‘The name is Belser. The Belser.’
@TheBelser
What’s happening people? Guess who’s back? It’s your resident pop culture maven back at it again to educate those who appreciate the ins and outs of your favorite characters. As the title suggests, this new series of articles will be on the greatest spy of all time, JAMES BOND. Doing the research was quite fun this time around because I’m a massive Bond fan and I knew this article was coming down the pipeline. It was only a matter of time. (Hey, that rhymes. Cool.)
James Bond is the ultimate male fantasy. Wearing the nicest clothes. Driving the coolest cars. Every woman you meet wants to get with you. Saving the world. This article is the beginning of an odyssey into a world of great locations, cool gadgets and living on the most generous expense account of any government employee ever! So let’s get this thing poppin’!
How I Found Bond:
Truth to be told, I was not a life long James Bond fan initially. My first recollection of James Bond would be the first Bond movie I remember seeing: LICENCE TO KILL starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond. HBO used to run this movie non stop in the early 90’s. I just thought it was a cool action movie. The franchise itself still did not grab me yet. I remember TNT and TBS running James Bond marathons during certain holidays. I remember the hype and big reception around the release of the GOLDENEYE movie and its revolutionary Nintendo 64 video game. The first of the movies I really got into was THE SPY WHO LOVED ME with Roger Moore when I was 12 or 13. So much so, I asked my parents to let me record it on VHS ( to show how long ago this was).
My full-on Bond fandom came as a result of my stint in Iraq during my military days. As you can imagine, entertainment was scarce so the natives took advantage of this by selling bootleg copies of movies to service members. By movies, I mean the then-current movies in theaters or an entire series of movies for ridiculously low prices. I spotted the Bond films and got all 20 or so movies on 4 DVDs with $20. I wore those DVDs out and watched all of them several times. I also watched CASINO ROYALE for the first time in Iraq as it was the ‘new’ Bond movie at the time. Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to learning about all things Bond. I’ve read the original novels, seen all the movies since Casino Royale in theaters and I’ve enjoyed documentary after documentary. I’m legit psyched that I get to finally share that knowledge with the masses.
The Man Who Made Bond
James Bond , the suave secret agent working for Her Majesty’s government, is the creation of the late Sir Ian Fleming. A former Navy commander and notorious womanizer, Fleming had mentioned to friends during World War II that he wanted to write a spy novel. In 1952, shortly before he was to be married, Fleming began to write Casino Royale to distract himself.
Fleming started writing Casino Royale at his Jamaica estate named GoldenEye on 17 February 1952, typing out 2,000 words in the morning, directly from his own experiences and imagination. He finished work on the manuscript in just over a month on 18 March 1952.
Fleming decided to underplay the character, observing: “Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure.” On another occasion, he reinforced his point: “When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted him to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument.”
The lead character he created was basically an amalgamation based on the many commandos that Sir Ian Fleming had known during his service in the Naval Intelligence Division during World War II. When it came to naming his new character, Fleming stated “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find”.
The Name
Fleming got his character’s name from an American ornithologist named James Bond. A keen bird watcher, Fleming was a fan of a book Bond had written titled Birds of The West Indies.
“It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born” – Ian Fleming on naming James Bond
The real James Bond gets a shout-out from his fictional counterpart in the 2002 movie DIE ANOTHER DAY in the clip above.
The Look
In the novel From Russia, With Love, Bond’s physical description is given in great detail:
‘Slim build; a three-inch long, thin vertical scar on his right cheek; blue-grey eyes; a “cruel” mouth; short, black hair, a comma of which rests on his forehead. 183 centimeters (6 feet) in height and 76 kilograms (168 lb) in weight’.
After the event of Casino Royale, Bond also had a faint scar of the Russian Cyrillic letter “Ш” (SH) (for Shpion or “Spy”) on the back of one of his hands, carved by a enemy agent.
Bond is said to facially resemble singer and actor Hoagy Carmichael. This fact is alluded to in two of Fleming’s Bond novels:
- In the book Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd says, “Bond reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless.”
- In the novel Moonraker, Officer Gala Brand says that Bond is “certainly good-looking … Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.”
Bond’s Family History
The novel You Only Live Twice reveals Bond’s family history in the form of a fictional obituary. Jame Bond is the son of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix. Bond is orphaned at the age of 11 when his parents are killed in a mountain climbing accident.
After the death of his parents, Bond goes to live with his aunt, Miss Charmian Bond. Later, he briefly attends Eton College at “12 or thereabouts, but is removed after two halves because of girl trouble with a maid”. After being sent down from Eton, Bond was sent to Fettes College in Scotland, his father’s school. On his first visit to Paris, Bond loses his virginity at the age of 16. Bond briefly attends the University of Geneva , before being taught to ski in Kitzbühel by Hannes Oberhauser, who is later killed in “Octopussy“.
In 1941, Bond joins a branch of what was to become the Ministry of Defence and becomes a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, ending World War II as a commander. Bond applies to M for a position within the “Secret Service”, part of the Civil Service, and rises to the rank of principal officer.
007
Bond’s code number 007 comes from one of British naval intelligence’s key achievements of World War I: the breaking of the German diplomatic code. One of the German documents cracked and read by the British was the Zimmermann Telegram, which was coded 0075, and which was one of the factors that led to the US entering the war.
According to Fleming, material that was graded 00 meant that it was highly classified. Fleming later told a journalist: “When I was at the Admiralty … all the top-secret signals had the double-0 prefix … and I decided to borrow it for Bond.”
Fleming used the 00 prefix to name the 00 Section. Considered to be the secret service’s elite. A 00 (typically read “Double O” rather than “Double Zero”) is a special field agent that holds a ‘licence to kill‘. This designation means this agent can kill enemy personnel at his or her discretion in order to complete any mission. Fleming’s first book, Casino Royale, details that Bond became a 00 after killing two enemy agents:
- A Japanese spy on the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
- A Norwegian double agent who had betrayed two British agents.
James Bond is in his mid-to-late thirties in Fleming’s stories. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett noted that, “within the first few pages [of Casino Royale] Ian had introduced most of Bond’s idiosyncrasies and trademarks”, which included his looks, his Bentley and his smoking and drinking habits, Bond’s penchant for alcohol runs throughout the series of books and he smokes up to 70 cigarettes a day. So many of Bond’s tastes come from his creator’s own personal preferences that many see James Bond as an ideal fictionalized version of Ian Fleming himself.
The Series Catches Fire
Casino Royale was an instant best seller. The first edition of 4,728 copies of Casino Royale sold out in less than a month, a second print run the same month also sold out as did a third run of more than 8,000 books published in May 1954. At the time of the novels, Fleming was the Foreign Manager for Kemsley Newspapers. Upon accepting the job, Fleming requested that he be allowed three months’ holiday per year, which allowed him the freedom to write. Fleming went on to write a total of twelve novels and two collections of short stories.
Between 1953 and 1966, all the books were written at his GoldenEye estate in Jamaica and published annually. His last two books,The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy and The Living Daylights, were published two years after his death in 1964. Having conquered the literary landscape, Bond’s exploits gained him fans all around the world. Two fans in particular are a couple of movie producers named Albert ‘ Cubby‘ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. They had the keen idea of turning James Bond’s adventures into a series of movies. We’ll see how that worked for them in the next article…
James Bond will return in: BOND ON THE BIG SCREEN.
-JaDarrel Belser