Miles Jupp asks if a woman invented James Bond...

In the first James Bond novel, 1953's Casino Royale, 007 carefully explains how to mix the drink which will soon become as important a part of the iconography of Bond as the Aston Martin or the pretty girl: the Vodka Martini, shaken not stirred.

“A dry martini. One. In a deep champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.”

It sounds absolutely magnificent. Much better than it actually tastes. Let’s look at the ingredients; Kina Lillet is a rather dull French vermouth. The amount of gin in Bond’s favourite drink makes it a mouth-parching, head-spinning assault weapon rather than a sophisticated tipple. And shaking rather than stirring a cocktail has no effect on the flavour (this is actually one of the questions they ask in the entrance exam for M16).

Thanks to the recipe, we have known how to mix James Bond’s favourite cocktail for more than 60 years. But the character of 007, the world’s most famous fictional spy, is a bit of a cocktail too, and as I’ve been discovering for Radio 4, there is an element in it that we haven’t been aware of until now.

Ian Fleming once said that his spy hero James Bond was Bulldog Drummond from the waist up and Mickey Spillane’s hero Mike Hammer from the waist down.

Fans of spy novels might throw in a few more influences. The critic Simon Winder explains Fleming’s influences: “There are a number of obvious figures, rather faded and ghastly now but good fun. Dornford Yates or Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu novels were incredibly popular. But the big ones are the two major Scottish figures, Robert Louis Stevenson whose Kidnapped invents the saga, the chase, the betrayal story. And John Buchan in famous books like The Thirty Nine Steps but also much less well known but equally powerful books like The Power-House, to do with global conspiracies, innocent men on the run. So it’s a very rich mulch Fleming is coming from.”

I’ve discovered that there is another name we need to consider alongside all the male writers who inspired Ian Fleming. An unfamiliar name. And that name is Bottome, Phyllis Bottome.

Phyllis Bottome is little remembered now, but she was a highly successful writer in the early part of the 20th Century, who published her first novel in 1902 at the age of just 20, and produced a book every year or two until her death in 1963. Her most famous book is probably The Mortal Storm, which exposed the plight of Jews in Europe and was turned into a Hollywood film with James Stewart.

In 1946 Phyllis Bottome published a novel called The Life Line. It is the tale of Mark Chalmers, a master at Eton who is recruited by an old friend called Reggie at the Foreign Office, and introduced by him to his boss “B”, whereupon he agrees to take on a hazardous special mission for British Intelligence. He will travel to Austria, pass on information to a British agent, and carry on his usual summer holiday activity of climbing in the Dolomites. In case of trouble, he is given a suicide pill.

Readers of Fleming’s James Bond novels might find Chalmers strangely familiar. He is 36, dark haired, keen on skiing and winter sports, speaks French and German fluently and has a taste for wine, food and the ladies. And the novel in which he appears, The Lifeline, was published in 1946, seven years before the publication of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.

It sounds like a mildly interesting coincidence; a minor strand that may or may not have gone into the creation of the most famous fictional spy of all time.

But what if I told you that the year after The Life Line was published, Phyllis Bottome and her husband holidayed in Ian Fleming’s villa Goldeneye in Jamaica?

What if I also told you that Phyllis Bottome had taught the young Ian Fleming in 1926 when he was sent to Austria in some disgrace, an enrolled in the Tannerhof, a school that she and her husband ran for delinquent upper class boys. A school where young Fleming was taught by Bottome’s husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis. The Ernan Forbes Dennis who had been the SIS station chief in Marseilles, where he had worked as a highly effective spy.

And what if I told you that while in Austria Phyllis had encouraged the young Ian Fleming to write his very first short story?

Would you then wonder if the spy writer Nigel West is right to describe the relationship between Ian Fleming and Phyllis Bottome as “thief and victim”?

Is Phyllis Bottome The Woman Who Invented James Bond?

Listen to Miles Jupp present The Woman Who Invented James Bond online now.