17F: The Life of Ian Fleming - Hardcover

McCormick, Donald

9780720608885: 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0720608880 ISBN 13: 9780720608885

Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd, 1994

Through his fictional creation, James Bond, Ian Fleming achieved world-wide fame. Fleming has been seen as the archetype for Bond, the jaunty, womanizing secret agent, a somewhat self-indulgent Englishman given to rich man's pursuits. In this book Donald McCormick, who knew Ian Fleming well, sets out to disprove the stereotype playboy image.
Fleming was one of four brothers. His father, a Conservative MP with a Scottish background, was killed in the Army in 1917, when Ian was nine. Consequently his mother, a dominant personality, exerted a strong influence on him. After Eton, Fleming went on to Sandhurst, but withdrew to try for the Foreign Office. He failed to enter the latter and subsequently worked in the City. In the war he came into his own and served with distinction, notably as Personal Assistant to the Director of British Naval Intelligence, with the rank of commander - signing his memoranda with the code-name '17F'. After the war he became foreign manager for Kemsley Newspapers. Following his much-acclaimed first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, Bond books appeared regularly until his death in 1964.
Donald McCormick reaches far and wide in this illuminating account of Ian Fleming's remarkable life, covering his wartime exploits and successful journalistic career as well as his marriage to Anne Rothermere and life at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. He shows Fleming as steadfast and loyal to others, but also as a restless man always seeking new talents in himself. Fleming's command of pace and innate romanticism, vital ingredients in his fiction, were ever present too in his many lifetime relationships and activities.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

This rushed, journalistic coverage of the fascinating Fleming only rarely lives up to its sensational and complex subject, even while dispatching many of the occluding myths around him. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Fleming did not originate the genre in which he wrote but instead gave it its enduring archetypal hero, James Bond, who in turn grafted himself onto Fleming's fame. McCormick (How to Buy an Island, 1973, etc.), Fleming's sometime junior colleague in wartime intelligence and global reporting, portrays the author as far more complex than his charismatic creation--both more ordinarily human and far more exotically eccentric. Though McCormick generally accounts for the biographical factors in Fleming's childhood (his father's death and his mother's strong nurturing) and his restless youth (studies in Germany and international reporting for Reuters), Fleming seems incomplete and distant by the time he has his crucial experience in naval intelligence in WW II under the code name ``17F.'' With these espionage operations still partially classified and permanently obscure, McCormick plays down Fleming's adventurism, with the exception of the bizarre case of Rudolph Hess. In the book's most mysterious chapter (which digs into Fleming's interest in the occult), McCormick places Fleming murkily in the plot that, by playing on Hess's superstitions and interest in astrology, lured the Nazi to England with the false promise of negotiating peace. McCormick paints a curiously selective portrait of Fleming's rise to fame--even his postwar career managing a global newspaper chain is given more attention than his turbulent marriage to the witty Lady Anne Rothermore or his phenomenally successful writing career. Although Fleming was ultimately a private character with a very public quasi-alter ego in James Bond, this thin work has the whitewashed feel of an authorized biography--but without the privileged access or intimacy with its subject. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

His authorship of the James Bond series so overshadowed everything else about Fleming (1908-1964) in the public mind that an intriguing life has been largely overlooked. McCormick, who knew Fleming during WWII and later as a newspaperman, has put together a workmanlike account that clears up erroneously reported details. A man of action and of high organizational skills, easily bored and perpetually restless, Fleming was making a name for himself as an international journalist before the war. A stint in the Navy turned into a key wartime role in British Naval Intelligence, and after the war he helped organize a syndicate of foreign correspondents, some of whom doubled as agents. The novels were written almost as a joke, and to help maintain an expensive wife, but they developed a life of their own that bemused and often amused Fleming, according to McCormick. Eventually, the movies took them over, and the books continued after Fleming's death under John Gardner's byline. There is much interesting and well-researched information here, but Fleming the man remains as elusive as he might well have wished.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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