https://literary007.com/2019/06/01/a-spy-is-born-by-jeremy-duns-ian-fleming-and-dennis-wheatley/

A Spy Is Born’ by Jeremy Duns – Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley
009 / June 1, 2019
In A Spy Is Born, Jeremy Duns follows the trail of a largely forgotten writer through memoirs, newspaper archives, declassified M.I.5 files and dog-eared paperbacks to reveal the surprising literary roots of James Bond.

His name? Dennis Wheatley. We asked Jeremy to share more of his intelligence.

001. You wrote about the links between Fleming and Wheatley some years ago, but why did you return to this subject for your new book?

It’s not so much a return as a continuation! A Spy Is Born is a significant expansion – over double the length – of my article ‘The Secret Origins of James Bond’, which was published on Spywise.net in January 2010. People can still read the PDF of that first version for free here (although it seems to work better if accessed via a mobile device than from a desktop, at least for me). That article was published a few months after The Devil Is A Gentleman, a years-in-the-making labour of love biography of Wheatley by Phil Baker, who I’d already consulted. I read the book for the original article, but there’s a vast amount in it, much of it in the footnotes, and over the years it’s sent me down a lot of new avenues. So I continued my research into Wheatley in between writing other books, and this is one of several topics I’ve done this with – another is Antony Terry, which eventually resulted in Agent of Influence.