Bond has a number of consistent character traits which run throughout the books, including an enjoyment of cars, a love of food, drink and sex, and an average intake of sixty custom-made cigarettes a day.

As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel Herman Cyril McNeile (aka "Sapper") and the Richard Hannay stories of John Buchan.

[2] It was not until 1952, however, shortly before his wedding to his pregnant girlfriend, Ann Charteris, that Fleming began to write his first book, Casino Royale, to distract himself from his forthcoming nuptials.

[3] Fleming started writing the novel at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica on 17 February 1952, typing out 2,000 words in the morning, directly from his own experiences and imagination.

[11][13] Sir Fitzroy Maclean was another figure mentioned as a possibility, based on his wartime work behind enemy lines in the Balkans, as was the MI6 double agent Dušan Popov.

[14] In 2016, a BBC Radio 4 documentary explored the possibility that the character of Bond was inspired by author and mentor to Fleming, Phyllis Bottome in her 1946 novel, The Lifeline.

[28] In the novels (notably From Russia, with Love), Bond's physical description has generally been consistent: slim build; a 3 in (76 mm) long, thin vertical scar on his right cheek; blue-grey eyes; a "cruel" mouth; short, black hair, a comma of which rests on his forehead.

It is a measure of the disdain in which these fictions are held at the Ministry, that action has not yet—I emphasize the qualification—been taken against the author and publisher of these high-flown and romanticized caricatures of episodes in the career of an outstanding public servant.

[37] It was not until the penultimate novel, You Only Live Twice, that Fleming gave Bond a more complete sense of family background, using a fictional obituary, purportedly from The Times.

[50] Much of Fleming's own daily routine while working at The Sunday Times was woven into the Bond stories,[51] and he summarised it at the beginning of Moonraker: ... elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford's; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.

[54] Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett noted that, "within the first few pages [of Casino Royale] Ian had introduced most of Bond's idiosyncrasies and trademarks", which included his looks, his Bentley and his smoking and drinking habits.

[60] When in England and not on a mission, Bond dines as simply as Fleming did on dishes such as grilled sole, oeufs en cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad.

[70] Bond occasionally supplements his alcohol consumption with the use of other drugs, for both functional and recreational reasons: Moonraker sees Bond consume a quantity of the amphetamine benzedrine accompanied by champagne, before his bridge game with Sir Hugo Drax (also consuming a carafe of vintage Riga vodka and a vodka martini);[71] he also uses the drug for stimulation on missions, such as swimming across Shark Bay in Live and Let Die,[72] or remaining awake and alert when threatened in the Dreamy Pines Motor Court in The Spy Who Loved Me.

[citation needed] Bond subsequently purchases a Bentley Mark VI drophead coupé, using the money he won from Hugo Drax at Blades.

Bond's job is to guard the interests of the property class, and he is no better than the youths Hitler boasted he would bring up like wild beasts to be able to kill without thinking.

[78] In "The Living Daylights" Bond deliberately misses his target, realising the sniper he has been sent to kill is not a professional, but simply a beautiful female cello player.

While Fleming had a number of gay friends, including Noël Coward and his editor, William Plomer, he said that his books were "written for warm-blooded heterosexuals".

[84] His attitude went further, with Bond opining that homosexuals were "a herd of unhappy sexual misfits—barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied", adding that "he was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

"[85] From Casino Royale to From Russia, with Love Bond's preferred weapon is a .25 ACP Beretta automatic pistol carried in a light-weight chamois leather holster.

These included skiing, hand-to-hand combat (elaborated in the SMERSH dossier on Bond in From Russia, With Love as proficiency in boxing with a good practical knowledge of judo holds), underwater swimming and golf.

[95] James Harker, writing in The Guardian, considered that the Gardner books were "dogged by silliness",[95] giving examples of Scorpius, where much of the action is set in Chippenham, and Win, Lose or Die, where "Bond gets chummy with an unconvincing Maggie Thatcher".

[105] Gardner updated Fleming's characters and used contemporary political leaders in his novels; he also used the high-tech apparatus of Q Branch from the films,[106] although Jeremy Black observed that Bond is more reliant on technology than his own individual abilities.

The icing on the cake is using exotic locales that "normal people" only fantasize about visiting, and slipping in essential dollops of sex and violence to build interest.

"[118] In 1967, four years after Fleming's death, his literary executors, Glidrose Productions, approached Kingsley Amis and offered him £10,000 (£229,261 in 2023 pounds[119]) to write the first continuation Bond novel.

[95] Raymond Benson noted that Bond's character and events from previous novels were all maintained in Colonel Sun,[121] saying "he is the same darkly handsome man first introduced in Casino Royale".

[124] Faulks ignored the timeframe established by Gardner and Benson and instead reverted to that used by Fleming and Amis, basing his novel in the 1960s;[115] he also managed to use a number of the cultural touchstones of the sixties in the book.

[125] Faulks was true to Bond's original character and background too, and provided "a Flemingesque hero"[115] who drove a battleship grey 1967 T-series Bentley.

Bond is able to eliminate the head of the group and thwart a planned assassination, but the novel ends with him deciding to leave the service as he has grown jaded with his own role in the work, to the extent that he is in a position where he could be the target of a sniper and he expresses no concern about his fate.

[147] In 1962 Eon Productions, the company of Canadian Harry Saltzman and American Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli released the first cinema adaptation of a Fleming novel, Dr. No, featuring Sean Connery as 007.

Besides Connery, Bond has been portrayed on film by David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.