Luggage: Ian Fleming

British Navy intelligence, aristocratic tastes, prudish and hypocritical.

Much of James Bond’s trademark cavalier attitude leaked through pen and paper from his creator Ian Fleming, forming the womanizing and well-traveled character, now a 50-year-old franchise.  Seven Bonds, 14 books (two published posthumously), and a multi-billion dollar film series later, many know of James Bond’s history, but often little of Fleming’s. Before his career as a novelist, Fleming served in the British Navy during World War II, worked as a journalist for Reuters, and earned a living as a travel writer.

Fleming penned his feisty two-part travelogue Thrilling Cities in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the first, an around-the-world journey; the second, a drive through Europe in his own Ford Thunderbird. Burning through £500 (about $11,500 now) of traveler’s checks for expenses, Fleming’s travel reflected his aristocratic tastes, staying in top hotels escorted by his friends and contacts. On his grand tours, Fleming traveled through Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. Fleming chose wrote about risqué topics, such as Hamburg’s then-booming sex industry, noting, “how very different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so disgracefully mismanage these things in England.”

During the U.S. leg of his trip and the subsequent U.S. publishing of his book, Fleming was asked to edit his comments regarding his trip to New York. Naturally, he refused to “tone down his wording.” Later he wrote the short story “007 in New York” to be included in the U.S. version by way of reparation.

—Andrea Bolt