I’m fairly pleased to report that I finished Nicholas Shakespeare’s 2023 biography of Ian Fleming, The Complete Man, a couple of days ago. Although I mentioned that I have a hardback copy a few days ago, it’s quite a thick, dense text, so I opted to be lazy and find an audio version too, enabling me to relax while getting through it. As a Bond fan, Fleming is still a historical figure who continues to intrigue me: obnoxious, arrogant, privileged, yet somehow also fascinating. For example, Shakespeare goes into a lot of detail about Fleming’s involvement with secret services during World War Two and the formation of 30AU and SOE, and you get a good idea of how such experiences could have lead to the creation of the character James Bond and the mythology surrounding him. For one, it was particularly clear the extent to which Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s intelligence boss during the war, was the basis for the character M. Shakespeare also takes care to place such information in quite a bit of contemporary context, updating the narrative with any relevant subsequent details. Thus I couldn’t help but get drawn in.

Shakespeare also includes a lot of cool details, such as about the meeting between Fleming and the actual James Bond, the Caribbean ornithologist. As I said about Andrew Lycett’s biography of the same writer, Fleming may have had his faults, but it is only through such background information that we can get any real understanding of the origins of a character which went on to be so prominent in popular culture. He may have been an arrogant snob and an anachronistic remnant of a fast fading empire, but the fact remains Fleming made a huge contribution not only to post-war literature and popular culture, but British history and wartime intelligence. Frankly, I find him as fascinating and enigmatic as the character he created, and biographies like this help bring that to light.