Colin Thompson
12/16/08
DeSormier
English IV Honors
Period 5
Ian Lancaster Fleming:
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
I chose Ian Fleming as my author because I myself am a big fan of spy novels. Ian Fleming was a pioneer of the whole spy novel genre. He is most famously known for writing the James Bond series. The development of the James Bond character is a result of the people he met through his career as a WWII spy for British Intelligence. Sidney Reilly is listed as an inspiration for James Bond. Reilly's friend, former diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, was a close acquaintance of Ian Fleming for many years and recounted to Fleming many of Reilly's espionage adventures. Lockhart had worked with Reilly in Russia in 1918, where they became embroiled in an SIS-backed plot to overthrow Lenin's Bolshevik government.
Within five years of his disappearance in Soviet Russia in 1925, the press had turned Reilly into a household name, lauding him as a master spy and recounting his many espionage adventures. Fleming had therefore long been aware of Reilly's mythical reputation and had listened to Lockhart's recollections. Like Fleming's fictional creation, Reilly was multi-lingual, fascinated by the Far East, fond of fine living, and a compulsive gambler. He also exercised a Bond-like mastery of women, his many love affairs standing comparison with the amorous adventures of 007.
I also did a little research in to the biography of James Bond to better understand the influence of Sidney Reilly on the character. James Bond was born on Nov. 16th 1924, he was the son of Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix Bond. In 1936 James Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident in the Aiguilles Rouge Mountains. After that incident Miss Charmian Bond started to take care of her nephew James Bond. At the age of 12 James completed his education at an English public school. At the age of 13 James Bond enters an English school by the name of Eton. Soon after...