The Failures That Made Ian Fleming | Hacker News Reader

The Failures That Made Ian Fleming

newrepublic.com

73 pointsjseliger26 comments

Even reading only the first few paragraphs there are a number of things which stick out as being wrong here.

His Father was not killed at the Battle of the Somme. He was killed 20 May 1917, the Battle of the Somme lasted from 1 July 1916 to 18 November 1916.

James Bond was supposed to have spent two terms at Eton but then four to five years at Fettes (a posh Scottish school) so the Eton connection isn't terribly significant.

Ian Fleming's family might have entertained Disraeli but given that Disraeli was dead before either of Fleming's parents were born it wasn't a close connection.

If the reviewer is getting this stuff out of the book it's questionable how useful the book is.

Not only that, but the article seems disconnected from the title somewhat. I was interested to hear about the failures that made him, but after reading for 5 minutes I lost hope of them being discussed. I can't stand verbose articles like these, I wonder how many people actually read them.

From https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/13/archives/ian-fleming-dead... (1964)

   His father, Major Valentine Fleming, at one time a Conservative member of Parliament, was killed while fighting on the Somme in 1916.

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Valentine Fleming died on 20 May 1917.

https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-det...

He's buried at Templeux-Le-Guerard British Cemetary, France, plot 2, row E, grave 40.

https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-det...

The epitaph on the stone reads "The heights hold peace".

https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-det...

In 2021, that's just a few clicks away. In 1964, the reporter of the New York Times would have been hard pressed to find and access that information and likely relied on an incorrect second hand source.

> In 1964, the reporter of the New York Times would have been hard pressed to find

Yes totally agree. I might have suggested otherwise but I didn't mean to. Ludicrous how easy finding out stuff ... or a certain type of stuff at least ... is by comparison today.

Normally I would be happy to defer to the New York Times but there's some easily seen evidence that their date is wrong. Here's a British Government website listing wills which includes a reference to Valentine Fleming and gives his date of death as 20 May 1917 - https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/Calendar?surname=Flemin... . And here's an obituary published on May 25 1917, of course it's possible the obituary was being published long after his death but unlikely I think https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/valentine-fleming-an-appr... . His being awarded his DSO immediately after his death, as recorded here https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/30111/supplement/5..., is also much more likely than months afterwards.

BTW in case there was confusion being "killed while fighting on the somme" is not the same as fighting in the Battle of the Somme. The battle was a distinct period of some months, while fighting on the Somme occupied a period of years for the greater part of WW 1.

EDIT: In order to fix a typo I removed the text "to have occurred soon after his death" from the last sentence of the first paragraph

Great comment. Thanks for the correction.

I actually have a story about him, sorta. I used to live on a sailboat, and going on the ocean from Wilmington, NC to Charleston, SC, I got stuck in a storm due to an engine failure. Long story short (involving bear hugging a metal mast surrounded by lightning strikes), I needed to find a mechanic in Southport, NC. I was referred one and he came by (my engine was from 1967) and showed me what to do.

He was an old guy, a grandfather. Nice as hell. He apparently used to work on Ian Fleming’s boat and he shared some funny stories. A couple months later I was passing through the Cape Fear river and stopped by to see how he was doing. He’d had a stroke and wasn’t quite all there.

So Ian Fleming was an intelligence operative with creativity and an author with creativity. He sounds like a cool and successful person! This article feels hellbent on putting a negative spin on his life

Fleming is a monument that reminds people of their remarkable past. When an inferior ideology wants to claim people's minds, it needs to first dismantle those monuments or, at least, erase any records of what those monuments were about, because they would constantly remind people of what the new ideology really is. To be frank, christianity wasn't very different at the very beginning. This time, though, we have this Internet thing and erasing history is hardly doable.

As Ian Fleming himself wrote in one of his novels, "it reads better than it lives".

There's a new Bond movie coming out. So the PR machine has been cranked up to remind people who Bond was.

The author of this review seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and Fleming's "unremarkable career" is much more remarkable than the career of the average person working in intelligence today.

So much of the review is projecting today's values into the past that it is hard to tell how much is a fair assessment and how much is virtue signaling.

yeah, really kind of a weird attempt to put down a long dead author for having some luck with birth and some success with writing spy novels (and essentially defining the genre).

i guess it is an attempt to generate clicks by fabricating a controversy?

it would be one thing if it were a serious attempt to critique the values espoused by bond/fleming, but it is just a bland flattening of the truth with some uninspired spitting on it.

Well… as anyone in intelligence will point out, the novels, while genre-defining, are ludicrously unrealistic.

In fact, being unremarkable is the hallmark of excellence in intelligence ops, therefore, I assume Mr Fleming was very good at his day job.

Genre defining for action spy novels (and untold numbers of big budget movie scripts). More interestingly, realistic novels like those of John le Carre probably wouldn't have happened without Fleming creating the market for them.

Only the first, Casino Royale, is close to realistic.

Some of the short stories also seem realistic, as does The Spy Who Loved Me.

The later books seem more fanciful.

Case in point:

> Inspired by a detective novel, Basil Thomson’s The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, Fleming is credited with proposing Operation Mincemeat, in which Naval Intelligence attached an identikit of fake documents to a dead body and released it from a submarine into Spanish waters; the Spanish, as expected, passed on the false information to the Germans, causing them to leave Sicily unprotected against Allied invasion.

I did not know this really important operation[1] was Ian Fleming's brainchild. Just this one is enough success.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

Fleming's "unremarkable career" is much more remarkable than the career of the average person working in intelligence today.

His career was during a war when large numbers of people were doing rather heroic things.

He beats Hemingway, whose major achievement of WWII was liberating the bar of the Ritz in Paris.

I think he would compare favorably even to his contemporaries. There must've been thousands of people in naval intelligence, many of whose efforts were not notable enough to be remembered today, unlike Fleming's.

You can learn what Hemingway actually did in WWI, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#World_War_I

It was certainly more remarkable than the authors'.

I'm getting so sick of this rhetoric prevalent on Reddit, HN, and society at large where we pick a figure that was lauded for their accomplishments, find either real or imaginary reasons that speak again this accomplishments or their character in general and then "cancel" them.

For example, Elon Musk's being born in an affluent family. How many others were born just as affluent if not a lot more, and yet failed to achieve anything of note? How many have squandered their opportunities?

The message that is pushed now is that what you have achieve is through no virtue of your own, but simply a cause-and-effect relationship of being born affluent. Hard work doesn't matter because you were born rich. If you weren't born rich but worked hard to achieve great success - still doesn't matter because obviously you were lucky. To me this seems like a very depressing, deterministic view of the world.

The message we should be teaching ourselves and future generations is despite your circumstances you should and could achieve more. Yes, if you were born in a poor African village without schooling and without money it's very unlikely you'll achieve as much as someone who went to Cambridge and had a very powerful network of family friends and an unlimited bankroll to attempt startups. Does that mean you should resign yourself to wallowing in self-pity because of 'woe is me, why hasn't God made me rich and beautiful?'. No.

Ian Fleming in WW2: https://worldsgreatestcon.fireside.fm

Digest version: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127742...

whenever I read things like this I think two things:

if you worry that someone has done or achieved more in their life than you have either accept that they did so, or try to beat their achievements, don't try to push them lower that what you perceive your place to be.

this data seems to be very bad. maybe someone was trying to fit a narrative.

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