“My name is Rodney…, Rodney Bond.” 007’s famous way of presenting himself might have lost its theatricality. In a new biography entitled Ian Fleming, the Complete Man, the novelist Nicholas Shakespeare (1990 Somerset-Maugham Prize for The Vision of Elena Silves) asserts that the creator of 007 would not have chosen that at the last moment the first name of his hero on the advice of his brother Peter Fleming.
This new work, dedicated to the life and work of the father of Her Majesty’s best agent, is due to be released in English bookstores next October. According to our British colleagues at The Times, who were able to read the right pages of the biography, Rodney is therefore a being of flesh and blood, who really existed. And better than that, he is said to have saved the life of Peter Fleming, Ian’s older brother, during a perilous mission in Greece in 1941 against the German Wehrmacht. In a desperate situation, injured by an explosion, British Army officer Peter Fleming still had the strength to send a coded SOS to MI6.
This encrypted message will be processed – and this is where fiction mixes with reality – by a man named Rodney Clarence Mortimer Bond, lieutenant in the famous English intelligence service, based not far away on the island of Crete. Immediately understanding the seriousness of the situation, Rodney Bond only listened to his courage. On a simple fishing boat, he will come to rescue Peter Fleming in danger.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Peter Hunt in 1969, based on the novel by Ian Fleming, With George Lazenby, Diana Rigg…
When he began writing his first spy novels in the early 1950s, Ian Fleming initially looked for a name that sounded good, representing the life force, for his invincible hero. The surname Bond was suggested by his older brother Peter, himself a travel writer. And as one can easily guess, this Rodney Bond, anonymous hero of the Second World War, remained unforgettable for him.
Ian Fleming, out of modesty or a taste for secrecy, gave another version. He said that it was while reading a work by the American ornithologist James Bond that he decided on the baptismal name of his secret super-agent… We are now impatiently waiting to read the biography of Nicholas Shakespeare because the truth can no longer wait.