Ian Fleming’s greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture.  Ian Fleming, a fantasist who peddled empire nostalgia to the sensation-hungry masses of the cold war era. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote. Award-winning biographer with unprecedent access Ian Fleming family papers reveals the deepening and reshaping previous versions of Fleming’s life, Shakespeare quotes a former head of MI6 who lauds “the reputational myth building value of 007. Fleming’s Feckless child of privilege, now looks like the real secret-service deal.  Ian Fleming sit down in February 1952 at his Jamaican home to type the first page of Casino Royale. From 1939 to 1945, the effective deputy to the chief of Naval intelligence had acted as what his boss Admiral John Godfrey called a war-winner.

Shakespeare stacks up enough evidence to illustrate Fleming at work as a “proxy spy chief”. Fleming was never Bond, neither was he a paper shuffling Admiralty drone.  By 1945, Fleming’s 30 AU unit numbered 450 men. Grandson of Robert Fleming, who rose from a Dundee slum to vast merchant-banking wealth, Ian grew up in the shadow of the hard-fisted family patriarch, his war-hero father Val killed in 1917 and his amazing brother Peter, a dashing writer-adventurer. Failed at Eton, failed as a Sandhurst cadet, Ian struck the benignly couple whose school in the Austrian Alps first gave him fulfilment as a vastly disappointed second son. Fleming began his seducer’s career in Kitzbuhel, and then he fell properly in love, with a bright and headstrong Swiss girl, Monique Fan chaud de Bottens. His dominant mother Eve forbade the match Fleming;s lawyer chum Ernie Cunieo detected in James Bond’s philandering Ian’s revenge for the terrible hurt.

A playboy with a  puritanical streak, Fleming found his metier as a Reuters ace reporter. He soon forsook journalism for the easier money of banking and broking, and ran through high-society girl friends with a “cut-and-run” insouciance. Naval intelligence gave him a good war without renown, no victory gongs for clandestine warriors.  Fleming then ran the foreign coverage of Lord Kemsley’s Sunday Times. Fleming had built his tropical bolt-hole as a “Caribbean Bauhaus” “Caribbean Cowhouse,  As Casino Royale took shape, Fleming did his own Bond style leap into the abyss. He married his lover Ann Charteris, ex-wife of the Daily Mail proprietor, Esmond Rothermere, At Goldeneye, Fleming escaped into a relationship with Blanche Blackwell- mother of Island Records’ founder, Chris.

Ian’s childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition to be ‘the complete man’, and he would strive for the means to achieve this ‘completeness’ all his life. Only a thriller writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal life and impressive career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction.

Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today. His talent for uncovering new material that casts fresh light on his subjects is fully evident in this masterful, definitive biography.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare, Harvill Secker £30, 804 pages.