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How James Bond鈥檚 creator 鈥榖orrowed鈥� his brother鈥檚 work to create his iconic super spy

15 September 2017

According to T.S. Eliot, good writers borrow while great writers steal.

As Paul Murton discovered on a ramble across Rannoch Moor for , creator Ian Fleming was just as ruthless as his famous spy when it came to helping himself to the ideas of others.

Hiking across the moorland, Murton reached a stone memorial cairn dedicated to Peter Fleming, Ian’s older brother. Years before Ian’s Bond books, Peter had used espionage experience gained in British intelligence to pen a spy novel called The Sixth Column.

Featuring a dastardly foreign plot to undermine Britain and a debonair hero to foil it, the book provided a template for Ian’s 007 tales when, a year later, he wrote the first of his Bond novels, .

For good measure, Ian even stole a character from his big brother – lifting a certain Miss Moneypenny from one of Peter’s unfinished novels.

Ian Fleming, author and creator of James Bond.

Paul makes his way across Rannoch Moor to discover the origins of 007's Miss Moneypenny

Paul follows in the footstep's of Ian Fleming's older brother Peter on Rannoch Moor.

Literary theft has a long and noble tradition and Fleming is far from the first author to mine the works of other writers.

Shakespeare nabbed practically the entirety of Othello’s plot and characters from ; Alexandre Dumas based his famous Musketeer stories on the work of a ; and even George Orwell’s classic sci-fi dystopia 1984 bears an uncanny likeness to a written decades earlier.