JAMES BOND BOOK #10: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

 When I first read The Spy Who Loved Me more than 50 years ago, this was by far my least favorite of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. --  It still is.  And going back and reading through book reviews from 1962 when the book was released, my opinion was shared by reviewers of the time.

Still, it is an interesting trip back into early 1960s America. And while it is quite different than any of the other Bond books, it is still an interesting addition to the series, if for no other reason than a peek inside Ian Fleming's mind. 

The Spy Who Loved Me is written in a first person female perspective by the fictional Vivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian woman. James Bond does not even make his appearance until two-thirds of the way through the book. The first half is Viv Michel telling about her life and loves which result in her being a caretaker for a night of an isolated motel in upstate New York. When a couple of thugs burst in on her, we have the stage set for Bond's appearance.

There's no saving of the world here. Just saving a young woman. 

Accounts of Fleming's life at this point more than hint that Fleming was struggling with coming up with new plots for his books. The fact that his three books after Goldfinger were a short story collection, a novelized screenplay that landed him in legal trouble ("Thunderball"), and this out-of-character book, bears evidence that indeed Fleming was struggling with the Bond plots. But the end of the book contains some fascinating reflections by Fleming on the character he has created. Those observations alone make the book worth reading.

The book was so poorly received that Fleming ordered that the book not be released in a paperback version and that it not be released in the United States. When the movie rights to the series were sold, Fleming included The Spy Who Loved Me, but with the caveat that while a film could use the title, the plot of the novel could not be used for a movie. 

Of course when the Bond book sales skyrocketed, The Spy Who Loved Me did appear in the United States and in paperback editions.

Is this book worth reading? It depends. For a casual Bond reader, this is the one I would skip. But if you are a true fan of the Bond book and want a full picture of Fleming and his character, you need to read this one, too. 

JAMES BOND BOOK #9: THUNDERBALL

This ninth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series has a special place for me. It was the first Bond book I read when I was 13 years old.  And I was hooked on both the books and the movies. This was the first time for me to read Thunderball in well more than 50 years, and five decades later, it still holds up as a great thriller.

For movie fans, this was originally intended by Bond producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to be the first Bond movie. But costs of production and legal issues with the book caused them to look first to Dr. No. More on that later.

Much of the movie comes directly from Fleming's book. There are some modifications, but the movie is very true to the book. This is the book that introduces SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld (in a limited roll). The super-criminal organization hijacks a NATO bomber and takes possession of two atomic bombs, demanding a ransom or the organization will explode the bombs in some undefined populated area.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the movie followed so much of the book was that Thunderball was originally written as a movie script. This gets us to the legal issue which plagued Fleming for the rest of his life.

Fleming was eager to get James Bond on the screen. His only meager success was a 1954 Climax TV production for American television of Casino Royale with Barry Nelson as an American "Jimmy" Bond and Peter Lorre as LeChiffre.  (If you want to view the 54-minute black-and-white production, it can be viewed on YouTube, CLICK HERE.

Efforts to market a Bond-style television show failed, although Fleming drafted the scripts for 13 episodes. So in 1959, Fleming sat down with Kevin McClory, a wannabe movie producer, and Jack Whittingham and created a script for a movie originally titled Longitude 78 West.  Fleming changed the title to Thunderball. When the movie effort was unsuccessful, Fleming in January-March 1960, turned the screenplay into the novel Thunderball, not crediting either McClory or Whittingham for their contribution. Undoubtedly that was a mistake, but after all, Bond was Fleming's creation. The book was published in 1961.

Kevin McClory was an Irish scoundrel who overplayed his qualifications and connections in the movie business. When Thunderball was ready to hit bookstands, and with Dr. No on tap for the movies, McClory launched nothing short of a legal vendetta in British courts against Ian Fleming. His attack was vicious. The legal fight sapped much of Fleming's energy and perhaps health. He suffered a heart attack. After years of legal fighting, during the trial, Fleming threw in the towel and settled in November, 1963, giving McClory the film rights to Thunderball while Fleming kept the book rights. The stress of the litigation is credited by many, including Fleming's wife, as adding to Fleming's health woes and causing his death. Fleming, a life-long heavy smoker with a family history of heart problems, died on August 12, 1964 at age 56.

McClory's movie rights resulted in Sean Connery's last appearance as James Bond in the remake of Thunderball, titled "Never Say Never Again." McClory stubbornly refused to part with the rights to Thunderball, hoping to launch his own Bond series. Only after McClory's death in 2006 did his heirs sell the movie rights to ION, which after more than 50 years, finally unified all the movie rights to James Bond.

BOND BOOK #8: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

For his eighth James Bond book, published in 1960, Ian Fleming took a different approach. This is not a novel at all, but rather a collection of five short stories that reveal things about Bond's character. To Bond movie fans, three of the stories carry familiar names: the titular For Your Eyes Only, From a View to a Kill and Quantum of Solace. But only one of the stories, Risico, will seem familiar to Bond movie fans.  

Here's a brief summary of the five stories in the order they appear in the book. 

From a View to a Kill. A NATO motorcycle courier is killed and his top secret papers are stolen. Bond is called in to investigate, almost like an international policeman rather than a spy. The story is intriguing in that for the first time, Bond must deal with the multi-national politics of NATO and the internal political maneuvering between M and NATO.

For Your Eyes Only. Bond becomes the instrument of M's personal revenge. A retired British Colonel and his wife living in Jamaica are ruthlessly murdered by a Batista thug in an effort to secure a Jamaica estate to which the Batista henchman can escape from Cuba in the face of the Castro revolution. But the couple were personal friends of M. He sends Bond to Canada to assassinate the killers. But Bond is surprised when the victim's grown daughter beats him to the scene.

Quantum of Solace. Perhaps the most unusual of all Bond stories. On a business trip to the Bahamas in the waning days of British rule, Bond spends an evening listening to the Colonial Governor telling a tale of an up-and-coming diplomatic officer whose life is ruined by a harlot wife. That's the entire story. There is no other action other than the post-dinner storytelling, yet I love the Hitchcock-like concluding twist. A quantum of solace, by the way, is a term of the story-telling governor's invention meaning the minimal amount of attachment between a couple that holds them together, and without which, they cannot stay together.

Risico. Attentive Bond movie fans will recognize this story as part of the plot in the movie "For Your Eyes Only." Bond is sent on an assignment to disrupt the opium supply from Italy into England. Bond is thrown into the conflicting world of smugglers Kristatos and Colombo, both of whom paint the other as the true drug smuggler. Who will Bond believe?  By the way, one of the best scenes of any Roger Moore Bond movie is taken directly from the conclusion of this short story.

The Hildebrand Rarity. Bond has completed an assignment on a South Pacific island, and now has several days before his return. A friend, Fiedel, talks Bond into joining him on an extravagant yacht owned by a wealthy American and his wife as they search for a tiny six-inch tropical fish termed Hildebrand Rarity, which has previously only been seen once. But what happens is far from a simple fishing trip.

This book contains some of Fleming's best writing. Don't expect the taut adventures of Dr. No or Goldfinger. Instead, you will find a more subtle Bond, and one well worth reading.

JAMES BOND, BOOK #7: GOLDFINGER

Released in 1959, Goldfinger may be the high-water mark in Ian Fleming's Bond books. It was the third in the great Bond trio: From Russia With Love, Dr. No and Goldfinger, which turned in to the first three James Bond films.

This is Ian Fleming at his finest. For those only familiar with the movies, all the elements from the film version of Goldfinger are there : the Miami card game, the sharp-edged golf match, the gold painted girl, Odd Job, the Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, the gangsters, Pussy Galore (although in a different role), and the Aston Martin, only a DBIII with only minor gadgets & no ejector seat. There's even an atomic bomb headed to Fort Knox. But some of these elements are not quite in the same order as in the movie.

Goldfinger -- "the man with the golden touch," as Shirley Bassey sings -- is even a more deliciously disturbing character in the book as created by Fleming than in the movie. There are a couple of places where the pacing dips due to some of Fleming's wafting into too much detail, but that is minimal.

Goldfinger indeed is a thriller that reinforces Fleming as one of the most entertaining spymaster writers ever. It is a MUST READ.

I began this by noting that it was the high water mark in Bond books.  Written in 1958 and published in 1959, Goldfinger preceded the first James Bond film by three years. Dr. No didn't come to film until 1962. But Fleming admitted that by this time, he was straining to find plots for his novels.  In fact, Goldfinger was the last truly original stand alone Bond novel for four years.

His 1960 book was For Yours Eyes Only, a collection of five James Bond short stories that included From a View to a Kill and Quantum of Solace. He worked on other projects, including a 13-episode American television pitch to CBS which was turned down, and teaming up with three other men, including Kevin McClory, to draft a movie script featuring a super-criminal organization called SPECTRE. That, too, was rejected.

In 1960, Fleming used the unproduced script and turned it into Thunderball, published in 1961. That became the source of the great legal controversy that plagued the Bond movies for more than half a century and contributed to Fleming's early death at age 56 (although Fleming's heavy smoking and drinking surely also contributed). 

Even after Thunderball, Fleming still was looking for something different. He wrote The Spy Who Loved Me, published in 1962. Told in a first person narrative by a lonely woman in the woods of New York, Bond is almost a secondary character. He does not appear until well more than halfway through the book.

But by that time, Life Magazine had published the list of JFK's favorite books, which included From Russia With Love, and the first James Bond movie was making its way to movie theaters. By then, Ian Fleming, not Goldfinger, was the man with the golden touch.

JAMES BOND BOOKS #6: DR. NO

Dr. No is the sixth of Ian Fleming's Bond books, and in my opinion, the best. Oddly, it almost wasn't written. After From Russia With Love, Fleming thought he was likely done with Bond. But the reception of From Russia With Love, both critically and sales, was such that he decided to continue.

Unlike previous years, when Fleming headed to his 2-month vacation in January 1957 at his Goldeneye hideaway in Jamaica, he did not have a Bond book planned. But by happenstance, in March of 1956 he had been invited to visit Great Inagua Cay, a desolate marshland island in the Bahamas that hosted birds, mountains of guano (bird shit) and two naturalists.  

The island was both hideous and attractive to Fleming. So when he decided to continue writing, it was a natural fit for the next Bond book. 

Dr. No slides into the middle of the great late-50s trio of the best Bond books -- From Russia with Love, Dr. No and Goldfinger. More than 60 years after it was first written, Dr. No still maintains its fast-pace edge. It is Fleming's writing at its best. In fact, a few years ago I read a book on writing that used Dr. No as one of three books that exemplify great thriller writing.

All the elements of Bond books come together here - the mysterious villain who isn't seen until the last part of the book; the exotic setting in Jamaica; the tense action, and of course Honey Rider, whose appearance in the book is sans swimsuit.

Because of legal entanglements, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman decided to scrap the original plans to use Thunderball as the movie-world's introduction to James Bond, and instead opted for Dr. No. And the world hasn't been the same since.

Fans of the movies will notice many of the scenes are drawn directly from the book -- more so than any of the other movies. This book is about as good as Bond gets.