Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Shakespeare (The Dancer Upstairs) delivers an exemplary biography of British spy novelist Ian Fleming (1908--1964). The scion of a wealthy banking family, Fleming was an indifferent student and at age 23 flunked the Foreign Office exam, after which he became a Reuters correspondent. After WWII began, Fleming used his contacts to join the Naval Intelligence Division as a lieutenant commander. Though Fleming's war service remains shrouded in mystery, Shakespeare builds a strong case that the novelist authored the memo that inspired operation Mincemeat, which fed the Axis powers bogus plans to distract from the upcoming Allied invasion of Sicily. After the war, Fleming became a Sunday Times editor, and in 1952, he wrote the spy thriller Casino Royale. The book's suave protagonist, James Bond, eclipsed Fleming's own fame after his death by heart attack at age 56. Shakespeare offers shrewd insight into the enduring appeal of Bond ("The lower the sun has sunk on the empire that Bond was born into, the more radiant his glow") and how Fleming's personal life shaped 007, suggesting the character reflects the heroism of Fleming's father, a major who died in WWI, as well as Fleming's own "cavalier treatment of women" (Fleming had many affairs during his fractious marriage to Ann Charteris). This will stand as the definitive biography of the popular author. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
Nicholas Shakespeare's elegant biography of the James Bond author Ian Fleming takes its subtitle from a journalist's observation, quoted halfway through, that its subject was "for a moment of time, a complete man" while working for British naval intelligence in the second world war. Yet you can't help read it as a promise to give the reader what was left out of previous biographies such as John Pearson's crisp, more portable authorised life from 1966. And is there a claim, too, for the alpha male credentials of the man called "Flemingway" by his friend Noël Coward? Journalist, stockbroker, thriller writer and - like his famous creation - a playboy and 70-a-day smoker, who died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 56 after a plagiarism row over the origins of Thunderball, the ninth Bond novel. After a dutiful account of how Fleming's Scottish financier grandfather became a millionaire - later cutting Fleming and his brothers out of his will - Shakespeare gets going with his subject's troubled boyhood in the shadow of his father's death in the first world war. Family friends in Switzerland take his education in hand after hasty exits from Eton (hanky-panky with a woman) and Sandhurst (gonorrhoea). His exams aren't good enough for the Foreign Office; an engagement to a Swiss lover ends amid maternal threats to cut off his allowance. He falls on his feet at Reuters - it was that kind of life - further honing his knack for a scoop at the Sunday Times, a handy source of contacts for his war work. Shakespeare goes to great lengths to dispel the idea that Fleming's service, occluded by state-sanctioned secrecy, was just "in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays" Testimony woven from diaries, papers and interviews gives the book a flavour of oral history. Shakespeare goes to great lengths - not least tracking down a 94-year-old veteran, the last surviving member of a covert commando unit that Fleming organised - to dispel the idea that Fleming's service, occluded by state-sanctioned secrecy, was just "in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays". The book's first half puts the future author at the heart of military and journalistic history - a search for German weapons of mass destruction; the race to get an inside scoop on the Cambridge spies - as well as the bedroom shenanigans of the English well-to-do. (Shakespeare, who encourages us at one point to smile at the mention of a "germanely" named Nazi admiral, Assmann, shows his assumptions of his audience when he writes confidently of "that small, turn-of-the-century intellectual clique, the Souls".) Fleming may be "the man behind James Bond", in the subtitle of Andrew Lycett's 1995 biography, but Shakespeare's project, you sense, is partly to say there's more to him. Eager to prove Fleming's interest beyond the reasons that will draw most of his readers to the book, he is almost comically insistent on the degree to which his subject was ahead of the curve. Not only might he have sparked the idea of creating the CIA - in a memo written when the US-UK special relationship was being forged - but he also came up with the idea of putting a Christmas tree from Oslo in Trafalgar Square. As for the dozen Bond novels that poured out of Fleming after 1953's Casino Royale - written in a month in his winter bolthole in Jamaica a year earlier - they were, in Shakespeare's telling, essentially the literary expression of a midlife crisis accelerated by the encroachments of fatherhood and a faithless union as the third husband of Ann Charteris. They had got together with an affair that caused a high-society scandal during her previous marriage to the Daily Mail heir Esmond Harmsworth; she later cheated on Fleming with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who told him that the "sex, violence, alcohol" formula of the Bond novels was "to one who leads such a circumscribed life as I do, irresistible". Fleming, injecting the American dirt of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels into the English thriller, launched 007 on what Shakespeare calls the "spam-munching gloom of Attlee's Britain", writing (Fleming told his publisher) in order to make "as much money... as possible" and to have "as much fun as I personally can". Respectable sales rocketed when JFK took a shine to From Russia, with Love - and the movies were yet to come. While Fleming was self-deprecating - telling Raymond Chandler the Bond novels were "straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety" - he was proud enough to greet the director of the first Bond movie, Dr No, by telling him: "So they've decided on you to fuck up my work." "Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt," Bond thinks in Casino Royale; he sees luck "as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued". Squint enough and Fleming took some care to cast his main character in ironic light. Early in that novel, the reader gets a fly-on-the-wall thrill of watching fieldwork in action, with the scene of theatrical care Bond takes to ensure his hotel room isn't being searched; but soon enough his French sidekick turns up to let Bond know his upstairs neighbours have been listening in to his every move. In Shakespeare's biography, the novels are mostly a source of supporting quotation - he doesn't get bogged down in questions of what it means to read Bond now, confining himself to a remark on how his "cavalier treatment of women... carried the sexual climate of the Blitz into the austerity of the cold war, and was less modern perhaps than it was later cracked up to be". And perhaps there's no need for his defenders to overstate the case for Fleming's novelistic subtlety. Bond has always been shaped by a collective amnesia that allows us to make him what we wish him to be at any given moment; when he parachuted into the Olympic opening ceremony with the queen, it was as the best of British, not as a connoisseur of (Fleming's words) "the sweet tang of rape". The novels, in a way, are irrelevant to 007, but the course of history would surely have run otherwise had Fleming not had the foresight to change his protagonist's name from the original "James Secretan" - Fleming's typescript revision perhaps his most significant literary act.
Kirkus Review
A fresh appraisal of the creator of James Bond. In the introduction, award-winning biographer and novelist Shakespeare recounts how he was approached by the Fleming Estate to write another biography of Ian Fleming (1908-1964) using family materials never before seen that shed "new light that leads to new conclusions about the man." Indeed, writes the author, "under the jarring surface of his popular image I could see a different person." Drawing on these materials, diaries, and numerous interviews, Shakespeare neatly weaves the dramatic history of Fleming's times into a very detailed narrative of his rise to success. Shakespeare is insightful in his explorations of how Fleming's experiences influenced his books: his Scottish roots; his privileged, loveless upbringing; expensive private boarding school and then Eton, which furnished many characters' names. After a brief, difficult stay at Sandhurst and a bout of gonorrhea, he was off to Austria and Switzerland, preparing for a possible government job and honing his considerable language and wooing skills. Working for Reuters, he was sent to Stalin's Soviet Union to cover a high-profile trial of British engineers. After a lucrative banking job--when he got the book-collecting bug and had numerous affairs--he was selected for "intelligence work, the secret war that could save lives." Six years as the personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Shakespeare writes, "gave him the secret material that he drew on to write his novels." He emerged a "complete man," and "he would spend the rest of his life in peacetime, trying to recapture moments of time like these." Living in Jamaica, Fleming began Casino Royale: "Ian took the cards he had been dealt and slipped them to Bond." Later, with some chagrin, a wealthy, unhealthy Fleming said, "I have become the slave of a serial character." Shakespeare leaves no stone unturned in this exhaustive, highly readable biography. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This is the first authorized biography of Fleming, the man known primarily as the creator of James Bond (although he did a lot of other things first) since 1966. Though there have been many books about the Bond creator, what sets this one apart, in addition to the legitimacy of authorization, is that Shakespeare (The Sandpit, 2020) was granted access to the Fleming family's private documents. Approaching the biography with the flair of a novelist, Shakespeare shows us the pre-Bond Fleming in lively detail. Fleming spent only the final dozen years of his life as a writer, and Shakespeare's approach helps readers understand how Fleming became the man who created Bond. It's an absolutely fascinating story full of astonishing career moves: Fleming was a reporter stationed in Russia and Germany; he was instrumental in the planning of several major Allied operations during World War Two; he ran a unit of intelligence-gathering commandos; and that's just a small taste. This richly detailed, well-documented, and exquisitely written biography is highly recommendable to fans of Fleming, Bond, or both.