Part of my summer bucket list was to read one of the old Ian Fleming James Bond books. In the end, I read them all. They are not long and not hard to read. Here are 10 things that surprised me about the literary James Bond.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers, in case you were thinking of wading into Ian Fleming yourself. Parents, be warned it also contains the P word. PUSSY! There, I said it and it’s out of my system. Actually, I just heard an NPR announcer say it today (talking about the Russian band Pussy Riot) and it made me laugh out loud.

1. He does order at least one vodka martini shaken not stirred, but his favorite drink by far is bourbon. He drinks enormous quantities of the stuff. He never orders less than a double and sometimes he orders it by the tumbler or just downs it straight from the bottle. In at least one case he mixes it with coffee and takes it with him on a mission that involves climbing trees, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. He definitely drinks in part to unwind after, and sometimes during, a hard day of spying. He occasionally drinks beer or wine, but you get the idea that is just to stay hydrated between bourbons. He also drinks enormous quantities of coffee and states emphatically many times in multiple books how much he despises tea.
2. He also smokes enormous amounts of cigarettes all day every day.
3. Somehow, despite this lifestyle he stays in excellent physical condition. Once, it catches up to him a bit and he is ordered to detox in a health clinic for a couple weeks, which is all it takes to restore him to perfect health. This is all somewhat amusing until you learn that Ian Fleming drank and smoked heavily, leading to several heart attacks that ultimately killed him in his 50s. So viewed through that lense, it reads a little like a fantasy of someone who is not in good health but imagines an alter-ego who is. Imagine if Clark Kent downed a bottle of scotch every day, knowing that it couldn’t hurt him. Well, Ian Fleming was no Superman but James Bond sort of was.
4. He seems most relaxed and engaged in life when he is in dangerous, risky situations that would be extremely stressful for a normal person. When he has a period of relative safety and office work, he gets depressed. This reminds me of possibly the only more famous fictional British character, Sherlock Holmes. He was similar in that he would get bored and depressed when he had a lull in between cases. Like Bond, he turned to substance abuse (cocaine in his case) to get through these periods, and like Bond, he seemed to suffer no lasting ill effects. Both also fake their deaths after defeating an arch-enemy and later resurface. Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle’s character Watson were war veterans (World War II and Afghanistan, respectively), and would have seen some serious shit in their time, which I imagine might have taken more of a toll than it took on their fictional supermen. I’m sure Fleming would have read and been influenced by Conan Doyle.
5. Pussy Galore was a woman who preferred the company of other women, until she met James Bond… James Bond seems to have a complicated, yet simple, view of lesbians. If they are young and attractive (to men), they are okay and if they are not, they tend to be evil, especially if they prey on young women who are attractive to men.
6. Speaking of the P word, Octopussy is an actual octopus, showing up briefly in a short story found in Fleming’s notes after his death. James Bond is mostly fearless but he has a weird phobia about octopuses, seeming to believe that they are among the most deadly sea creatures. I’ve done a little research and other than the poisonous ones in Australia, there is almost no evidence of octopuses posing any serious threat to humans, and certainly not killing them.
7. James Bond is not a particular fan of gay men, short people, Japanese people and people with disabilities. He seems to like black people, gypsies, and Americans overall although he occasionally spouts various slurs and generalizations about them. He is not bothered when one close friend recalls raping someone. In one instance he himself is guilty of something bordering on date rape, although the woman involved does not seem concerned about it afterward. He generally treats women and people in general with respect when he encounters them one on one, however.
8. One Bond story is a first person account of a young woman’s coming of age, including some sexual exploits, some of which involve James Bond. Perhaps Ian Fleming was bored and wanted to experiment a bit with that one.
9. He doesn’t always get the girl. Well, usually he gets the girl, but typically only one per novel, and occasionally zero, or there is just a sense of mounting sexual tension which might lead to something offscreen.
10. The novels are not as violent as the movies. James Bond states several times that he does not kill in cold blood. He generally kills in self defense or occasionally in revenge, and feels some regret about it. The women he sleeps with are not killed constantly like they are in the movies. The villain pretty much always dies, but not always in a violent one-on-one showdown like in the movies. Sometimes it is in a more anti-climactic way. One thing is exactly like the movies – the villains do tend to leave James Bond in “an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death,” as Dr. Evil put it in Austin Powers. They do sometimes explain why they do this – basically some mixture of sadism, ego, and over-confidence. It’s not quite convincing, but hey, these stories are fantasies in the end.

It was fun reading these books and I’m not sure why I didn’t do it sooner. Rest in peace, Ian Fleming, and long live your indestructible fictional alter ego.