The Stock of Bond: Ian Fleming's literary reputation By Jeet Heer Boston Globe Ideas (October 20, 2002) AS THE CREATOR of James Bond, Ian Fleming has suffered a curious fate: Just as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes are known by millions who have never read a page of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle, so the fame of 007 has eclipsed that of his literary father. Although the Bond books enjoyed a vogue in the early 1960s, when they received a presidential recommendation from John F. Kennedy, the subsequent rise of the hugely successful movie franchise displaced Fleming's novels from the popular imagination. Meanwhile, critics of espionage fiction relegated Fleming to second-class status because his pulpy novels lacked the explorations of moral ambiguity and tawdry compromise they found in seemingly more sophisticated writers such as Graham Greene and John le Carre. Yet 50 years after Fleming invented the most famous spy of the 20th century, there is considerable evidence that James Bond is gaining a newfound literary respect. Earlier this year, Penguin books inducted three of Fleming's original thrillers - ''From Russia With Love,'' ''Dr. No,'' and ''Goldfinger'' - into its prestigious Modern Classic Series. Soon after, The Salisbury Review, a haughty Tory journal usually devoted to articles praising the wisdom of Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot, celebrated the spy writer for his conservative instincts and published a newly unearthed Fleming manuscript, a memoir of the Dieppe Raid. And, in his new book ''In Churchill's Shadow,'' British historian David Cannadine argues that Fleming's novels have played a key role in shaping England's backward-looking national self-image. In the past, Fleming's most vocal fans tended to be British conservatives, such as Kingsley Amis and Ken Follett, who shared the Bond novels' somewhat romantic notion of England as a country that could ''punch above its weight'' and maintain its influence after the collapse of its empire. In the current Fleming revival, however, the Bond books are winning praise from unexpected quarters. The gadfly left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to the Penguin omnibus, praised the ''staying power'' of Fleming's work. He adds, in an interview: ''Few writers live in the memory the way Fleming does. I was rather distressed to discover reading these three books again that every time I turned the page I knew what was coming, often word for word. It's like a Beatles song you haven't heard for years and years, but when you hear the first opening chord, you know all the words to come. It's hard-wired into you.'' Feminist novelist Margaret Atwood also has warm praise for Fleming's work. ''The James Bond books are engraved in my mind,'' she said in a recent telephone conversation. ''They are great fun and belong to the tradition of boys' adventure fiction going back to Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson.'' Drawing on his own experiences in the British Secret Service, Fleming starting writing ''Casino Royale,'' the first Bond novel, in 1952, while on his honeymoon; it was published in 1953. As the novelist John Lanchester recently noted, Fleming belonged to a distinguished generation of writers that included Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Cyril Connolly. ''These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterized by brilliant success,'' Lanchester observes in the London Review of Books. ''They also had parallel lives as spies, soldiers, shaggers and men of action. ... But all of them suffered from a desperate, crippling, lifelong fear of boredom.'' This fear persisted, biographers argue, throughout Fleming's lively career as a journalist, naval officer, and spy. To escape his own ennui, Fleming created Bond, who rarely suffered a dull moment. Before his death in 1964, Fleming followed ''Casino Royale'' with 11 other Bond books (two more were published posthumously). Although the books had a loyal following right from the start, sales for the series skyrocketed in 1961 when President Kennedy named ''From Russia With Love'' as one of his favorite novels. ''Dr. No,'' the first Bond movie, started filming in 1962, with Sean Connery playing the lead. Even during the height of their popularity, however, the Bond books had their critics. In 1958, British journalist Paul Johnson denounced Fleming for writing trashy novels based on ''sex, snobbery and sadism.'' (As it turns out, Johnson was himself a fan of spanking in his private life, as his own mistress revealed to the British press a few years ago.) In recent years, Johnson's accusation that Bond is a sexist pig has been picked up by feminist critics, who fret that Bond takes unfair advantage of erstwhile adversaries such as Pussy Galore, Honeychile Rider, and Mary Goodnight. Atwood, however, thinks that Bond, like that other creation of the early 1950s, Playboy magazine, may have had an unintentionally liberating impact on women. ''Playboy, like Bond, was revolutionary for five years,'' Atwood notes. ''Both James Bond and Playboy were saying, `Screw marriage, sex should be a toy.' Here were all these women stuck with washer-dryers and suddenly the men were saying, `I want a bunny.' The women responded, `Hey, wait a minute, we did everything we were supposed to, and now you're walking out?' The result was the women's movement.'' Though Bond's sexual attitudes have cerainly dated, his work is prescient in other ways. Even at the height of the Cold War, Fleming focused on non-communist villains who were more dangerous because they were less rational. ''By some latent intuition, 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 fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapons-grade plutonium,'' argues Hitchens in his introduction. With their baroque schemes and twitchy hints of sexual abnormality, Fleming's fiendish bad guys were often his most memorable creations. Who can forget Goldfinger's plot to seize the gold reserves of Fort Knox or Blofeld's scheme, in ''On Her Majesty's Secret Service,'' to destroy the British countryside with crop and livestock pests? As so often in popular fiction, not to mention Milton's ''Paradise Lost,'' the bland hero is overshadowed by his monstrous enemy. ''Bond is actually rather a cardboard guy,'' Hitchens admits. ''He doesn't change much. It's a series of affectations and poses and designer elements. I've always found it difficult to really visualize him. That's why he's so protean in the movies as well. But the villains are always extremely good. I think that's true without exception. They are quite believable even though very incredible.'' Throughout the Bond novels, Fleming pays tribute to the ''special relationship'' between Great Britain and the United States. More so than the lone wolf of the movies, the literary James Bond often worked closely with his CIA counterpart Felix Leiter, a Texan. During his first meeting with Leiter in ''Casino Royale,'' Bond ''reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.'' As Hitchens notes, ''Fleming was doing his best to surrender with a good grace to American supremacy.'' Bond is better suited to the age of Tony Blair than the anti-American spies found in the novels of Greene and Le Carre, who often resent the fact that their empire has been supplanted by a gauche New World power. Because Fleming was believed to be polluting English fiction with American values, his books received some very nasty reviews in the 1950s. The critic Bernard Bergonzi charged that Fleming was influenced by ''the American thriller'' and thus ''rarely rises above the glossy prose of the advertising copy-writer.'' Robin Winks, a Yale historian who has written extensively on real and fictional spies, says that ''there was a feeling in England that Ian Fleming sold out to American tastes and the American market.'' And yet Fleming's high regard for the United States had a positive effect on his literary style. He was an admirer of the brisk, hard-boiled prose of American novelists such as Dashiell Hammett, and his blunt depictions of gunplay and beatings broke with the gentlemanly style of spy fiction exemplified by the writings of John Buchan, a loyal servant of the empire who held the title Baron Tweedsmuir. (Even the Buchan admirer Bergonzi admitted that Buchan's plummy spy novels could be wordy and excessively leisurely.) The opening of ''Casino Royale'' shows Fleming's ability to locate the reader inside Bond's high-tension world: ''The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high-gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.'' Next month, MGM will release the 20th - or 21st, if you count the 1967 ''Casino Royale'' spoof - Bond movie, ''Die Another Day.'' Already, it has been criticized for its zealous product placement. In the film, Bond will be seen driving a Ford car, wearing an Omega watch, using a Philips shaver, and carrying Samsonite luggage, and all of these manufacturers paid for the privilege of being associated with 007. But right from the start, the appeal of Bond had more to do with stylish shopping than smart spying. Well before Bret Easton Ellis obsessively cataloged his antihero's Armani suits and Gucci loafers, Fleming was bandying about brand names and logos. In ''Casino Royale,'' we learn that Bond has a taste for the high life because he drives ''one of the last of the 41/2-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers.'' Elsewhere, Fleming details the make of Bond's watch (''Rolex Oyster Perpetual''), his tailoring (Saville row, of course), and his preferred martini (''Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel''). Bond's enemies were intolerable not only because they wanted to take over the world, but also because they lacked the spy's cool sophistication and aplomb. Ultimately, Fleming's use of brand names, often dismissed as snobbery, was inseparable from his larger strengths as a storyteller. The best popular spy fiction gains its peculiar authority from its knowingness: Authors such as Greene and Le Carre had some experience in the real world of intelligence, and their appeal is rooted in their ability to suggest that they are letting readers in on the inside dope. Like Greene and Le Carre, Fleming shares this sense of worldliness with the reader, an accomplishment that Amis describes as ''the Fleming effect.'' For all the fantastic elements found in his books, Fleming could make us believe in the world he created, which contained enough accurate details to be plausible but also enough outlandish elements to be memorable. By mixing together fantasy and reality in just the right doses, Fleming created a concoction as powerful as the legendary martinis that Bond enjoys.