Ian Fleming, British author and former naval intelligence officer

Casino Royale (1953), the first of Fleming’s twelve Bond novels

Fleming wrote twelve novels and two short story collections featuring Bond between 1953 and 1966, including Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia with Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy and The Living Daylights. After Fleming’s death in 1964, the character has been continued by other authors under license, including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz. Bond is best known internationally through the long-running Eon Productions film series, which began with Dr. No in 1962.

Field officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly referred to as MI6. He holds the designation 007, one of a small number of agents licensed to kill in the course of their duties. His missions typically involve espionage, sabotage and assassination directed against threats to Britain, often set against Cold War rivalries with Soviet intelligence and its fictional in-house enemy organization SMERSH, and later against independent criminal and terrorist organizations such as SPECTRE.

British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), operating out of London under the fictional head of service known as M

The novels are set in the 1950s and 1960s, against the backdrop of the Cold War. Later continuation novels and the film series have updated the setting to whatever decade each work was produced in, so the character has effectively remained contemporary across seven decades of publication.

United Kingdom, with missions taking him across Europe, the Caribbean, the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan and elsewhere

British (English, raised partly in Switzerland according to the novels’ backstory)

Male

In the novels Bond is generally placed in his late thirties, a detail consistent with his backstory of Naval service in the Second World War before joining the Secret Service

English as his first language. Fleming’s novels also give him working French and German, useful for his European assignments.

Fleming describes Bond as tall and lean, with black hair worn combed back, blue-grey eyes, and a three-inch scar visible on one cheek. A comma of hair is noted as falling across his forehead. He carries a build compared in the books to that of a welterweight boxer, and bears a small scar on his shoulder from an earlier wound. Fleming modeled aspects of his look on the composer and bandleader Hoagy Carmichael, a comparison made within the novels themselves.