Was Bond pinched from Bottome? Ian Fleming's 'Casino Royale' is uncannily like an earlier spy novel

Secret sharer: Roger Moore, promoting For Your Eyes Only in 1981. Photo / Getty Images

It sometimes seems that any male contemporary of Ian Fleming who was reasonably person­able and could run for a bus without keeling over has been cited as the model for James Bond. But real people are notoriously difficult to translate into fictional characters. Could it be possible that Fleming took Bond not from life but from ­literature – lifting him wholesale from a novel by his literary mentor?

You will soon be able to judge for yourself, as the novel in question, The Lifeline by Phyllis Bottome, is to be reissued by Muswell Press after decades out of print. It was first published in 1946, seven years before Bond made his debut in Casino Royale. The espionage historian Nigel West has averred that the novel's hero, Mark Chalmers, "has every characteristic of James Bond" and that the literary relationship between Fleming and Bottome is that of "thief and victim".

Whatever the truth of that, Phyllis Bottome was certainly a profound literary and moral influence on Fleming at a time when he desperately needed guidance.

In 1927, the 19-year-old Fleming was the despair of his family, having neglected his studies – he was more interested in girls (as a bout of gonorrhoea testified) and cars – and dropped out of both Eton and Sandhurst.

His mother was threatening to exile him to Australia when a friend of a friend, Major Ernan Forbes Dennis, suggested that Fleming be sent to the establishment he ran with his wife at the Tennerhof, their chalet in the Austrian Tyrol.

'Very Etonian, very prickly... it was almost impossible to get through his defences': Ian Fleming in 1958. Photo / Getty Images

Ostensibly a crammer where young gentlemen destined for the Foreign Office could brush up on their German, it was described by Fleming's biographer John Pearson as "part community, part educational laboratory", with the Forbes Dennises using modish psychological theories to get the best out of their pupils.

Mrs Forbes Dennis was Phyllis Bottome, daughter of an American clergyman and his English wife, and a published novelist from the age of 21. She and her husband had moved to Vienna after the First World War, when he was appointed, ostensibly, as passport control officer: in fact, this was cover for his role as head of station in Austria for MI6.

Major Forbes Dennis – by now retired from espionage – initially found Fleming "very arrogant, very Etonian, very prickly… It was almost impossible to get through his defences." It was left to the 45-year-old Bottome to lavish care and attention on the young Fleming: as a disciple and later biographer of the psychologist Alfred Adler, she deduced that Fleming's mother, after her husband's premature death, had come to regard her older son, Peter, as a substitute and so had been significantly more affectionate with him than with Ian.

During the three years he spent on and off at the Tennerhof, Fleming was often in trouble for failing to apply himself: he preferred to cultivate his interests in mountain sports and Austrian women, both of which would later fuel the Bond novels. Nevertheless, he did acquire some academic proficiency and discipline – and, more importantly, developed a passion for story­telling. Bottome encouraged all her young men to write, and to improvise tales round the dinner table every evening.

Fleming honed his taste for the macabre and the raunchy inventing scurrilous stories about the neighbours: one of his tales described a local bigwig ravishing a peasant girl, only to contract leprosy from her and die in agony.

In 1963, shortly before her death, Fleming wrote to Bottome to thank her for all she had done for him, and recalled writing "a rather bizarre short story for you which you criticised kindly and which was in fact the first thing I ever wrote".

After she died, Fleming told Forbes Dennis in his letter of condolence: "You were father and mother to me when I needed them most."

Jack Lord hold Sean Connery at gunpoint in a still from the James Bond film, 'Dr. No'. Photo / Getty Images

In that sense, then, James Bond would never have come into existence without Phyllis Bottome. But can we go further and say that she was actually Bond's true begetter?

In the early 1930s, Bottome had gone to Munich to study psychology and found that Adolf Hitler frequented the same café as her – a seemingly friendless figure, he would always eat alone. Before the war, she became a prominent anti-Nazi, attacking Hitler in novels such as The Mortal Storm (1937), which was filmed with James Stewart and made her a star in the US: she became so popular that the New York Times would report the arrival of the ship carrying the proofs of her latest book. In 1946, she published The Lifeline, a spy thriller set in 1940 in which Eton schoolmaster Mark Chalmers goes undercover as a mental patient at a clinic in the Tyrol to spy on the local Nazis.

We know that Bottome gave Fleming a copy of the book when she went to stay at his Jamaican villa, Goldeneye, in 1947. And the similarities between Chalmers and the Bond of Casino Royale are striking.

Chalmers and Bond are both described as being 36 years old, slim, dark-haired, 6ft tall; both are expert linguists, fond of alpine sports, overfond of smoking and drinking. Like Bond, Chalmers is horribly buttoned up ("emotion always made him feel wary"). Both men are extremely attractive to women, while not thinking much of them.

When Chalmers fumes that he has to conspire with a female doctor to get into the clinic – "I've got to see a lot of her, that's the worst of it. I don't like women" – it sounds like a pre-echo of Bond's fury at having to share his mission with Vesper Lynd ("What the hell do they want to send me a woman for? Do they think this is a bloody picnic?"). And, of course, both heroes come first to respect these pests, and then to fall for them.

Although the two novels have very different plots, they include some remarkably similar scenes. After Chalmers is savagely beaten by the Gestapo, there is a long description of his feverish, dream-filled convalescence and his gradual coaxing back to consciousness by the kindly voice of Dr Ida – a ­section later replicated in tone and atmosphere by Bond's convalescence and recovery as a result of Lynd's ministrations, after Le Chiffre has set about his private parts with a carpet beater.

Daniel Craig as James Bond. Photo / Supplied

Although Fleming's wartime service in Naval Intelligence gave him an insider's view of the secret service, Bottome could match it by drawing on her husband's experiences – the "B" who dispatches Chalmers on his mission, a precursor of Fleming's "M", was clearly a nod to the then little-known fact that the head of SIS was always known as "C".

Nigel West tells me that there is a simple explanation as to why Phyllis Bottome never complained about her future pupil's un­acknowledged "homage" to her work. "There's no question about it: ­Phyllis Bottome was writing about Ian Fleming when she created Mark Chalmers. And there's no question that Ian Fleming took Mark Chalmers as the model for 007 – he reappropriated himself."

Apart from the similarities between the brooding but dashing personalities of Fleming and Chalmers, West cites the fact that the route Chalmers takes from his home to the Foreign Office ­indicates that he lives at the Buckingham Palace end of Ebury Street, in Belgravia – where Fleming ­himself lived.

The Lifeline was not one of ­Phyllis Bottome's more popular books; it took Fleming's magic to turn the figure of the Byronic spy into a modern folk hero.

But without Chalmers, reflecting Fleming back to himself, there might have been no 007. Of course, Bond is a Fleming creation, but there's also a real sense in which a part of him is fundamentally Bottome.