Fleming's Women: Love & Violence The 007 Women Who Made James Bond
Richard Wallace

Without the romance, drama, danger, and heartbreak that seven key women created in the life of writer Ian Fleming, James Bond could never have existed. Fleming’s Women: Love & Violence explores the impact these women had on Bond and Bond’s creator:

His mother, Evelyn "Eve" Beatrice Sainte Croix Fleming, the flamboyantly beautiful, eccentric, rich socialite whose influence her ruined son could never shake;

His fiancée, the exquisitely named Monique Panchaud de Bottens, whose conservative Swiss family were horrified when Fleming’s sexual promiscuity was revealed to them;

Muriel Wright, the sexy military dispatch rider who skied like a ghost and whose death during a World War II bombing raid in 1944 plunged Commander Fleming into a spiral of guilt and remorse;

Maud Russell, the wartime mentor who gifted £5,000 to Fleming so he could build Goldeneye, the creative sanctuary in Jamaica that nurtured the rise of his fictional hero;

His wife and arch-tormentor, the society hostess Ann Fleming (formerly Baroness O'Neill and Viscountess Rothermere) who ridiculed her husband’s best-selling books behind his back with her literary friends;

Blanche Blackwell, the Jamaican heiress who became the mistress and muse of Fleming’s last years and the inspiration for Vivienne Michel from The Spy Who Loved Me;

And Fleming’s secret editor, Jean Frampton, the shy Dorset housewife who re-typed all the later Bond novels and enhanced them with Fleming’s encouragement.

These are the women who made James Bond: 007 surrogate mothers who unconsciously shaped, moulded, and honed Ian Fleming’s dark creation, providing the most famous secret agent in the world with the necessary tools and cache to kill his enemies and get the impossible girl.