Book explores Ian Fleming's Jamaican retreat

James Bond is a British icon, but the fictional spy hero really was born in Jamaica, just as the Caribbean island gained its independence from the waning British empire.

The relationship between Bond's author, Ian Fleming and the island where he sought to escape from dreary post-war Britain is explored in Matthew Parker's biography, Goldeneye.

Fleming wrote all the Bond short stories and novels, which inspired an ongoing series of blockbuster films, at his Goldeneye estate on Jamaica's northern shore. He spent two months every year, from 1946 through his death in 1964, at Goldeneye, and for a while his own boozy, cigarette-fueled seductions rivaled those he created for Bond.