“The name’s Secretan, James Secretan.” Doesn’t quite work, does it? Ian Fleming realised as much when he read through the draft of his first spy novel Casino Royale, scratched out the vaguely foreign surname, and created “James Bond”. He explained to a friend that his action hero needed a name that could be clearly shouted across a crowded beach. The new name was sturdy, memorable and ageless, and so too would the character be.
In this new biography of Fleming, commissioned and authorised by his estate, Nicholas Shakespeare chronicles this near-miss and other sound judgments that made Fleming’s spy books best-sellers and spawned the most successful film series in history. But the story of the 007 novels only kicks off halfway through this 800-page whopper, The Complete Man. That’s because Fleming didn’t find time to write until he was 44, and only wrote novels for the final 12 years of his life.
