I became an Ian Fleming aficionado when I was a pre-teen in the early 1960s after watching the late, great Scot actor Sean Connery portray Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond in the first two Bond films, Dr. No and From Russia With Love.
Watching the two great cinematic thrillers led me to join a book club and receive the introductory offer of a 9-volume set of Ian Fleming’s novels, which were the first nine books in my now quite extensive library. Reading the first two Fleming novels, I was pleased to discover that the novels were darker and more complicated that the films.
A short time later, I heard on the radio in my father's car that Ian Fleming had died.
Years later, in the early 1980s, I was thrilled to spend a week with my wife at Fleming's villa Goldeneye in Jamaica, where he wrote all of the James Bond thrillers.
As History.com notes, Ian Fleming led an interesting, if all too short, life:
On
August 12, 1964, the British author and journalist Ian Fleming, creator of
James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy, dies of a heart attack at
age 56 in Kent, England.
Fleming’s
series of novels about the debonair Agent 007, based in part on their dashing
author’s real-life experiences, spawned one of the most lucrative film
franchises in history. Ian Lancaster Fleming was born into a well-to-do family
in London on May 29, 1908. As an adult, he worked as a foreign correspondent, a
stockbroker and a personal assistant to Britain’s director of naval
intelligence during World War II–experiences that would all provide fodder for
his Bond novels.
You can
read the rest of the piece via the below link:
James Bond creator Ian Fleming dies - HISTORY
You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on Ian Fleming's war and two of my Crime Beat columns on Ian Fleming via the below links:
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Iconic James Bond Character
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: The Ian Fleming and James Bond Phenomenon
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