Ian Fleming

British · 1908 to 1964

Born on May 28, 1908, at 27 Green Street in Mayfair, Ian Lancaster Fleming was the second son of Valentine Fleming, Conservative MP for Henley, and Evelyn Rose. His father was killed by German shelling on the Western Front in May 1917, an obituary written by Winston Churchill appearing in The Times. The orphaned boy went to Durnford, then Eton, where he excelled at athletics and twice carried off the Victor Ludorum but feuded with his housemaster over hair oil, a car, and women. He spent a year at Sandhurst, brief stretches in Munich and Geneva, and then drifted through Reuters in Moscow and the City. The war made him. As personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Fleming planned Operation Goldeneye and helped run 30 Assault Unit, a commando intelligence team whose exploits he would later mine for fiction. In 1952, aged forty-four, sitting at his Jamaican estate Goldeneye in the weeks before his marriage to Anne Charteris, he began a thriller to distract himself. Casino Royale (1953) introduced Commander James Bond, an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service with a Beretta, a Bentley, and a taste for vodka martinis. Eleven more novels and two story collections followed, selling over a hundred million copies in his lifetime, the books drawing on the cigarettes, the gambling, the cars, and the snobbery he loved. He also wrote the children's tale Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964) for his son Caspar. A lifelong heavy smoker and drinker, Fleming suffered a fatal heart attack at Canterbury on August 12, 1964, his son's twelfth birthday, apologising to the ambulance crew for the trouble.