By Robert Emslie
Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: In the Ian Fleming novels what was James Bond’s automotive brand of choice?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you are right.
For self possessed sophistication there is but one name, usually offered in repetition: Bond, James Bond. Ian Fleming’s iconic spy, 007 has been licensed to kill on both page and screen for more than 60 years. Over that time there have been 25 film adaptations and 7 actors who have filled the character’s Savile Row suits. And while film-Bond has made use of a number of different and unique rides over the years, there’s only one that has become synonymous with the character, right?
Yes, I’m referring to the Aston Martin DB5, which was first driven by Sean Connery’s Bond in the film Goldfinger, and resurrected for Daniel Craig in the Sam Mendes-helmed Skyfall. That car was tricked out by MI6’s crack spy-gadget team, headed by the straight laced but brilliant Q. No other car is as closely associated with the character, however, that’s not the way it goes in the stories Fleming put to page.
From JamesBondLifestyle:
In the Bond novels Casino Royale and Moonraker James drives one of the last of the 4,5 Litre Bentleys with Amherst Villiers Supercharger. It’s a battleship-grey convertible coupé from 1930. It is perhaps the most iconic Bentley, also referred to as the “Blower Bentley”, with its distinctive supercharger projecting forward from the bottom of the grille.
This is the first but not the only Bentley owned by James Bond. A 1935 Bentley 3½ Litre Drophead Coupe Park Ward with car-phone can seen in the beginning of the movie From Russia With Love (1963). In the movie Never Say never Again (1983), Bond drives a 1937 Bentley 4¼ Litre Gurney Nutting 3-Position-Drophead Coupé. In the novel Thunderball he acquires a wreck of a Bentley Mark II Continental, restores it and customises it, and calls it “The Locomotive”. Bond purchases a Bentley Mulsanne Turbo (British racing green with magnolia interior) in John Gardner’s Role of Honour. In the movie Never Say Never Again (1983) James Bond (Sean Connery) drives a 1937 Bentley 4¼ Litre Gurney Nutting Drophead Coupé. And in the novel Carte Blanche, written by Jeffery Deaver, Bond owns a new model Bentley Continental GT.
Bond did drive an Aston Martin in Fleming’s Goldfinger where the author put 007 behind the wheel of a DB Mark III. Of course when he started writing the Bond stories that was the AM at hand. When the film was made five years later, the Mark III had been supplanted by the DB5 and a relationship was set in celluloid. For readers of Fleming’s books however, it was Bentley that left the spy stirred, not shaken.
Image: JamesBondLifestyle
Robin Reliant ?
No that was the Jim Band spy novels. He preferred his seven and seven with an umbrella in it.
I actually knew this one!
And like most facts I know, I have no idea how or why I know this.
I may have read it in a book… Imagine that?
You mean you can learn something from a spider-squasher?
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Aston was my guess. I never would guessed the blower Bentley. Epic choice, though.
I was going to say a Saab 900 Turbo, but that was in the later John Gardner novels.
Yep, I knew that.Ant the choice of those prewar Bentleys was absolutely absurd for a spy doing undercover work. Not to mention highly impractical for driving around london. As for the DB’s, the 5 is by far the superior and far more lovely model.