There is a clue in the title of Clare Mulley's biography The Spy Who Loved -- a play on Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me, the most sexually explicit of his novels and the only one told from the point of view of a young woman -- that we are signing on for quite a ride in following the adventures of her biography's subject.

Born Krystyna Skarbek as the daughter of a Polish aristocrat and his Jewish banking heiress wife, Britain's first special agent of the Second World War would later adopt the name Christine Granville. While the tragedy of her death at a young age does not exactly come as a surprise given the war-time backdrop of her love and work, the fact that she died at the hands of an obsessive ex-lover haunts her legacy as an exceptionally strong and fearless woman, especially for her times.

Like the Cosmo Girl conjured by Helen Gurley Brown decades later as the target audience of her magazine for liberated young women, Granville placed high value on her own sex appeal, her career, and her right to remain single as long as she wished while maintaining an active sex life. She lived and loved, in other words, like a man. Through her contribution to the Allied war effort, she earned the George Medal, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre.

The mesmerizing pull she had on men was due in part to her unconventional beauty, but mostly it was her charisma -- her uncompromising self-confidence, independence, and integrity, mixed with a dash of playful joie de vivre -- that led to her many conquests in and out of the bedroom. Given the number of secret lovers she had taken in addition to her two husbands, rumors about her romantic life abounded. Most notably, she has been linked to Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond and a former naval intelligence officer.

Mulley writes that according to Fleming's biographer, Donald McCormick, Fleming told journalist Ted Howe, the mutual friend who may have introduced him to Granville, "She literally shines with all the qualities and splendours of a fictitious character. How rarely one finds such types."

She certainly meets the description of and might have been the muse for Vesper Lynd, Fleming's first Bond Girl. Quoting Fleming, Mulley describes Vesper as

"...a dark and enigmatic European agent, perpetually caught between sunbathing and action, who serves as Bond's love interest in the first 007 outing, the 1952 Casino Royale. Lynd was 'very beautiful...very beautiful indeed', with black hair, 'cut square and low on the nape of her neck, framing her face to below the clear and beautiful line of her jaw...her skin was lightly suntanned and bore no traces of make-up except on her mouth...On the fourth finger of her right hand she wore a broad topaz ring.' A wireless expert who speaks French like a native and is in love with a Pole, she manages to combine being 'full of consideration without compromising her arrogant spirit', and believes in doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does.' Fleming teasingly referred to his Bond books as 'autobiography' and took many of his characters' names and natures from the people he knew...so the idea of his using Christine and her childhood nickname 'little star' -- given as 'Vesper', the evening star -- is appealing. 'Can I borrow it?' Bond asks Vesper of her name at an early meeting, in the sort of in-joke that Fleming liked to play."

Bright and extremely self-confident, even as a child, Granville's charm evolved into adulthood as a "a blend of vivacity, flirtatiousness, charm and sheer personality...like a searchlight which when she chose could blind anyone in its beam," according to Mulley. In one of the most cinematic and memorable scenes in The Spy Who Loved, Granville is depicted walking around a pool at the Gezira Club in Cairo, surrounded by major players in the world of espionage, as the focus of attention "in her peep-toe platform espadrilles and well-cut shirt and skirt." The wife of one of the captivated men noted that even her own husband was "devoted" to Christine, though his feeling was "an emotion that transcended sex, and had its roots in admiration of her heroic qualities."

The Spy Who Loved proves the timeless wisdom that a woman's visceral sense of liberation -- of her self or of her country -- creates an irresistible, alluring, and history-altering magic.