Free For Your Eyes Only by Ben Macintyre Page A

plots, although the names sometimes came before the plots,’ said his friend Ivar Bryce (whose own name would be adopted by Bond as an alias in
Live and Let Die
). ‘He enjoyed using the names of his friends, or even those he only knew slightly.’ Or not at all. People were named after things, and things were named after people. His lover in later life, Blanche Blackwell, gave him a small boat named
Octopussy
, which became the name of a man-eating pet octopus in the short story. In rather ungallant return, Fleming named the ancient guano tanker in
Dr No
the
Blanche
. The crime boss Marc-Ange Draco in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
is named after El Draco, the Spanish name for the English privateer Sir Francis Drake – a reference picked up years later by J. K. Rowling for her Hogwarts antihero, Draco Malfoy. Rosa Klebb (the Russian for bread) was partly based on Colonel Rybkin of Soviet intelligence. Major Boothroyd, the secret service armourer, is named in honour of Geoffrey Boothroyd, the gun expert who providedFleming with invaluable technical advice. Ernie Cuneo, a hard-nosed New York lawyer and friend of Fleming, found himself turned into Ernie Cureo, the Las Vegas taxi-driver and undercover CIA agent in
Diamonds Are Forever
; his American friends Tommy and Oatsie Leiter became Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA ally. One of the more charming christenings was that of Vesper Lynd in
Casino Royale
. One afternoon in Jamaica, Fleming and Ivar Bryce visited a romantically isolated mansion on the coast and were ushered in to meet ‘The Colonel’. A little later, a dusty butler appeared and announced, ‘Vespers are served’, while dishing up a powerful concoction of rum, herbs, fruit and ice. Ever after, Fleming associated the word Vesper with a heady sort of glamour, and made her Bond’s first lover. Darko Kerim, the extrovert secret service agent in
From Russia with Love
, was based on Nazim Kalkavan, Fleming’s guide to Istanbul when he covered an Interpol conference there in 1956.
    Fleming teased his friends and acquaintances by putting them, their names, or their characteristics in his books. But the character he most pillaged for material was himself. It is a measure of Fleming’s introspection that he could identify his own virtues as well as his vices, and inject them both into the personality of James Bond. In Bond’s obituary in
The Times
, from
You Only Live Twice
, Fleming cannot resist the opportunity to write his own epitaph, with a knowing glimmer of self-congratulation:
    To serve the confidential nature of his work, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of commander.

004
The Plots: From Hot War to Cold War

    Â 
    004
The Plots: From Hot War to Cold War
    James Bond is a warrior of the Cold War. Yet in many ways – in attitude, sensibility and even equipment – he is a creation of the Second World War. As with Fleming himself, that war shaped and toughened him, and with the ending of that conflict, in common with many combatants, he finds himself adrift. In
From Russia with Love
, Bond’s war nostalgia is made explicit: ‘He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.’
    Ian Fleming shared with his brother, Peter, a fear that Britain, having triumphed over Nazism, was becoming soft and irrelevant, a land of small minds and smaller dreams. In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as theEmpire declined. In Fleming’s words: ‘The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him . . . in his particular line of