James Bond is the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel Herman Cyril McNeile (aka “Sapper”) and the Richard Hannay stories of John Buchan.His genius was to repackage these antiquated adventures to fit the fashion of postwar Britain …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_(literary_character)