“It’s what you expect of an adolescent mind, which I happen to possess,” said Ian Fleming who started writing Casino Royale to take his mind off an impending marriage. He was in his early 40s then and had served during World War II as an intelligence officer. He dashed off the novel in a month and called it a ‘dreadful oafish opus’ written with ‘half a brain.’

He wanted a dull name for his fictional spy and chose the name of an ornithologist named James Bond, whose book Field Guide To The Birds of West Indies was lying in his library. Twelve years and 14 books later, by the time of his death in 1964, the Bond books had sold over 40 million copies worldwide.

In the late ’50s, two film producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, got into a partnership to make the Bond films. Surprisingly, they found it was not easy. The American studios found the novels too British and except for a stray television show, nothing really happened. But they didn’t give up. After all, their company was called EON films, which apparently stood for Everything or Nothing.

There were many spies in fiction and film before Bond. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay books, The Saint by Leslie Charteris, Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution, OSS 117 by the French writer Jean Bruce and more.

Spy films were somewhat treated like B-movies, though Alfred Hitchcock had made several successful ones like Secret Agent, The 39 Steps, Notorious, Saboteur and North By Northwest. In a sense, N by NW (1959), was actually the first Bond picture. A suave hero chasing diabolical villains all across the country, a lovely femme fatale heroine, action, humour and thrilling set pieces. That was the Bond template.

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