Ian Fleming

As the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth approaches, there’s no dearth of hoopla happening over both the author and his famous spy. Over on the Guardian blog, Sam Jordison talks about why the James Bond novels, though low-brow, should be considered classics. I have to agree with him, though perhaps Fleming’s wife wouldn’t; she felt he was “hammering out pornography.”

All novelists find inspiration in reality, but Ian Fleming, more than most, firmly anchored the imagined world of James Bond to the people, things and places he knew. The characters, plots, places, machines and situations in the James Bond stories are so firmly embedded in fact that it is often hard to spot where the real world of Ian Fleming ends and the fictional world of James Bond begins.

IT COST the creator of James Bond his health and £50,000. Now, more than 40 years later, a legal battle about the authorship of Thunderball has claimed another victim with the pulping of a book about Ian Fleming.

Hurrah! Sebastian Faulks has been commissioned to write another James Bond novel for the upcoming Fleming centenary. I could get excited over Devil May Care, even if Bond is an old codger now.