Fans of James Bond will be delighted to learn that his creator, Ian Fleming, was rather Bond-like himself.

Ian Fleming was born in 1908, the second of four brothers. He was born at home, as he would have been then, because he came from a wealthy family. His father Valentine was the Conservative MP for Henley until his death in combat during WWI, and his grandfather Robert founded the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. Like dear old Dad Ian was educated at Eton but due to his drinking and womanizing (Eton is a secondary school, like an extremely posh and selective American high school) he was urged to leave before graduation. He was subsequently shipped off to Sandhurst, which is (or maybe was) like a very patrician West Point. Hazza and Wills both did a spell there, as was expected. Ian didn’t last long though, and was deemed unfit for training when he was diagnosed with gonorrhea. He was 18 or 19.

When neither shaking nor stirring Ian bummed around, briefly attended three foreign schools, had several affairs, at his widowed mother’s insistence went into banking which he wasn’t very good at, did a little stint in newspapering, and barely passed the Foreign Office exam and was eventually given a job because of his mother’s intervention/bullying.

Now this is where he morphs into James Bond. He was attached to Naval Intelligence and was brilliant at crafting all sorts of spycraft schemes. In 1941 (so the story goes) he was hanging about at the casino in Estoril, in neutral Portugal, and imagined a scenario whereby the place was teeming with ruthless Nazi operatives and was a place of peril and intrigue. In fact, the casino itself was actually kind of a dull place full of locals and ex-pats just waiting for WWII to be over so they could finally get out of Portugal and go home, with the city itself teeming with refugees, most of them Jewish, desperate to board boats in Lisbon that would take them anywhere but their home countries.

The war did end, finally, and Ian “became the foreign manager in the Kemsley newspaper group, which at the time owned The Sunday Times. In this role he oversaw the paper’s worldwide network of correspondents. His contract allowed him to take three months’ holiday every winter, which he took in Jamaica.” Thanks, wiki. There he had a mini-estate called Goldeneye, named after one of his successful WWII espionage campaigns.

If you’ve watched The Crown, and you remember the interlude where Princess Margaret is hanging around in Mustique, where she was staying must have been what Goldeneye was like. Ian womanized and had a long-term affair with a woman named Ann Charteris. Hers is a biography I would love to read. Anyway, she was married to the 2nd Viscount Rothermere but she used to escape to Jamaica as often as she could and her handy excuse was that she was visiting their good friend Noël Coward, who was a neighbor of Ian Fleming’s. Viscount Rothermere finally had enough of this nonsense and divorced Ann, and she married Ian Fleming. There’s a little bit of irony to this because the Harmsworth family, the possessors of the Rothermere title, founded and to this day own and publish the Daily Mail scandal sheet. For Ann, this was her third and final marriage. For Ian, it was his first. He was in his mid-40s.

Now Ian and Ann have maybe become a little Duke and Duchess of Windsor-ish. They weren’t exactly exiled, since they spent a lot of time back in England, and they both continued having affairs, but they were bored. Ann occupied herself by painting watercolors, and Ian smoked and drank and skirt-chased. As the story goes, one day Ann suggested to Ian that he dust off his typewriter and write down some of his stories and use his newspaper/publishing connections to maybe get something published.

The result was the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, which was a runaway success. Sadly, although Ian must have become very rich because he churned out 12 Bond novels, Bond short stories, and, bizarrely, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and lived long enough to see a few turned into hugely successful movies (not that he was always pleased with the results), he died young, at 56, in 1964. [Edit: When he died he left an estate “valued at £302,147 (equivalent to £6,513,997 in 2021” which, he either ran through money like water or he was getting ripped off, or both.] Another sad coda is that he only had one child, with Ann, a boy named Caspar who deliberately overdosed himself at the age of 23.

That’s the problem with these CSMs: they often end on a morbid note. But nonetheless, here is a recipe from the short story The Living Daylights.

Ian Fleming’s Scrambled Eggs “James Bond”:

For FOUR individualists:

12 fresh eggs

Salt and pepper

5-6 ounces of fresh butter

Chives or other herbs, finely chopped

Break the eggs into a bowl. Beat thoroughly with a fork and season well. In a small copper (or heavy-bottomed saucepan) melt four oz. of the butter. When melted, pour in the eggs and cook over a very low heat, whisking continuously with a small egg whisk.

While the eggs are slightly more moist than you would wish for eating, remove pan from heat, add rest of butter and continue whisking for half a minute, adding all the while finely chopped chives or fine herbs. Serve on hot buttered toast in individual copper dishes (for appearance only) with pink champagne (Taittanger) and low music. [Editorial note: I can no more imagine Ian Fleming or James Bond drinking a glass of pink champagne than I can imagine him popping a PBR at a Texas Longhorns tailgate party, so presumably what you’re doing here is preparing breakfast for your bed partner in the hopes that she will fortify herself for another round or two.]

The James Bond Classic Martini:

This is very boring and always horrifies martini purists, who fetishize gin. I’ve been drinking these for so long (without the James Bond connection) that I’m almost sure my mother packed them in my elementary school lunchbox.

2 measures vodka

½ – ¾ dry vermouth (depending on taste)

twist of fresh lemon peel 

Shake to mix, pour into a martini glass, rub peel around the glass rim before placing it in the drink

The James Bond Vesper Martini:

This comes from the (inferior) 2006 Casino Royale, where Daniel Craig orders it and calls it this. The femme fatale is named Vesper. 

3 measures gin

1 measure vodka

½ measure Lillet Blanc or dry vermouth with a few dashes of bitters 

twist of fresh lemon peel

Shake to mix, strain into a martini glass, rub peel around the glass rim before placing it in the drink