Instead, the reader is treated to the story of the life of this woman and how she came to be in the predicament that would require someone like James Bond to save her. Bond in fact doesn’t appear until the novel has nearly ended. Instead of writing it as a 3 rd person omniscient narration has he had done with the previous novels, he decided to write in the 1 st person from the perspective of a woman, Vivienne Michel, a French Canadian who had spent her late teenage years in England and whose tale was to focus on the various disappointments in her love life before the fateful night when James Bond saved her life. No may have been based upon her.įleming decided to take an entirely different approach with his next book, which would become The Spy Who Loved Me. Some believe that Blanche was really the love of Ian Fleming’s life and that the character of Honeychile Rider from Dr. Anne was seeing Hugh Gaitskell, a politician and Leader of the Labor Party while Ian was seeing Blanche Blackwell, mother of Chris Blackwell who would go on to become founder of Island Records and eventually become the owner of Fleming’s Goldeneye estate, a present day luxury resort. Both Ian and Ann were also each engaged in affairs. Ann had never approved of Fleming’s Bond books because she found them distasteful and because her social circle also disapproved of them. His relationship with his wife Ann had become terribly fractured. The previous year, Fleming had suffered a coronary forcing him to spend a month at a London clinic. He was no longer fit enough to ski at the Fleming family Christmas holiday retreat in St. Not surprisingly, Ian Fleming was in a dire physical and emotional state. His previous novel, Thunderball, had been published despite Kevin McClory’s attempt to stop publication amidst accusations of plagiarism.

In January of 1961 Ian Fleming retreated to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica to write his 10 th James Bond book.

The spy who loved me book