Alisha McClenon
I found James Bond in a library in the West Midlands, on a night when the lights kept going out.
It was the late 1970s, and I’d grown up in a council house where power cuts were just part of the rhythm of things — you got used to finishing your tea by candlelight, or doing your homework with a torch propped against a stack of books. It wasn’t a hardship exactly. It was just what England was like then: strikes, shortages, the news full of pit closures and dole queues, everything grey and rationed and running slightly out of steam.
Then I took a copy of Dr. No out of the local library, more or less at random, and read the entire thing in one night. I didn’t mean to. I just couldn’t put it down, and by the time I noticed how late it was, it seemed pointless to stop. I went to school the next day on no sleep at all, and straight back to the library the moment it opened, to see what else they had by this Ian Fleming.
It’s hard to explain, if you didn’t grow up in that particular time and place, quite how far away Fleming’s world felt from mine. Casinos, Caribbean islands, tailored suits, cars that mattered, food that wasn’t rationed or reheated — none of it had anything to do with a council estate in the Midlands in the middle of a miners’ strike. That was exactly the point. Bond wasn’t an escape from my life so much as proof that a completely different one existed somewhere, written with enough conviction that I believed in it completely, at least for the length of a book.
I read my way through everything the library had, and then everything I could get my hands on beyond that. And somewhere along the way, the thing that had originally hooked me — the plots, the pace, the sheer glamour of it all — turned into something else: a real curiosity about the man who’d written it. Who was Fleming, that he could imagine all this so precisely? How much of it was invention, and how much was simply his own life, lightly disguised? And how did one moderately strange, very specific character — a tired, hard-drinking naval intelligence officer with a taste for good food and bad habits — end up becoming one of the most recognisable figures in the world, in film, in fashion, in the culture at large, decades after the man who created him had died?
That curiosity never really went away. This site is where it’s ended up: a place to dig into Fleming’s actual novels rather than just their reputation, to trace where his fiction and his own remarkable life overlap, and to follow everything Bond became after Fleming stopped writing him — the continuation novels, the films, the sheer cultural weight the character has picked up along the way.
I still think about that library, most of the time when I sit down to write about any of this. A different life, briefly made available on a Tuesday night, for the price of a library card.