KEY POINTS:
Fifty years on, James Bond has come full circle. In the new movie Casino Royale, Bond, as played by Daniel Craig, is a brute and proud of it.
It's not so much his gym-sculpted torso - on which the camera dwells perhaps rather too long and lovingly, especially in the torture scene, for (male) mainstream tastes - as his tough guy looks and obsessive personality.
To state the obvious, James Bond is a fictional character who became a universal fantasy figure.
The conventionally good-looking Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan played Bond as pure Walter Mitty, a languid, wise-cracking lounge lizard - Bryan Ferry on a cocktail (shaken not stirred) of steroids and Viagra - who could transform himself into superhero at the raise of a manicured eyebrow.
Craig takes Bond back to the character Ian Fleming created: an undercover soldier, a killer, a fatalist who took it for granted that he wouldn't live to draw his civil service pension; a man whose face, when he fell asleep, "relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold".
Unlike the 1967 movie of the same name, which was a spoof and a dismally limp one at that, Casino Royale is - pyrotechnics aside - largely faithful to the book, the first in the series.
In 1951 Fleming, aged 43, took up writing for essentially negative reasons: he was bored, having exhausted the recreational possibilities of Jamaica where he lived for two months of the year, and twitchy about his upcoming marriage after years of militant bachelorhood.
Casino Royale was based on a wartime experience: finding himself in a casino in neutral Portugal frequented by German agents, he decided to take them to the cleaners and thereby blow a hole in their operations budget.
By Fleming's own admission, it was a foolhardy plan reliant on a golden streak of luck and it failed spectacularly, but the budding novelist didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Re-reading the novel, one's struck by the thinness of the plot; the flatness of some of the prose, given that Fleming's best writing is stylish, vivid and apparently effortless; the structural flaw which the film replicates but which I won't go into; and Bond's stupendous alcohol intake.
Before going into battle armed with around $5 million - in today's money - courtesy of the British taxpayer, Bond puts away the following: pre-lunch, an Americano (Campari and sweet vermouth); with lunch, a couple of Scotches; pre-dinner, a dry martini comprising three parts gin, one part vodka and one part vermouth; with dinner, a small carafe of vodka and a bottle of champagne (shared).
It's thirsty work at the baccarat table and a half-bottle of champagne barely touches the sides. Afterwards he celebrates by downing the lion's share of another three bottles of champagne.
It's now four in the morning and he's feeling a little jaded as he lights his 70th cigarette of the day, but duty calls. Next thing he's doing 190km/h in his supercharged Bentley chasing the villain who, as villains tend to do, has turned out to be a poor loser.
Having obligingly blundered into an obvious trap, Bond literally puts his balls on the line in a protracted torture scene that still has the power to make (male) readers' eyes water.
Despite the Bond books' vast commercial success and socio-cultural impact, they're now essentially pop cultural artefacts.
This is a pity because the best of them (Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger) are classics of the genre.
Hollywood has given Bond a life of his own, relegating his creator to copywriter in a blockbuster marketing campaign. This too is a pity because Fleming's life story is as dramatic and colourful as his fiction.
The son of a Conservative MP who died in World War I and whose Times obituary was written by Winston Churchill, he grew up in the shadow of his father, and his elder brother, who shone at Eton and Oxford and became a celebrated travel writer.
Fleming was "sent down" from Eton for misbehaviour involving a girl, dropped out of Sandhurst and was rejected by the Foreign Service.
He had some success in journalism but really came into his own during World War II.
As personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence he was in the forefront of the secret war, running a legendary team of commandos - the 30 Assault Unit - and, at the Americans' request, drawing up the blueprint for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
Although his family was enormously wealthy - they were a branch of a Scottish banking dynasty which continues to this day - the terms of his father's will effectively reduced Fleming to the status of a supplicant by denying him access to the family fortune until his mother re-married (something the will ruthlessly discouraged) or died.
Having achieved his twin goals of financial independence and a renown eclipsing that of his brother and father, Fleming died at the age of 56, more than likely a victim of the self-destructive lifestyle he shared with his creation.
He'd outlived his mother by a matter of months.
