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Ian Lancaster Fleming (May 28, 1908 – August 12, 1964) was a British author and journalist as well as Second World War Naval Officer, best remembered for writing the series of novels featuring the character James Bond, as well as the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Biography
Fleming was educated at Durnford School in Dorset, Eton College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He won the Victor Ludorum at Eton two years running, something that had only been achieved once before him. He found Sandhurst to be uncongenial, and after an early departure from there, his mother sent him to study languages on the continent. He first went to a small private establishment in Kitzbühel, Austria run by the Adlerian disciples Ernan Forbes Dennis and his American wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, to improve his German and prepare him for the Foreign Office exams, then to Munich University, and, finally, to the University of Geneva to improve his French. He was unsuccessful in his application to join the Foreign Office, and subsequently worked as a sub-editor and journalist for the Reuters news service, including time in 1933 in Moscow, and then as a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, in Bishopsgate. He was a member of Boodle's the gentleman's club in St. James's Street, from 1944 until his death in 1964. His marriage in Jamaica in 1952 to Anne Charteris, daughter of Lord Wemyss and former wife of Viscount Rothermere, was witnessed by his friend, playwright Noel Coward. World War IIIn 1939, on the eve of World War II, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, recruited Fleming (then a reserve subaltern in the Black Watch) as his personal assistant. He was commissioned first as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve lieutenant, and subsequently promoted to Lieutenant Commander, then Commander.
In Naval Intelligence, Fleming conceived of Operation Ruthless, a plan – not executed – for capturing the German naval version of the Wehrmacht's Enigma communications encoder. He also conceived of a plan to use British occultist Aleister Crowley to trick Rudolf Hess into attempting to contact a faux cell of anti-Churchill Englishmen in Britain, but this plan was not used because Rudolf Hess had flown to Scotland in an attempt to broker peace behind Hitler's back. Anthony Masters's book The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight asserts Fleming conceived the plan that lured Hess into flying to Scotland, in May 1941, to negotiate Anglo–German peace with Churchill, and resulted in Hess's capture: this claim has no other source. Fleming also formulated Operation Goldeneye, a plan to maintain communication with Gibraltar as well as a plan of defence in the unlikely event that Spain joined the Axis Powers and, together with Germany, invaded the Mediterranean colony. In June 1941 General William Donovan requested that Fleming write a memorandum describing the structure and functions of a secret service organisation; for that, Fleming was rewarded with a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver pistol inscribed, "For Special Services." Parts of this memorandum were later used in the official charter for the OSS, which was dissolved in 1945 following the end of World War II; the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, was created two years later. In 1942 Fleming formed an Auxiliary Unit known as 30AU or 30 Assault Unit that he nicknamed his own "Red Indians"; it was specifically trained in lock-picking, safe-cracking, forms of unarmed combat, and other techniques and skills for collecting intelligence. He meticulously planned all their raids, alongside Patrick Dalzel-Job (one of the Inspirations for James Bond), going so far as to memorize aerial photographs so that their missions could be planned in detail; because of their successes in Sicily and Italy, 30AU was greatly enlarged and Fleming's direct control was increased before D-Day. Fleming even visited 30AU in the field during and after Operation Overlord, especially after the Cherbourg attack, in which he felt that the unit had been incorrectly used as a frontline force rather than as an intelligence gathering unit, and from then on tactics were revised. It is often reported, and perpetuated by Fleming, that he travelled to Whitby, Ontario to train at Camp X, a top secret training school for Allied forces. However, this is most likely untrue, as no evidence of Fleming having been at Camp X has ever been uncovered, nor do any of the staff recall Fleming ever having been there.[2] Writing careerAs the DNI's personal assistant, Fleming's intelligence work provided the background for his spy novels. In 1953, he published his first novel, Casino Royale. In it he introduced secret agent James Bond, also famously known by his code number, 007, which indicates that he has a licence to kill. Bond appears with the beautiful heroine Vesper Lynd, who was modeled on SOE agent Christine Granville. Ideas for his characters and settings for Bond came from his time at Boodle's. Blade's, Bond's club, is partially modelled on Boodle's and the name of Bond's arch enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, was based on a fellow member's name. Fleming's Bond novels were never wildly successful, but when President John F. Kennedy included From Russia With Love on a list of his favorite books, sales quickly jumped. Fleming wrote 14 Bond books in all: Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds are Forever (1956), From Russia With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), For Your Eyes Only (1960), Thunderball (1961), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964), The Man With The Golden Gun (1965), and Octopussy/The Living Daylights (1966). In the late 1950s, the financial success of Fleming's James Bond series allowed him to retire to Goldeneye, his Jamaican estate. The name of the house and estate where he wrote his novels honours Operation Goldeneye, an anti-Nazi operation he had created during his wartime career. The origin of the name is clearly from his wartime career, rather than being derived from some other likely sources, such the place name Oracabessa (Spanish for 'head of gold') or the novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, by Carson McCullers. The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) stylistically departs from other books in the Bond series as it is written in the first person perspective of the (fictional) protagonist, Vivienne Michel, whom Fleming credits as co-author. It is the story of her life, up until when James Bond serendipitously rescues her from the wrong circumstance at the wrong place and time. Besides writing twelve novels and nine short stories featuring James Bond, Fleming also wrote the children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In 1961, he sold the film rights to his already published as well as future James Bond novels and short stories to Harry Saltzman, who, with Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, co-produced the film version of Dr. No (1962). For the cast, Fleming suggested friend and neighbour Noël Coward as the villain Dr. Julius No, and David Niven or, later, Roger Moore as James Bond. Both were rejected in favour of Sean Connery, Broccoli's choice. Fleming also suggested his cousin, Christopher Lee, either as Dr. No or even as James Bond. Although Lee was selected for neither role, in 1974 he portrayed assassin Francisco Scaramanga, the eponymous villain of The Man with the Golden Gun. Neither Saltzman nor Broccoli expected "Dr. No" to be much of a success, but it was an instant sensation and sparked a spy craze through the rest of the 1960s. The successful "Dr. No" was followed by "From Russia with Love" (1963), the second and last James Bond movie Ian Fleming saw. During the Istanbul Pogroms, which many Greek and some Turkish scholars attributed to secret orchestrations by Britain, Fleming wrote an account of the events, "The Great Riot of Istanbul", which was published in the Sunday Times, on 11 September 1955. Later lifeImage:LifeFleming.jpg Ian Fleming. LIFE Cover. Fleming was a bibliophile who collected a library of books that had, in his opinion, "started something", and therefore were significant in the history of Western Civilization. He concentrated on science and technology, e.g. On the Origin of Species, yet he also collected sociological milestones such as Mein Kampf and Scouting for Boys. He was a major lender to the 1963 exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man. Currently, some six hundred books from Fleming's collection are in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A. Fifty-six-year-old Ian Fleming died of a heart attack the morning of August 12 1964, in Canterbury, Kent, England, U.K., and later was buried in the churchyard cemetery of Sevenhampton village, near Swindon. Upon their own deaths, Fleming's widow (Ann Geraldine Mary Fleming (1913–1981)) and son (Caspar Robert Fleming (1952–1975)) were buried next to him. Selected worksJames Bond books
1 First U.S. paperback edition was retitled You Asked for It. Children's story
Non-fiction
Unfinished/unpublished works
Biographical films
See also
References
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