Ian Fleming

Fleming spent the war as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, a job that put him beside every deception operation Britain ran without ever sending him into the field, and the frustration of that shows in what he invented afterwards. He wrote Casino Royale in about two months at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, and produced a Bond book most years until his death in 1964 at fifty-six. Casino Royale is the leanest of them, a card game against a Soviet paymaster and an ending closer to disillusion than triumph. From Russia With Love was named by President Kennedy as a favourite, which did the sales no harm at all.