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Francine Matthews writes about Ian Fleming's role in British war intelligence and the basis for her novel Too Bad To Die.
I shouldn't blame Ian Fleming for my years in the CIA—probably John le Carré is responsible for those—but it's true that Fleming's character, James Bond, casts a long shadow over every woman who wants to be a spy. Bond Girls are so glamorous, and they die so horribly, tripping on their high heels with a gasp of "James!" as a sniper fires. My own training was more practical: dead drops, agent handling, escape and evasion, explosives—but I was allowed to carry a lipstick that perfectly matched my field camouflage.
I remembered all that as I invented the character of Siranoush in Too Bad to Die: a Bond Girl with a vengeance, running circles around Ian Fleming. I love to write fiction based on the secret battles of World War II, and Fleming is behind any number of them. I ran into Fleming so often, in fact, that I began to wonder how much of his story was truth, and how much fiction.
I learned that the man friends referred to jokingly as a "chocolate sailor," because he looked too good to be true in his reserve naval uniform, found a home and a calling amid the white lies of war. Fleming had grown up in the embrace of the British aristocracy: educated at Eton and Sandhurst, the scion of a wealthy banking family. But he was never regarded as a flaming success. He was a
dabbler, discarding careers in diplomacy and the military for halfhearted attempts at stock trading and journalism.
Ian was moody, unsure of his talents or worth, prone to depression and drink. The war gave him an intriguing job—assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence—and a role he could perform to perfection. Fleming lied brilliantly to the enemy.
Bound to his Whitehall desk, planning and executing deceptions against the Axis, Fleming yearned for a more active role. He wanted to be the agent who carried out his ingenious schemes. It was his brother Peter, however, who was allowed to train as one of the new Special Operations Forces that sprang up during World War II; Ian was left to spin stories in his idle hours about a character he would eventually name James Bond.
One of Fleming's wartime duties was to plan the bilateral conferences between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The sixth, to discuss the Allied invasion known as D-day, was held in November 1943. It began in Cairo and moved to Tehran, where FDR met Joseph Stalin for the first time.
In Too Bad to Die, Ian doesn't fall ill with the bronchitis Churchill spread throughout the British delegation or remain in Giza to convalesce (as, in fact, happened). Instead, Ian Fleming goes commando—and glimpses the kind of daring he could only imagine...and bequeath to a character named Bond.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
John Altman is a musician and freelance writer living in New York City. A graduate of Harvard, he comes from an extended family of writers, including the novelists Karen Bender, Aimee Bender, and Robert Anthony Siegel.
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