r/Crazy_retro_stories

A biography of Fleming was being published that fall, so Life started running an abridgement. Even the abridgement is too long to post here, so here are the twelve most interesting excerpts:

1. After Fleming’s father was killed in World War I, his will left Fleming’s mother unusually sweeping financial control over her children—enough  to disinherit any of them.

Valentine Fleming, a fond father, was particularly attached to his second son and usually found time to write him a postcard from France. The last one arrived at the end of the Easter holidays in 1917. On May 20, Major Fleming was killed in action. He received a posthumous D.S.O. and left a gross estate of £265,596, then worth about $1.3 million. He also gave his widow sweeping powers to alter the terms of the will with respect to the children—in effect, she could disinherit any of them if she liked.

1. At Eton, Fleming was overshadowed by his older brother Peter, so he stopped trying to compete and deliberately made eccentricity and individuality his way of standing out.

At Eton, Ian was inevitably outclassed and outdistanced by Peter. Ian solved the impasse in the only way he could: he no longer competed. And since he could not win success as a respectable and hard-working member of his house, he found other ways of achieving distinction. One was to concentrate on being an individual—a bit of a dandy, a bit of an eccentric. Rupert Hart-Davis, the publisher, remembers him as “something of a swell, walking down late for a breakfast of buttered eggs.” He was admired for his wit and for his caustic turn of phrase, but he liked to spend at least part of the day alone. He was popular, but most people were a little wary of him. It probably suited him that way.

1. Fleming started writing during the “golden time” at Kitzbühel in Austria

Undoubtedly Ian would have come to terms with a lot of the difficulties in his own time; but as it was, the most important thing Ernan Forbes Dennis and Phyllis Bottome did for him was to supply aim and direction. For the first time in his life he really began to read—social history, anthropology and the history of science and technology. Encouraged by Phyllis Bottome, he wrote an imaginative short story—Death, on Two Occasions. Years later, when he was ill and famous, he wrote a letter in which he referred to those early days at Kitzbühel as “that golden time when the sun always shone.” He loved the Tyrol, the skiing, the climbing, the freedom. And the girls.

1. Kitzbühel was a turning point in Fleming’s attitude toward women (which is a big part of the Bond books)

The English girls Fleming had known up to then seem to have been either prudish or mercenary, boring or a source of trouble, and his frequently expressed objections to Englishwomen—that they never wash and have no idea of how to make love properly—already seem to have been born. It was all so different in Kitzbühel: no mothers to worry about, no moral codes to outrage. He looked at the girls and they fell into his lap. One of the women who knew him then says, “He was quite ruthless about girls, or perhaps a more apt word is absent-minded. Women were all a bit of a joke for Ian, a treat to enjoy but not to make any sort of fuss about afterwards.”

1. As a young Reuters reporter in 1933, Fleming was sent to Moscow to cover the Soviet trial of six British engineers accused of espionage and “wrecking”

He stayed on with his mother in London, and through her finally got a job. Sir Roderick Jones, head of the Reuters news agency, agreed to see him, liked the look of him and offered him a trial as a reporter. Fleming was lucky; after a year of routine work he was sent to Moscow to cover the trial of six British engineers who had been arrested by the Soviet secret police in March 1933 on charges of espionage and wrecking. An inexperienced reporter, Fleming was up against formidably expert competition. But in the final days before the trial opened, with the rumors exhausted and hard facts still untapped, he demonstrated the advantage of an ingenious imagination. He began a fill-in story with the knowledgeable line, “When the big hands of Moscow’s 300 electric clocks reach the hour of six. . . .”

“How do you know there are 300?” asked another reporter.

“How do you know there aren’t?” said Fleming.

1. Before World War II, Fleming was already recording ideas about boredom, sex and the need for ever-stronger stimulation that became part of the James Bond formula

In the years just before World War II, he began to talk of “that awful boredom,” and he echoed this in Casino Royale: “The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored [James Bond] almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement.” Fleming wrote in one of his notebooks, “What happens is that, as with drugs, [a man] needs a stronger shot each time, and women are just women. The consumption of one woman is the consumption of all. You can’t double the dose.”

1. Fleming entered British Naval Intelligence in 1939 almost by chance

In May 1939 Fleming was invited to luncheon in London’s Carlton Grill by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, a man he had never met. Godfrey had been appointed Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, and he needed a personal assistant. A previous director, whose assistant had once been a stockbroker, told Godfrey he ought to look for a stockbroker too. Somehow Fleming was recommended.

At luncheon, Godfrey was impressed, for at 31 Ian Fleming was a striking young man. In addition to charm, vitality and a sense of adventure, he had acquired a certain confidence and an air of authority. But Godfrey wanted a chance to see him at work, and during July 1939, Fleming began visiting the Admiralty three or four afternoons a week. “Within a month,” says Godfrey, “he had a better all-round picture of the N.I.D. [Naval Intelligence Division] and its place in the Admiralty than most of the people who had been there for years.”

In July 1939 Ian was made a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and by the time war was declared on Sept. 3 he had created a place for himself, even though he had a total lack of awe for admirals, generals and air marshals.

1. Fleming became notorious for schemes that sounded half like future Bond plots

In the winter of 1939-40 London was full of secret organizations. The geniuses and crackpots were getting their chance at last: even First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had pet plans which left fiction far behind. The fantasist in Fleming fed on the contacts between Naval Intelligence and the cloak-and-dagger world of Special Operations Executive, an organization set up to carry out irregular operations such as parachuting men and weapons to resistance movements.

“A lot of Ian’s ideas,” says Admiral Denning, “were just plain crazy. . . . But a lot of them had just that glimmer of possibility in them. . . . Just before the Dieppe raid [in August 1942] he had the idea of sinking a great block of concrete with men inside it in the English Channel to keep watch on the harbor through periscopes. We never did it, of course, but it might have worked.”

He also evolved a scheme to taunt the enemy fleet into giving battle by beaming a torrent of insults to the German navy’s wavelength from a British cruiser. It had to be dropped because no cruiser with a sufficiently powerful transmitter was available.

In 1941 Fleming became aware of a certain Nazi, Otto Skorzeny, who two years later was to carry out the daring aerial rescue of Mussolini and later was to become the inspiration for Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker. Studying the loss of the island of Crete to airborne German troops, Fleming sensed that Skorzeny and his group had been given a special role. Although they landed in the first wave, they had taken no part in the main fighting. It seemed to Fleming that their job was to grab British secret material: maps, divisional orders, codes and equipment. They were the first Intelligence Commandos, and Fleming was convinced this was an idea which N.I.D. could copy.

The result was what became known as No. 30 Assault Unit—or, as Fleming liked to say, “my Red Indians.”

1. Fleming trained in sabotage, safe-blowing, lock-picking—but could not bring himself to pull the trigger during an assassination test

The school at Oshawa [Canada] provided Fleming with a lot of tricks which he was to pass on to James Bond. Yet, despite Fleming’s success, none of his instructors seemed to think that he would have made a satisfactory agent in the field.

“Look what happened at the end of the course,” Stephenson says. “We used to book this instructor a room in a cheap downtown hotel in Toronto. Then we’d give the trainee the name of this hotel and the room number and say that the man staying there was a dangerous enemy agent who had to be destroyed. We’d try to pressure him into thinking that it was a genuine killing. Now, one of the tricks this instructor had picked up was the ability to dodge a bullet—a sort of circus trick. If you fired at him from five yards he knew how to divert you sufficiently for the shot to go wide. Well, after the success Ian had been having on the course we were all interested to know what would happen, and I briefed him myself. I made sure his gun was loaded. I told him that the games were over now and this was serious. ‘Open that door, draw fast and shoot straight,’ I told him. Several of us were at the hotel watching when Ian arrived. He got as far as the landing, and then there he waited a long time. Then he went away. He apologized about it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I just couldn’t open that door. I couldn’t kill a man that way.’”

In real life Fleming liked to imagine that he had killed someone in the line of duty. To one friend he confided that the killing had been done with a sandbag. To another he hinted that he had performed the terrible deed by firing a small automatic. . . . Still another friend is convinced Ian slugged an agent of the wartime Vichy government in France and tipped him into the Marseilles harbor.

1. He indirectly helped come up with the OSS (predecessor of the CIA)

In June 1941 Fleming came nearest to living the life of high adventure he had always dreamed of. With Admiral Godfrey he made a top-secret trip to the U.S. to attempt to establish closer relations with American intelligence—a delicate matter, since the U.S. was not yet at war.

In Washington J. Edgar Hoover was uninterested in the Godfrey-Fleming mission; he already had his channels with the Canadian millionaire Sir William Stephenson, who represented British intelligence in the U.S. But in New York Stephenson received the admiral and the commander; Fleming immediately became a hero-worshiper of “Little Bill,” who opened up a whole new world to him. Stephenson was a master of the technology of subversion.

Back in Washington, Fleming disappeared for a couple of days, and when he finally returned to London he took with him a present from General “Wild Bill” Donovan, whom President Roosevelt had decided to appoint “Coordinator of Information.” It was a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver with the inscription, “For Special Services.” After the war Fleming would occasionally tell his friends that it was given to him by the father of the American Secret Service, without divulging what the “special services” were. But in a letter written a few years before he died, Fleming did say that he had spent some time in Donovan’s Washington home “writing the original charter” of the Office of Strategic Services.

1. The baccarat showdown in Casino Royale was inspired by a stopover in Lisbon.

During the stopover in Lisbon, Fleming played out the scene which was to grow in his imagination for 11 years until it formed the plot of his first book, Casino Royale.

Fleming himself has described how he got the idea of James Bond’s baccarat battle with Le Chiffre from a game he himself played in deadly earnest against a group of Nazis. However the reality seems to have been different. At the Lisbon gaming tables, Fleming did whisper to Admiral Godfrey, “Just suppose that those fellows over there are German agents!” But only a handful of Portuguese were present, the croupiers were bored, and Fleming played a long, unsuccessful game until he was cleaned out.

1. He microfilmed Japanese codeooks – another thing that got into Casino Royale in altered form

Stephenson even showed Fleming a little action and, while in Casino Royale, Fleming described the two missions which had earned his hero his double-O classification—a license to kill—one of them was the shooting of a Japanese cipher expert in New York. The death of the Japanese was a highly exaggerated account of an adventure in which Fleming took part with Stephenson. There was not a killing, but there was a Japanese cipher expert, in a Rockefeller Center office one floor below Stephenson’s. At 3 a.m. Fleming, Stephenson and two assistants “borrowed” the Japanese code books from the office safe and in no time at all got the code books microfilmed upstairs and returned to their exact place. To Stephenson it was a straightforward operation, to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.