Ian Fleming

In September 1925 Ian Fleming received seven blackballs when his brother Peter put him up for membership in Pop, the exclusive Eton social club. The future author of the James Bond novels was 17. It must have rankled to be found not up to standard, not the right sort. He got his own back via Bond's arrogant perfection.

Fleming's life reads like a good novel. He was a scoundrel, a lowlife among the uppercrust, a borrower of other men's wives. In 1939, his great coup as a spy went awry when he was caught smuggling condoms out of the Soviet Union; his cunning idea was to have them analyzed to learn the state of the Soviet rubber industry. He was 30 and a bit old for a spy, really. In his novels he could fantasize about how a competent spy might operate. He named his hero James Bond after an ornithologist, an expert on the subject of West Indian birds, something Fleming was an expert about too, in a manner of speaking. Ian Fleming appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

007

Today's the birthday of Ian Fleming, the author of twelve James Bond novels, born in the posh Mayfair neighborhood of London in 1908. He appears seven times in A Book of Ages. Being blackballed from a social club at Eton, engaging in adultery and espionage (sometimes simultaneously) purchasing a book about the birds of the West Indies by an ornithologist named James Bond, and finally inventing the elaborate and enduring male fantasy which finally made him rich. A suave, companionable but cold-blooded man, Fleming was known to write polite thank-you notes to the husbands he was cuckolding. He died at age 56 of a heart attack, thereby certifying that he had one. He only saw one Bond film: Dr. No. He didn't particularly like the casting of Sean Connery.