By January 1962 the author Ian Fleming had published nine books in the preceding nine years: eight novels and a collection of short stories.[c] A tenth book, The Spy Who Loved Me, was being edited and prepared for production; it was released at the end of March 1962.[3][4] Fleming travelled to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January 1962 to write On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He followed his usual practice, which he later outlined in Books and Bookmen magazine: "I write for about three hours in the morning ... and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day."[5] For On Her Majesty's Secret Service he "took as much trouble as ever with the plot", according to his biographer, John Pearson.[6]
The College of Arms building in LondonFleming experimented with his format in The Spy Who Loved Me, writing the story in the first-person narrative of a Canadian woman whom Bond rescues from rape at the hands of two thugs.[7] He reverted to his usual formula for On Her Majesty's Secret Service.[8][6] He had undertaken some research in Britain before he left for Jamaica, and he contacted the Writers and Speakers Research Agency to ask about "which parts of the United Kingdom would be the best targets for which bacteria, etc",[9] and to find someone who could speak Corsican and provide information about the Unione Corse.[10] On Her Majesty's Secret Service was written in January and February 1962,[11] while the first Bond film, Dr. No, was being filmed nearby; Fleming visited the film set several times and met the cast, even inviting them to dine at Goldeneye with one of his friends and neighbours, Noël Coward. Fleming was attracted to the film's female lead, Ursula Andress, and included a mention of her in the novel he was writing.[12][13]
The first draft of the novel was 196 pages long and called The Belles of Hell.[14] Fleming later changed the title after being told of a nineteenth-century sailing novel called On Her Majesty's Secret Service, seen by his friend Nicholas Henderson in Portobello Road Market.[15] Fleming thought his draft was the best book he had yet written.[16] Sections were later added in England after he undertook further research on heraldry and biological warfare. Robin de La Lanne-Mirrlees of the College of Arms assisted Fleming with the background and also designed a coat of arms for Bond.[14]
On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the second book in "the Blofeld trilogy", sitting between Thunderball (1961), where SPECTRE is introduced, and You Only Live Twice (1964), where Bond finally kills Blofeld.[8][17] Although Blofeld is present in Thunderball, he directs operations from a distance and so he and Bond never meet. On Her Majesty's Secret Service constitutes his and Bond's first meeting.[18] Although Fleming did not date the events within his novels, John Griswold and Henry Chancellor—both of whom wrote books for Ian Fleming Publications—have identified timelines based on episodes and situations within the novel series as a whole. Chancellor put the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1961; Griswold is more precise and considers the story to have taken place between September 1961 and 1 January 1962.[19][20]
Although he was often a formulaic writer, with the death of Bond's new wife at the end of the novel Fleming showed he was prepared to break the formula of a popular writer by avoiding a happy ending, according to the writer John Atkins.[21] The communications academic Jerry Palmer believes Fleming was adopting a different convention of a thriller: that the hero should be alone. Palmer states that conventions determined Tracy needed to die, adding "James Bond happily married is a contradiction in terms".[22]
