I’m not big on graphic novels and I’ve not read comic books or adventure comic strips since I was a kid, but The James Bond Omnibus, Volume I interested me.

I was first introduced to Ian Fleming’s iconic secret agent when I saw Dr No at the Colonial movie theater in South Philadelphia in 1962 when I was 10-years-old. But for many British children and adults, their first visual introduction to James Bond was through a daily comic strip that appeared in the newspaper the Daily Express.  

From 1958 to 1984, the Fleming thrillers were serialized in comic strips and syndicated in British newspapers.

The James Bond Omnibus (Titan Books) has pulled together the newspaper comic strip adaptations of eight Fleming novels and three short stories. The novels are Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, From Russia With Love, Dr No, Goldfinger and Thunderball. The three short stories offered are Risico, From a View to a Kill and For Your Eyes Only.

The stories were adapted from the novels by Anthony Hern, Henry Gammidge and Peter O’Donnell. O’Donnell, who recently died at age 90, went on from the Bond comic strips to create his own comic strip, Modesty Blaize. The comic strip’s art was drawn by John McLusky.  

One of the first thoughts that struck me as I began to read the comic strips was that they were more faithful to Fleming’s novels than the films. My second thought was to wonder what might have been had the film makers stuck more closely to the Fleming novels.

I’ve been an Ian Fleming aficionado since I first saw Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No. The first nine books in my now extensive library were Ian Fleming’s thrillers and many of my lifelong interests such as travel, crime and espionage were all sparked by Fleming. As a teenager I was fascinated by Fleming’s use of exotic locales, women and villains in his stories.

Many years later I was thrilled to have been able to spend a week with my wife at Goldeneye, Fleming’s villa in Oracabessa, Jamaica. Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels at this cliff-top villa that overlooks the Caribbean Sea.

The villa was then just as Fleming liked it – rustic and casual. Fleming had a sunken garden that lead to the edge of the cliff. Off to the side of the garden, he had steps carved out of the cliff, which lead down to a small private beach.

Like Fleming, I went free-diving in the sea with my mask, flippers and knife during the day, and I worked at Fleming’s original Jamaican Blue Mahoe writing desk at night.

I met and spoke to a wonderful woman named Violet, who was Fleming’s original housekeeper. She spoke of how “the Commander,” as she called him, was such a nice man. Tears came to her eyes as she spoke of Fleming.

Goldeneye was a magical place. It was a truly a dream vacation for a Fleming aficionado.

It was at this magical seaside villa that Fleming wrote the novels that his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler and John Betjeman immediately recognized as classic thrillers.

“Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed the Russian Mafia, as well as the nightmarish idea that some such fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapons-grade plutonium,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in the introduction to one edition of the thrillers.

Ian Fleming often told friends that he was going to write the spy story to end all spy stories. He was born in London, England on May 28, 1908. He was the grandson of Robert Fleming, a wealthy Scot banker, and his father, Valentine, was a Member of Parliament. Major Valentine Fleming was killed in France in 1917 during World War I, shortly before Ian Fleming’s ninth birthday. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for the London Times.

Fleming attended Eton, Sandhurst and the Universities of Geneva and Munich. In his twenties, Fleming worked as a journalist for the Reuters News Agency. He was dispatched to the Soviet Union by Reuters in 1933 to cover the famous spy trial of six British engineers who worked for Metropolitan-Vickers.

Fleming later worked a stockbroker and when World War II began he was recruited to become the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey.

Lt Commander Fleming accompanied Godfrey to the U.S. to establish closer relations and he met with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Fleming also met William Stephenson, who was the head of British intelligence operations in North America. Stephenson was known as “The Man Called Intrepid.”

Fleming visited Camp X in Canada where allied spies and commandos were being trained. Much of Fleming’s wartime experiences would find their way in to his post-war thrillers.

On another naval intelligence mission in 1942 Fleming ventured to Jamaica, where he met with his American counterparts over concerns about German U-Boats in the Caribbean. Fleming fell in love with the tropical island and bought an old donkey racetrack where he planed to build his dream house.

After the war Fleming returned to journalism and he became the foreign manager for the London Sunday Times. He negotiated two winter months vacation each year and he spent those months at Goldeneye.

Fleming was a long-time bachelor and “womanizer” like his character James Bond, but he finally married Ann O’Neil in Jamaica in 1952. He often told reporters that he wrote the Bond books to get over the shock of getting married at the age of 42.

From then on until his death in 1964, Fleming spent every January and February at Goldeneye, writing that year’s James Bond thriller.

Not that it matters, as Ian Fleming himself wrote in the introduction of From Russia With Love, but much of the background material in his books was accurate.

He was a journalist and an intelligence officer before he became a novelist, so his books contain a good deal of what he called “incidental intelligence.” From the practices of voodoo in Live and Let Die, to genealogy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, his books explained in detail a wide variety of interesting subjects. He also richly described people, places, products and happenings, which added authentic touches to his stories.

Although Fleming has been criticized for creating unbelievable villains like Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Dr No, one should stop and consider real life villains like Martin Bormann, Al Capone, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Or consider Manuel Noriega, a tin-pot dictator who was involved in international drug operations, believed in witchcraft and wore red bikini underwear to protect him from his enemies.

Top that, Mr.Goldfinger.

In a 1964 Playboy interview Fleming said that Bond was a man of action, a cipher, and simply a blunt instrument in the hands of the government. Fleming also infused his character with some of his own “quirks and characteristics.”

Fleming said he wanted Bond to be entirely an anonymous instrument and let the action of the book carry him along. He wanted the character to more or less follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s heroes – believeable people, believable heroes.

“He’s sort of an amalgam of romantic tough guys, dressed in 20^th Century clothes, using 20^th Century language,” Fleming told Playboy. “More true to the type of commandos and secret service men than to the heroes of ancient thrillers.”

The Double O license to kill was a fictional device to make Bond’s job more interesting. Fleming said he got the idea from the British Admiralty, which at the beginning of WWII used the Double O prefix on all its Top Secret signals.

Bond battled SMERSH, which was a contraction of Smert Shpionam, which means death to spies in Russian. SMERSH was a real Soviet counterintelligence group that hunted down and executed anti-Soviet spies during WWII.

In the later books (and in the early films) Bond took on SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. SPECTRE was an international crime organization that contained elements of SMERSH, the German Gestapo and international organized crime groups.

Fleming readily admitted his plots were fantastic, yet he said they were often based on the real world of intelligence. He noted that on occasion a news story would “lift a corner of the veil” and reveal the real world of spies and commandos.

Fleming made note of the case of the Russian assassin Captain Nikoly Khokhlov, who cam equipped with an electrically-operated gun fitted with a silencer and concealed in a gold cigarette case. The gun fired bullets dipped in cyanide, which might lead a pathologist to rule the cause of death to be heart failure.

“I can trace most of the central incidents in my books to real happenings,” Fleming wrote in a magazine piece. “The line between fact and fiction is a very narrow one.”

Fleming would often dismiss his thrillers as mere entertainment, but he also said that thrillers may not be literature with a capital L, but it was possible to write what he called “thrillers designed to be read as literature.” Fleming went on to say that the practitioners of this form have included Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

Fleming stated that he saw nothing shameful in his aiming as high as that.

Ian Fleming died in 1964. He did not live to see the film Goldfinger, which was released later that year. Fleming died of a heart attack, which his character Darko Kerim in the novel From Russia With Love described as “the iron crab.”

Fleming died – as he thought he would – from living too much and from living to well.

Most photos of Fleming show him in the last years of his life, but I’ve always liked an earlier photo of him, where he is standing in his Royal Navy uniform at the Admiralty.

In this photo Fleming is young and handsome, with dark hair and a cold sardonic look on his face. He looks an awful lot like his character James Bond.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ian Fleming, you should read John Pearson’s The Life of Ian Fleming, Andrew Lycett’s Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond and Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.

Of course you should also read Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, and you might also read The James Bond Omnibus.

      

    

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