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In 1944, as the war reached its climax Ian Fleming, an officer in Navy Intelligence, told a friend: “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.” And that is exactly what he did.

More than half a century after Fleming wrote the first James Bond book, Casino Royale, in his holiday home in Jamaica, they remain landmarks of the thriller genre. The attitudes that Bond embodied have changed: his sexism, his disdain of homosexuality, and his consumption of alcohol and tobacco, are no longer acceptable. But the writing stands the test of time well: the descriptions fire off the page; the plots hurtle along and the sense of drama, taste and beauty are as crisp as ever.

Raymond Chandler, a friend of Fleming and one of his few rivals in literary longevity, identified the qualities that make the Bond books “almost unique” in British writing: a willingness to experiment with conventional English, a flamboyant evocation of place and an “acute sense of pace”.

For postwar readers, Fleming offered escape to a universe of luxury and romance, a licence to kill but also to eat, drink and enjoy guilt-free sex. Bond lives in a world of things — fast cars, expensive wines, foreign travel and available women. Fleming was among the first novelists to realise the thrill of the designer label.

Bond is more truly global than any other fictional figure, including Harry Potter. Say “James Bond” to anyone, in any culture on earth, and they will smile. Fleming has been copied, parodied and “continued”, but never equalled. To borrow a phrase, nobody does it better.

One to read: Casino Royale (1953)

Ben Macintyre is a Times journalist and the author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, to be published by Bloomsbury in April to accompany an Imperial War Museum exhibition marking the centenary of Fleming’s birth. Agent Zigzag, his story of the spy Eddie Chapman, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

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