1910, [Fleming’s father] was elected Conservative and Unionist MP for Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Henley.”
The research here is impeccable, although Shakespeare mangles things slightly when he says that the first Bond dramatisation was a 1958 South African radio play “with a quiz show host as James Bond”: in fact, it was Bob Holness, then an actor and later famous as host of Blockbusters. Could a lack of knowledge about the career of Holness be a symptom of the same high seriousness that prevents Shakespeare from fully appreciating the Bond novels? He quotes much praise for Fleming’s books from the likes of Betjeman and Larkin, but conveys little sense of really enjoying them himself, and offers surprisingly little detailed analysis of them. Still, his enthusiasm for Fleming the man, if not Fleming the author, has been sufficient to produce a book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life.
It is, however, ultimately a sad story. After several years of so-so sales, when the Bond books finally caught the public imagination, Fleming was too ill to enjoy his new-found fame – “I’d swap the whole damned thing for a healthy heart” – and the phenomenal success of the early Bond films only took a further toll. He died in 1964 at 56. It was, writes Shakespeare, “as if Ian had become the girl in Goldfinger, coated with gold so that he could not breathe.”
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man is published by Harvill Secker at £30. To order your copy for £25, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books
