Fleming’s Q – Will the Real Major Boothroyd Please Stand Up?
by Vaseem Khan
Spy fiction is an evergreen genre. The clandestine exploits of its protagonists remain endlessly fascinating, framing—as they often do—the real-life skulduggery of nation-states. From the Cold War to modern geopolitical rivalries, fictional spies serve as vehicles for readers to understand how espionage can shape world events. But a spy is nothing without his equipment. Yes, a field agent might be suave and sexy à la Mr. Bond, but none of that is going to get him—or her—very far if, in the essential moment, his rocket-launcher-disguised-as-an-umbrella backfires. In a very real sense, 007 could not do what he does without the brains behind MI6’s field kit: namely, Q Branch, led by the inimitable Major Boothroyd—aka Q.
Bond aficionados will know that Q (then Boothroyd) first appeared in Dr. No, the sixth Bond novel, in which Boothroyd—serving as MI6’s armourer—informs Bond that his beloved Beretta is a fairly useless weapon. Instead, he issues him a Walther PPK. Bond, being Bond, initially pooh-poohs the suggestion, only to later realise that Q really does know his small arms onions.
Q actually appears very little in the novels. It is through his on-screen avatar that we have come to know him. The interpretation by Desmond Llewelyn—over seventeen films—has made Q a beloved figure, and his exchanges with his knight-errant colleague have become an intrinsic part of the 007 legend. “Do pay attention, Bond!”
My latest novel, Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q (out in October 2025 and written at the behest of the Fleming estate), will, for the first time, give Bond fans a flesh-and-blood person to set beside the Major Boothroyd myth. A fifty-year-old Q finds himself kicked out of modern-day MI6 and returns to his hometown to investigate the mysterious death of his childhood friend, a quantum computer scientist on the verge of a major—and possibly very dangerous—breakthrough. Here, we begin to understand Q’s backstory—filling in the blanks that both Fleming’s books and the films left to our imagination—including meeting Q’s estranged father, Mortimer Boothroyd, a surly, retired Roman historian. This book is for those who love a solid mystery, in the company of a protagonist who transcends the genre. There’s dry humour, cryptic clues, insight into Q’s life at—and post—MI6, and yes, Commander Bond puts in an appearance. How could he not?
While writing the book, I reflected on what it is that has kept spy fiction alive and kicking over so many years, ever since James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, published in 1821, (arguably) kickstarted the phenomenon. In the late 1800s, several Sherlock Holmes stories involved espionage-heavy plots, giving the genre a shot in the arm. In 1907, Joseph Conrad, of Heart of Darkness fame, penned The Secret Agent, an anarchist spy story heavily cited after the September 11 attacks in New York due to its terrorist themes. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) remains an enduring classic—I recently listened to a new abridged audiobook version.
Spy fiction flowered during, between, and after the world wars—World War II in particular. A standout figure: Eric Ambler, who introduced gritty realism to the genre, especially in Epitaph for a Spy (1938). The post-war period saw a battle between two giants: Fleming and John le Carré. Fleming’s Bond was charismatic, ruthless, and more assassin than spy. In the films, in particular, he behaves oddly for a secret agent—routinely announcing his presence to those bent on rooting him out, then rapidly dispatching all and sundry. In contrast, le Carré’s characters were grounded, subtler in their assessments of self and others, and often burdened by the ethical dilemmas of their actions. Perhaps this new complexity stemmed from the fact that le Carré had himself served as a spymaster?
How has the genre changed in recent years? Having recently sat on panels with some of the most popular names in current spy fiction—Mick Herron (Slow Horses), Charles Cumming (Lachlan Kite), Ava Glass (Emma Makepeace), Nick Harkaway (George Smiley—continuing his father’s legacy), and David McCloskey (Sam Joseph)—I would argue that it hasn’t. Not really. The edges might have become fuzzier—Herron, in particular, has made biting satire a leitmotif of his spy fiction—and the theatres of conflict may have shifted, but the foundations of a good spy story remain the same: international intrigue, field agents caught in political crosshairs, and a sense of moral ambiguity.
Increasingly, the genre has broadened to reflect the world in which we live and the diversity of agents necessary to operate within it. For instance, Kim Sherwood’s recent Bond continuation novels thrillingly showcase female Double-O agents and agents of colour.
Why do such books remain so popular? I answer by asking: Which young person hasn’t imagined themselves in the role of a kick-ass superspy? But how many Bond fans, I wondered, have ever asked what it might be like to be Q? That was the question that powered my reimagining of Major Boothroyd.
The character of Q—Q standing for “Quartermaster”—is based on two real individuals. The name Boothroyd came from Geoffrey Boothroyd, a Glaswegian firearms expert who wrote to Fleming in 1956 to inform him that Bond’s Beretta was “really a lady’s gun.” Setting the politics of such a statement aside, the exchange led to Bond’s weapon of choice being replaced. The second inspiration behind Q was Charles Fraser-Smith, a Brit who developed field equipment for Section XV of the Special Operations Executive (Britain’s WWII intelligence organisation) while ostensibly working in the clothing department of the Ministry of Supply. Fraser-Smith’s efforts, made at the behest of MI6, led to numerous inventions intended to aid SOE agents in their missions against the Nazis. He called them his “Q gadgets,” after the so-called Q ships—WWI warships disguised as freighters.
Today, Q continues to evolve. In the films, he is now a young cyber-specialist with floppy hair and a spritzy attitude. But Ben Whishaw’s Q is precisely what MI6—and Bond—need in an era where cyberwarfare and AI threaten to overwhelm national defences.
My Q hovers between two worlds: a man wedded to the old-fashioned values he was raised with, yet, by necessity, an expert on the future battlefield between nation-states. In Quantum of Menace, we see these two dynamics in action. And at long last, we get to meet the man behind the myth. Personally, I think he deserves the limelight.