Ian Fleming is best known for writing 12 James Bond novels and a collection of 007 short stories inspired by his World War 2 military intelligence role.
The author would pen one adventure a year from his Goldeneye retreat in Jamaica and lived to see Sean Connery’s Dr No and From Russia with Love.
However, he only lived to visit the Goldfinger set before his sudden death in 1964 of a heart attack at just 56, after a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking.
A year prior, Fleming had taken part in the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio programme, of which only a 9 minute audio fragment still remains.
Alongside his music choices, he unsurprisingly said his luxury item would be a typewriter and paper, while also revealing his favourite novel.
It turns out that alongside the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, Fleming’s book of choice would be Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. That part of the recording is lost, so we don’t know why he chose this book, but it’s noted that the writer requested the Russian novel be the German translation. This makes sense given that Fleming was fluent in both French and German, having studied in Austria, Germany and Switzerland after leaving Eton. It was his love of skiing and climbing in the Alps that would inspire scenes in his Bond novels. It’s also worth noting War and Peace is a very long book, so no doubt that would have influenced his choice of passing the time while cast away.
