One of the highlights of Lyon & Turnbull’s Rare Books, Maps, Manuscripts & Photographs sale on 19 June 2024 is a superb presentation copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, warmly inscribed on publication by Fleming to his fellow newspaperman Ion Smeaton Munro in gratitude for helping him complete what he modestly calls his ‘extra-mural opus’.
Ian Fleming’s wartime employment in the naval intelligence division is well known as the backdrop to his creation of the world’s most famous spy. After a youth marked by a series of false starts, including ejection from Sandhurst, failure in the Foreign Office entrance examinations, and a lacklustre stint in stockbroking, Fleming must have been contemplating a bleak future before war intervened and proved the making of him.
Despite having no obvious qualifications, except perhaps a talent for languages, Fleming was invited to become personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence. Swift promotion followed, and Fleming was soon one of a handful of people in the country to be given access to Ultra intelligence, while focusing on black propaganda and an operation, codenamed Goldeneye, targeted at maintaining espionage networks in Spain in the event of a German invasion.
Other traits which Fleming shared with his fictional creation included a taste for fine living and casual liaisons, but the author was strictly a desk officer, which Bond emphatically was not. Fleming was, however, surrounded by men of action, both during the war and after it, any number of whom might have provided the model for Bond’s exploits.
