No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die...

Building a character and why you should read Bond...

The initial Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, and it was apparent from the very first line—“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning”—that Fleming had a complete sense of his character...[But provided very little background...] 

The lack of information was deliberate: “I wished him to be unobtrusive. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure,” Fleming wrote in April 1958 in a letter to The Manchester Guardian, in response to an article criticizing the “sex, violence and moral decay” of Bond’s world. Yet in order to create an “illusion of depth,” he had to “fit Bond out with some theatrical props”—the guns, the cigarettes and the vodka martini cocktail, shaken “very well until it’s ice-cold” and served with “a large thin slice of lemon-peel,” as Fleming described it in Casino Royale. (Several months later, Fleming tried the drink, which he “found unpalatable.”)