Long before becoming celebrated (and reviled) as the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming had been a serious bibliophile, building an impressive collection of books from the 1930s onwards. Both Bond and bibliophilia played significant roles in the life of Ian’s nephew, James Fleming, who has died aged 80.
Both aspects of Ian Fleming’s work mattered greatly to him. Initially wary of his uncle’s literary legacy, James Fleming eventually became both proprietor and editor of the Book Collector, the specialist journal that Ian launched in 1952.
But uncle and nephew met only twice. One of those occasions was the funeral of Eve Fleming, Ian’s mother, in summer 1964. James, who was then 20 years old, heard Ian being offered a drink. “Gin and tonic, quick as you can,” came the reply. “Oh, but Mr Ian, you know what the doctors said,” someone responded. “Fuck the doctors,” Ian said. He died a fortnight later.
The Bond novels found little favour in the family home, where life moved on more traditional lines. James’s father, Richard, is said to have thrown The Spy Who Loved Me into the fire on account of its “lewdness”. James was more certain that on a trip to the US he wrapped From Russia, With Love in brown paper lest he be seen reading such sensational stuff.
Of greater worth in his parents’ eyes were the books of Ian’s elder brother Peter (also James Fleming’s godfather), which broke new ground for travel writing in the 1930s. It was an opinion shared by James, who followed Peter in his love both of shooting and travel to exotic destinations.
Born in London, James was the third child – there were eight – of Charmian (Charm) Hermon-Hodge and Ian’s younger brother, Richard, a leading banker and director of the family firm founded by Robert Fleming in 1873.
After attending Eton, he gained a history degree at Magdalen College, Oxford (1965), and worked as an accountant and then a farmer in the Cotswolds. Books, however, were his true love. He not only collected them but published them: in 1978 he founded Alexander Heriot Ltd, whose niche was the history of Arabian horses.
The idea of authorship appealed to James, who worked in his 20s on a social history of tea. Nothing came of the project, though, and it wasn’t until he moved to a farm in Caithness during the 1990s that he began writing in earnest. His first two novels, The Temple of Optimism (2000) and Thomas Gage (2003), were both well received; the latter was praised by the TLS for bearing comparison with “the Victorian classics it ambitiously imitates”. But there was a disagreeable “ooh-la-la”, James observed, as people went looking for connections to Ian’s work.
While it was “lowering” to be “found guilty of trying to piggyback on the reputation of a relative”, James invited such remarks when he published a trilogy of thrillers. White Blood (2006) introduced a formidably macho protagonist, a Scottish-Russian naturalist called Charlie Doig.
Set in revolutionary Russia, the book was praised in the Guardian by Sam Thompson for its “wry urbanity” and “charming enthusiasm for language”. The later Doig novels, Cold Blood (2009) and Rising Blood (2011), continued to blend flamboyant adventure with a hellish vision of the period.
During his time in Scotland, Fleming immersed himself in local matters. Aside from repairing gates, building drystone walls, herding sheep and wielding a chainsaw, he also studied, and wrote articles about the Flow Country, Europe’s largest expanse of peat bog. He welcomed the turn towards green energy, pronouncing Caithness to be “the wind turbine capital of Britain”. Nevertheless, if any item about Bond or Ian Fleming happened to appear on television, he found that locals would “grab me in the street and make some rude remark”.
Returning to England, Fleming acquired the Book Collector in 2016 and became editor two years later. In 2021 he published Bond behind the Iron Curtain, which concisely traces the course of a culture war in miniature. Fleming described how, in 1962, the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia attacked the decadent idea of Bond, while the KGB commissioned a Bulgarian author to write a communist riposte, Avakoum Zakhov Versus 07 (an “0” had to be dropped for copyright reasons).
James came to regard his uncle Ian’s life as tragic, his writing as underappreciated. He lent considerable assistance to Nicholas Shakespeare for the biography Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (2023), and found it “an extraordinary experience to have one’s family history, its secrets as much as its eccentricities, unveiled before one, limb by limb”.
In 1975 he married Kate Rooksby. She and his sons, Christian and Thomas, survive him.
• James Fleming, writer and editor, born 26 February 1944; died 22 November 2024
