Fun facts about Ian Fleming and his most famous creation, James Bond
1. Ian Fleming named James Bond after an ornithologist because it was the ‘dullest name’ he’d ever heard. The original name for James Bond was ‘James Secretan’; Ian Fleming took the eventual name from the author of a book on birds. The Bond books (and the hugely popular film franchise) are famous for numerous characters and catchphrases: Miss Moneypenny, ‘M’, ‘licence to kill’, ‘shaken not stirred’ (though this is apparently something of a fallacy), and Bond’s gadget and weapons adviser, ‘Q’. Fleming based ‘Q’ in his James Bond novels on a man who wrote Fleming fan letters criticising Bond’s weapon choices.