‘Bond. James Bond.’
‘That’s a pretty chump name. From England, huh?’ (p.124)
A colossal experiment, a James Bond adventure told from the point of view of its ‘Bond girl’, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel. Fleming had experimented with structure and time-frame in previous novels, but this is an extraordinary departure from the formula. It was panned by the critics and Fleming later tried to suppress it.
The Spy Who Loved Me is a short novel, divided – very slickly – into three sections: Me, Them, Him.
Me (74 pages)
The first 70 or so pages are a first-person narrative told by Vivienne Michel, 23-years-old, five foot six, still fresh, young and naive. It is the long, sensitive autobiography of a well-brought-up young woman in which JB isn’t mentioned – a really remarkable production for the author of the famous bang-bang espionage novels.
Viv comes from an established French-Canadian family, her parents died when she was young (like so many Bond girls, making her that bit more free, wayward and independent – characteristics which always appeal to him) and she was brought up by an aunt who sent her to a traditional, Catholic convent school.
As her education neared completion, the (Protestant) aunt decided she needed to be ‘finished’ in England, and so sent her to a very posh finishing school in the Sunninghill area of East Berkshire, not far from Windsor. There’s a brief account of the bullying she got there from the other girls for having a ‘funny’ accent, before she settles down to be turned into a model young lady.
But the lion’s share of the section is devoted to a long and embarrassingly detailed account of her seduction by ‘Derek’, from a local public school. By this stage Viv has left her school and set up in a shared flat in Chelsea. She and her flat-mate hold their first party, lubricated with plenty of pink champagne and amateur canapés, and she finds herself being charmed by the tall sixth-former, Derek Mallaby, who plays cricket for his school’s first XI.
Viv and Derek proceed to meet up every Saturday throughout that long lovely summer for walks or even little pleasure cruises along the Thames. One thing leads to another and she describes, in minute and excruciating detail, the evening he takes her virginity – first trying it on in the cramped box at the local fleapit cinema, until the management throws them out – then persuading her to go for a ‘walk’ down by the river Thames, till they find an isolated spot, littered with the detritus of previous ‘courting couples’. Here Derek does the deed, Viv cries in pain but, once satisfied, he turns cold and aloof, all but ignoring her on the cold, sad trudge back to Windsor railway station.
We are plunged into her point of view, experiencing all this from the perspective of a confused teenager, puzzled by the now-passionate, now-frigid behaviour of the man she thinks ‘loves’ her.
It comes as no surprise to the reader when young Derek writes her a ‘Dear Jane’ letter, explaining that now he is going up to Oxford, things are going to be different, his parents don’t want him consorting with someone who isn’t ‘the right type’, in fact – he now reveals – he’s been sort of engaged to a young lady from a good family for a while now. Sorry. Bye.
Viv cries her eyes out for six months. But there’s more, lots more of her narrative. We hear about her career in journalism, first of all in a local paper distributed in the Chelsea area. We learn what its editorial policy is, how Viv turns out to be a natural at researching and sub-editing, as well as chivvying adverts out of local traders. She is promoted, then gets a new job at a large-scale German media company in town. This is run by the excessively Teutonic Kurt Rainer and, once again, we get an extensive description of Viv’s role in the processes whereby news copy is generated, fact checked and distributed to the German news agencies.
Rainer has a fiancée and shares completely inappropriate confidences with Viv about his plans for the marriage, for the honeymoon (sex once a night), then settling down into married life (sex every Wednesday and Saturday). All these confidences draw him into her ambit until the (inevitable) night when he arrives in floods of tears, announcing his fiancée has dumped him and married a man in Germany. One thing leads to another and she ends up sleeping with him and then, basically, becoming her boss’s mistress.
All goes sort of OK until she realises she’s pregnant. When she tells him, Rainer reacts with callous Teutonic coldness and efficiency. He ceases all friendly relations with her, becoming coldly professional in the office and finally calling her in for a ‘meeting’ where he explains that he has organised every detail for her to fly to Switzerland, stay in such and such a hotel, go and see such and such a doctor, and have an abortion. He hands over an envelope with the necessary money (£150) and then announces that she is fired.
The text follows Viv’s experiences flying to Switzerland by herself and enduring the abortion process with no-one to help or support her. It all makes excruciatingly embarrassing reading for any man who’s ever seduced a young woman, or who is father of a teenage girl, or just any man.
[I found Viv’s story a fascinating slice of social history – the experiences of a (in fact, fairly privileged and well-off) young, single woman in England, circa 1956 or 57. Reminds me of the grim kitchen sink dramas of the later 1950s or the black and white movies – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey – or another novel about a naive young woman in London (written by a man) Take A Girl By You by Kingsley Amis.]
Back in London, Viv realises she just needs to escape – the horrible weather, the narrow horizons, the snobbery and disapproval. She needs to get back to the wide, open spaces of her youth, back to Canada. She buys a Vespa scooter and flies with it back to Canada, then packs off on an open-ended adventure motoring south into the States, into upstate New York State, to be precise.
Viv scooters round the area, exploring nooks and crannies while her money begins to run low and till, by good luck, she checks into an obscure little motel, ‘The Dreamy Pines Motor Court’ run by lecherous Jed Phancey and his long-suffering wife, Mildred.
This couple explain that the motel is owned by a rich Italian guy – Mr. Sanguinetti – and they’re looking for a young woman to become receptionist and look after the place in the last few weeks of the season till it’s closed up for the winter. Sounds like an easy way to pick up some dollars, so Viv agrees, dodging Jed Phancy’s lecherous comments and gropes as the couple show her where everything is, pack up their stuff, and motor off.
–All the above – Viv’s life story – has been told as a long flashback. It began as Viv watched the Phancies depart – then a violent rainstorm hit the motel, forcing Viv to retreat inside, pour herself a long drink of bourbon, and snuggle up in a comfy chair, as she reflected on her life and on the tangled web of events which had brought her to this isolated motel in the middle of nowhere. It is a persuasive and mesmeric performance.
Them (23 pages)
Viv is roused from her reveries by a harsh knocking at the door. Two men in raincoats are standing in the thundering downpour; they say they’re from Mr Sanguinetti. No-one had told her to expect them and as soon as she’s let them in she realises she’s in trouble, really bad trouble.
Tall, thin Sol Horovitz (aka ‘Horror’) with his bony skull and callous stare is accompanied by bald, fat Sluggsy Morant (‘Sluggsy’), who immediately sizes Viv up and starts making the crudest comments about her figure, promising that, when night falls, he’s going to give it to her good and hard and lots of times. Yuk. Viv has been pitched, with no warning, into a nightmare. — The 20 or so pages of this section amount to a systematic mental and physical degradation of this ‘innocent’ young woman, the kind of punishment which Fleming normally reserves for Bond.
The two men take complete control of the kitchen-diner area, Sluggsy groping and verbally threatening Viv at every opportunity. Eventually she makes a desperate dash for the door and runs in the pouring rain between the cabins and into the nearby pine woods. But Horror switches on the car headlights which penetrate deep among the pines, and Sluggsy easily catches her at gun-point.
Back in the cage of the kitchen-dining area she has another go at her attackers, using a corkscrew to try and skewer Horror, but only managing to scratch his forehead. Now this forbidding scarecrow loses his temper, his tiny black eyes seeing red and, while Sluggsy holds her, Horror sets about systematically punching Viv’s face, then her body, at its most vulnerable and painful points, until she is whimpering, then screaming, then begging, then blacks out.
Viv recovers consciousness stripped naked in the cold shower with Sluggsy leering over her, waiting while she throws up, having been reduced to the level of a beaten animal. ‘Get dressed and come back to the diner and no funny business,’ he tells her.
It takes her a while to recover, to stand up, to dry off, to dress in white overalls, and stagger the short distance to the diner. Once again, the impassive baddies tell her to fix them hot food – eggs and bacon and coffee – while her flayed mind vows that, God, if she makes it through this nightmare night she will never take peace and safety and security for granted again.
As the bad guys come to collect their food, she makes another feeble rebellion, throwing a drawer full of knives and forks in Sluggsy’s face, then trying to fend Horror off with plates, but they easily overpower her and this time Sluggsy begins ripping her clothes off with the declared aim of raping her when — there is a knock at the front door. And, like characters in a bedroom farce, they all freeze in a static tableau.
Him (79 pages)
‘OK, babe,’ they tell her, ‘answer it, but no funny business.’ Viv opens the door and it’s James Bond, six feet tall, lean, fit, scar on his face, cool grey-blue eyes (p.127). As usual, there is no detection involved in a Bond story. He is immediately thrown into confrontation with the bad guys – the only question is when the shootout will erupt.
Viv almost faints with relief as she invites Bond into the dining area, making secret signs with her fingers and winking at him. He says he was driving down to Albany when he got a slow puncture a mile or so back. Now it’s completely flat, he saw the ‘Vacancy’ sign on and wants to stay the night. Menacingly, the two hoods try to deter him, but Bond insists, so they shrug and say, ‘OK doll, get him a key’.
Very relaxed, the goons tell Bond that Viv is in a bit of a state because they’re investigators for the motel’s owner and were sent up to investigate claims she was fiddling the books. Bond instinctively disbelieves them. Amazingly, they let Viv go out to Bond’s car with him to collect his bags and stuff where she tells him in full and graphic detail what a nightmare she’s been in, and how evil the bad guys are. Bond reassures her, palms a gun and a small attaché case, and returns to the dining area, while the two hoods watch resentfully.
Bond confidently orders a meal and Viv scrambles yet more eggs and fries yet more bacon, while he explains why he’s here.
Complicated backstory
Apparently, a high-level Russian scientist from the nuclear sub base at Kronstadt, ‘Boris’, has defected. Our chaps offered him a new identity in the West. The Russians generally shrug when defectors leave, but this one was so high-level they want him liquidated to set an example. So they put out a contract of £100,000 on him.
Word got round to SPECTRE – the nefarious criminal organisation introduced in the preceding novel, Thunderball. (In fact Bond specifically references ‘Operation Thunderball‘ and Viv turns out to have read about it in the papers.)
An ex-Nazi (as so often, cf the ex-Nazi von Hammerstein in For Your Eyes Only or Hugo Drax in Moonraker), Horst Uhlmann, picks up the contract. All this is discovered and reported by the Canadian Mounties and Bond is sent to Canada on the case. They decide he will impersonate ‘Boris’, since he happens – fortuitously – to be a dead ringer for him (handsome physicist!). Thus Bond camps out in the defector’s flat waiting for the assassination attempt to come. So one day the bad guys come knocking and there is a furious shootout in the apartment building hallway. The wounded Horst forces open the apartment door, into where Bond is kneeling to fill him full of lead. End of assassination attempt.
But Horst had recruited a back-up team from bad guys attached to The Mechanics crime gang in Albany, upstate New York, and Bond wants to complete the job by tracking down and capturing them. (This is a very convoluted back story.) So Bond set off to drive from Canada down to Albany and was cruising along the highway when he realised he had a puncture, and limped past the bright ‘Vacancy’ sign on the motel just as the storm broke. That’s why he’s here.
I found this explanation tortuous, implausible and hard to follow. As often, the ‘international espionage element’ felt like it was tacked on to a plot which in essence is much more like a kind of Raymond Chandler / Mickey Spillane gangster story. Remove the defector, and it’s the cops / special agent, against organised criminals / the Mob.
All this has been conveyed by page 140 of this 190-page novel. What remains? The shootout and escape.
The long dénouement
The ending is very dragged-out. Eventually the hoods let Bond and the girl go to their cabins to sleep, though ensuring Bond’s is the one right at the end of the line. Bond shows Viv how to secure her bedroom bu shoving wedges under the door, pushing the TV cabinet against the window, creating a pretend body in the bed, and sleeping on the floor. Only then does he kiss her and go off to his cabin.
In the middle of the night Viv wakes to see a glimmer of light coming from the built-in wardrobe, then there’s a crash and Sluggsy bursts in through a rent the baddies had obviously made through the back of the wall and into her wardrobe, earlier in the evening. Sluggsy seizes Viv by the hair and cuffs her unconscious.
As she comes to, Viv realises she’s being pulled along the ground, in pain, while light and sound rage around her. Slowly she realises the motel complex has been set on fire and that Bond has rescued her from the burning building. He makes sure she’s safe, breathing and conscious, leaving her at the edge of the trees to run back to the burning cabin to retrieve the pistol he gave her. Along with his Beretta, that makes two weapons.
He explains that the bad guys had shot bullets through his cabin window into the fake body Bond created in his bed. Bond had waited till they were satisfied they had ‘killed’ him and left, slipping out the back of his cabin. He had seen them begin to torch the motel buildings, then scampered along to Viv’s cabin, to find her unconscious and rescue her, which is where the narrative picked up.
From their vantage point, Bond and Viv watch the two hoods walking from the motel carrying TV sets; so they’re doing a little freelance looting as well as arson. The plot is finally clear to Bond: it is an insurance scam. The two hoods are paid by Sanguinetti to torch the motel. The girl was to be the patsy. The Phancies were in on the scam. They would testify that they left the girl in charge and told her to turn off the electricity and use oil hurricane lamps. One of these would be found overturned among the burned ruins, along with the body of the girl. It would all be blamed on her and Sanguinetti would collect half a million cash. Tidy.
Now Bond walks into the light and tells the men to freeze. He sends the girl to pat their pockets and armpits to get their guns, but Horror moves like lightning, dropping his TV set, swirling and taking the girl hostage and counter-threatening Bond, as in a million TV and movie scenes. So the baddies edge to the corner of the building using the girl as a shield, then get away, not without a shot or two of Bond’s winging them.
There is then a great deal of crawling round buildings, hiding behind walls – as the fire continues to rage – dodging bullets, with the opposition popping up in unexpected places, everyone firing at everyone else. Might look good on TV or in a film, but a little boring to read. (Compare and contrast with the opening section about Viv’s teenage experiences, which were fascinating and original.)
Then the baddies are in their car, making their escape, and Bond leaps to his feet right in their path and, in classic duelling stance, side-on to his target (exactly as he did when he shot into the cab of the high-speed locomotive in Diamonds Are Forever) Bond shoots point blank into the car, which suddenly veers off the drive, across the lawn and over a small cliff into the lake – SPLASH – and sinks. End of bad guys.
Bond and the girl stagger through the still-burning ruins to one of the remaining motel cabins and have what is presumably meant to be a sensual shower together, tenderly soaping each other, the girl’s extensive injuries and wounds from Horror’s torture now conveniently forgotten. This reader found it impossible to relax into this soft porn after, not just the shootout we’ve just experienced, but the girl’s brutal degradation in the second section, let alone her traumatic sexual experiences in the opening. Far too much has happened and been too serious and traumatic to let the reader enjoy a sudden bit of Emmanuel or Bilitis.
And, disappointingly, we are now subject to paragraphs of gush about how strong, tall and handsome Bond is. As they shower or dry each other with soft towels, Viv thinks how Bond is ‘like the prince from the fairy tales’ who has saved her from the dragon and now is justified in taking his reward – her (p.176). He makes love to her, and she reflects:
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman’s natural feeling for her hero. (p.176)
After the tremendous insight and sympathy Fleming showed in the opening autobiographical sequence, this feels like an imaginative and moral collapse into pulp, cliché, stereotype.
The lovers fall asleep. In the middle of the night Viv hears something and looks up. There is a nightmare face at the window, slobbering, drooling, grimacing. There is a powerful Edgar Allen Poe-ish paragraph where she says she feels her hair literally stand on end, and tries to cry out but is literally frozen with terror. Then the window smashes and Bond reacts like a snake, whipping the gun out from under his pillow and shooting the figure at the window multiple times. He goes outside to check the body – Sluggsy – is definitely dead, comes back into the room, pulls the curtains over the smashed window, and then takes Viv again, ‘fiercely, almost cruelly’ (p.182). Pulp. Sensationalism. Crudity.
And in the morning he is gone, leaving a long practical letter and Viv to her gushing schoolgirl thoughts.
He would go on alone and I would have to, too. No woman had ever held this man. None ever would. He was a solitary, a man who walked alone and kept his heart to himself. (p.146)
The final section also drags quite badly. Bond’s letter tells Viv he’s up, fixed his wheel and on the road south to track down the Mechanics baddies, as he first explained. He will call the local police to come interview her (and get them to bring hot food) and do everything he can to make sure she gets the reward from the insurance company for foiling the arson scam.
Sure enough, there’s the drone of a police car pulling up outside and then some motorbikes. The handsome young motorcycle policeman has brought hot coffee and doughnuts. While Viv tucks in, the friendly old police chief first takes down all the details of the night before (corroborating the account Bond’s already given) then takes her aside for a friendly word of advice.
In a frankly odd finale, the old cop tells her she has had an insight into the dark underbelly of society, the hidden world of crime and law enforcement. The men who inhabit it – whether good guys like Bond or bad guys like Sluggsy and Horror – live a life apart, different from nice girls like Viv, from most good citizens. So, the cop tells her, she mustn’t go hero worshipping such a man. He comes from a different world, one she doesn’t want to enter. She must stay in the normal world, the real world, of decent folks. Viv agrees. She looks at the handsome young motorbike cop who kindly brought the coffee and doughnuts. Yes, he’s the kind of man she should fall in. Decent, reliable, someone from her world.
With these thoughts she packs up her few worldly goods onto the back of the Vespa and, with a parting wave at the kindly cops, speeds off down the highway.
It feels like a bizarre attempt to reintegrate the narrative into the everyday world of its likely readers. Why? Reminds me of the odd disjunction in many Hitchcock movies, which start in the (to us) stiflingly conformist ‘Hi honey, I’m home’ world of 1950s American suburbia, before taking us off into situations of extreme violence or horror (North by North-West, Psycho) before returning the viewer to normality, closing the violence cupboard, resolving the trauma.
It’s such a reassuringly conformist ending that is seems to us, 50 years later, almost surreal. But her farewell wave, and the image of a tough young woman who has survived a nightmare ordeal, still independent and undaunted, setting off down the highway into an unknown future, that still has a curiously contemporary ring.
Comments
It is an extraordinary tour de force by Fleming to devote so much time and effort to a sympathetic portrait of a young woman in 1950s England. It reminds me straight away of the extended sequence towards the end of its predecessor novel, Thunderball, where that book’s ‘Bond girl’, Domino, shared with Bond a long reminiscence of her teenage fantasies about the sailor figure who appears – or used to appear – on packets of Players cigarettes, a sequence which, the longer it went on, the more moving and beguiling I found it.
For a man sometimes accused of hating or degrading women, Fleming spent a lot of time imagining himself into the lives and experiences of his female characters. (The Wikipedia article on the book – linked to below – includes a round-up of contemporary reviews of Spy: almost all the critics really disliked it, among other things for its graphic sex scenes; but it is notable that the only positive review is from a woman, Esther Howard, who commented on the romantic element in the book, praising its ‘Daphne du Maurier touch’. Odd that the male critics noted only the sex and sexual violence, which they (presumably) felt duty bound to disdain; but it took a woman to recognise and enjoy the various elements of romantic psychology which Fleming had consciously given Vivienne.)
Time
Nearly all the novels mention the phrase ‘all the time in the world’ somewhere or other, here on page 131. It is a leitmotif scattered through the oeuvre, and each time I read it reminds me of the Louis Armstrong version of the song.
But they also nearly always reflect, somewhere well on into the action, on how the early scenes of Bond being briefed by M or arriving at the location fresh and innocent, now seem like months even years ago, so much has happened in the interim.
And so, although the immediate action of this novel takes place over the 8 hours or so of one nightmare night, from the Phancies leaving Viv in the motel at dusk to the police arriving the next morning, the intensity of the psychological experiences feel like a lifetime.
I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. So it was only five hours since all this had begun! It could have been weeks. My former life seemed almost years away. Even last evening, when I had sat and thought about that life, was difficult to remember. Everything had suddenly been erased. Fear and pain and danger had taken over. (p.160)
A lot is experienced in a very short space of time. Arguably it is the mark of the thriller genre that it focuses on intensity over depth of experience. What sets Fleming apart is that he embeds his intensities into writing with a number of other virtues or merits. I especially like his realistic descriptions of places, people, meals and landscapes. But it is clear from sequences like the long opening section of this novel, that he was also interested in trying to create a realistic psychology for his characters. It is only intermittently successful and when it fails – as with Viv’s collapse into gushing schoolgirl adoration of her hero – it fails badly. But it is the sheer fact of the attempt which is interesting.
The life-affirming effect of danger
And the simplest element in a character’s psychology is their thoughts and reflections. Are they the bare minimum required by the plot, to create a kind of entry-level sympathy? Or are they a bit more ambitious, pointing the moral not only of the story itself, but maybe of the genre and the act of reading?
Thus Viv is given quite a few moments of reflection, in the early section mulling over her disastrous love life (effective), in the final section full of gushing hero worship of the Sir Galahad who has saved her (poor). In the middle sequence, though, while she is being threatened, terrorised, then beaten, she expresses the simple credo which is at the core of the entire thriller genre.
The simple act of living, how precious it was! If I got out of this, I would know it for ever. I would be grateful for every breath I breathed, every meal I ate, every night I felt the cool kiss of sheets, the peace of a bed behind a closed, locked door… Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. (p.111)
‘Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.’ And thrillers, spy novels, pulps, with their varying levels of violence and escape, vicariously take the reader into scenes of danger, then restore them to the everyday world, chastened, stunned, ready to value every moment of health and happiness we can seize in such an unstable world.
The true jungle of the world, with its real monsters, only rarely shows itself in the life of a man, a girl, in the street. But it is always there. You take a wrong step, play the wrong card in Fate’s game, and you are in it and lost – lost in a world you had never imagined, against which you have no knowledge and no weapons. No compass. (p.106)
Hardly profound philosophy, but the frequency of passages like this – or the many places where Bond reflects on his job as a killer and is troubled by the deaths he’s caused – suggest that Fleming is more interested in the thoughts and reflections his characters give rise to than in the rather paltry, often silly scenarios he has to put them through for the entertainment of his pulp audience.
Credit
The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming was published in 1962 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
- The Spy Who Loved Me (book) on Amazon
- The Spy Who Loved Me (movie) on Amazon
- Ian Fleming website
- The Spy Who Loved Me Wikipedia article
Other thrillers from 1962
- The Light of Day by Eric Ambler
- Atlantic Fury by Hammond Innes
- The Golden Rendezvous by Alistair MacLean
- The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean
- A Murder of Quality by John le Carré
- The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton’s début novel
- October 1962 saw the release of the first of the James Bond movies – Dr No – which brought the character to a much wider public, introducing the iconic visual design, theme tune and classic performance by Sean Connery.
The Bond novels
1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.
Books & Boots 