IAN FLEMING. By Andrew Lycett

It always seems a crying shame to me whenever an author dies young, or rather prematurely. The protagonist here, Ian Fleming died in his mid-fifties and during his lifetime was producing a James Bond book every year...successfully. So what if he had lived till around 80 years old; how many more "new" authentic Bond novels would he have written and published? Some might deem this a trite observation, but consider hitherto very popular novelists like Agatha Christie and James Hadley Chase who lived till ripe old age, adding dozens of new works to their corpus in the last 30 years of their lives. But no matter. Ian Fleming made his mark, and continues to do so, especially with the staggering, mind-boggling success of the Bond movies over the decades. Most readers would of course want this particular biography to more or less start with Fleming and the Bond novels, which is certainly not the case here - and should not be. This is a proper biography, I think. It is only some 200 pages or so into this biography that the creation of the Bond novels starts to unfold. But the early part of this work is not without interest, especially in respect of history (personal and global), influences, and evolution. It saddens me a lot too, that Fleming during his lifetime only managed to see a couple or so of his own creation on the big screen! It would have been wonderful for him to have seen other actors like Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and even Lazenby breathing life into the larger than life indestructible sleuth he created. And the wonderful music in the movies too that festooned the screen versions of the likes of You Only Live Twice and Octopussy. But at least Ian Fleming has been immortalised in many ways too since his demise; this impressive book constitutes one of such ways.