Birds of the West Indies

Birds of the West Indies was a book owned by novelist Ian Fleming, who used the ornithologist's name for his own fictional British secret agent character, Commander James Bond.^[1] Fleming, a keen bird watcher while living at his estate in Jamaica, owned this book. He later explained that the author's name was "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine – just what I needed." Fleming once said in a Reader's Digest interview: "I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, and 'James Bond' was much better than something more interesting, like 'Peregrine Carruthers.' Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure — an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department." The book has since become a collector's item amongst Bond fans and was featured as a homage in the twentieth James Bond film, Die Another Day, when Bond poses as an ornithologist while in Cuba. The final shot of the miniseries Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond is of a copy of Birds of the West Indies next to Ian Fleming's typewriter.

The story of James Bond and his wife, Mary Fanning Wickham Bond, discovering Ian Fleming's theft of the name, before contacting and meeting Fleming at Goldeneye is told in the 2022 documentary The Other Fellow.^[2] The film chronicles the lives of several men named James Bond and shows a film, not previously broadcast, of the Bonds meeting Fleming, as well as interviews with James and Mary that were discovered by the film's director Matthew Bauer.^[3]

See also

• Inspirations for James Bond

References

External links

• A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, published by HMCo Field Guides, 1999 (Limited view)