Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming

Today on Far Future Horizons we present Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming starring Jason Connery, son of Sean Connery, the actor who launched his career to stellar heights by bringing Ian Fleming’s James Bond to the silver screen with the motion picture Dr. No in 1962. 

Jason Connery

Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming is a 1990 TV biographical film of the life of Ian Fleming an chronicles the fictionalized exploits of the famed British reporter who later in life created the character James Bond with his first novel Casino Royale.

Ian Fleming

Fleming took the name for his character from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, a Caribbean bird expert and author of the definitive field guide Birds of the West Indies; Fleming, a keen birdwatcher himself, had a copy of Bond's guide and he later explained to the ornithologist's wife that "It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born". He further explained that:

When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument ... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, (James Bond) is the dullest name I ever heard.

—Ian Fleming, The New Yorker, 21 April 1962

On another occasion Fleming said: "I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, '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."

Fleming based his fictional creation on a number of individuals he came across during his time in the Naval Intelligence Division during World War II, admitting that Bond "was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war".

Among those types was his brother, Peter, who had been involved in behind the lines operations in Norway and Greece during the war. Aside from Fleming's brother, a number of others also provided some aspects of Bond's make up, including Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, Patrick Dalzel-Job and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale.

Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming is available from Amazon.com.

Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming

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