Introducing the first selection for The James Bond Book Club.
To kick off the club, we are delighted to bring you The Lifeline, the novel that inspired Ian Fleming’s Bond, first published in 1946.
It is 1938 and Mark Chalmers, a master at Eton, is recruited by an old friend at the Foreign Office and introduced to his boss ‘B’. Reluctantly he agrees to take on a covert mission for British Intelligence – to parachute into Nazi-occupied Austria and pass on vital information to a British agent. Chalmers has no intention of committing himself beyond this one job but once he reaches his destination, he finds himself sucked into the cause – fighting fascism with the Underground.
James Bond may not have existed without Phyllis Bottome. Ian Fleming studied with the author at a school she ran in Austria with her ex-spy husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis.
