Royale-les-Eaux
The opening chapters are rather downbeat, casting a more sombre mood than we’ve been used to. The narrative skips the adventure recounted in The Spy Who Loves Me altogether and refers back to the events of the previous-but-one novel, Thunderball, ie the attempt by the fiendish Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation to blackmail the West with the threat of detonating two stolen atomic bombs.
Bond is fed up because he has spent a year tasked with tracking down Blofeld in so-called ‘Operation Bedlam’, and has got precisely nowhere. In fact the novel opens with Bond cruising through northern France in his beloved Bentley, mentally composing the umpteenth version of a letter resigning from the Secret Service. He is woken from this gloom when a sports car tears past him, driven by a sexy young lady. He follows her into the next village along the road, and then spots her again at the French coastal gambling resort of Royale-les-Eaux (setting of the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale).
Here, in an uncanny repetition of the central gambling scene in that first novel, Bond once again plays baccarat, initially winning, and then gallantly comes to the rescue of the girl when she gambles rashly and loses – paying her debt for her. (A casino employee tells Bond she is La Comtessa Teresa di Vicenzo, p.20). This leads, rather inevitably to chatting her up in the bar – ‘no one calls me Teresa, call me Tracy’ – and then rapidly to her bedroom, where she rather violently asks him to shut up and take her roughly, hard, but afterwards bursts into inconsolable sobbing.
Bond realises she is deeply depressed and her wanton behaviour reflects a deep unhappiness. Having tried, and failed, to comfort her, Bond – in a telling phrase – pads back down to the hotel corridor to his room, ‘feeling, for the first time in his life, totally inadequate’ (p.40).
Flashback All the above is told in a flashback, a technique Fleming has got into the habit of using extensively. The actual text opens with Bond spying on the girl at the end of a day sunbathing at the beach, and then following her out across the sand to the water’s edge where he suspects she is going to drown herself. Instead, two goons come up behind him with guns and an inflatable dinghy comes powering into the shallows, and Bond and the girl are forced into it.
All the events outlined above are Bond’s remembrance flashing back from the ‘now’ which is his kidnap and transport in the dinghy..
So who are the goons? Are they SPECTRE? Was the girl bait in a trap? Is he going to be tortured and executed? The boat speeds round to the harbour, docks and Bond is forced at gunpoint into the presence of a short, powerful man who announces that his name is Marc-Ange Draco and he is the head of the Union Corse, the notorious Corsican mafia (p.46).
No, he isn’t going to be harmed – instead, Marc-Ange surprises him by explaining that the girl Bond has been ‘seeing’, Tracy, is his Marc-Ange’s. Her mother was an English governess who Marc-Ange married and swept off into the mountains of Corsica – but Tracy grew up to be a troubled, wayward young woman, who hid her depression by moving in the European Fast Set, eventually marrying a worthless Italian playboy (hence her title, p.54).
The marriage didn’t prosper but when Tracy fell pregnant Marc-Ange hoped it would improve her humour and she indeed loved the resulting baby. But then the baby died of spinal meningitis (p.54) and Tracy made the first of a series of suicide attempts.
Now, in just a few days of their affair, Marc-Ange has noticed that Tracy’s mood has improved and so he has made checks into Bond’s background. Now, Marc-Ange announces that he will pay Bond £1 million to marry Tracy. Bond is flabbergasted, impressed, taken aback. but he knows himself – he is a rolling stone, he doesn’t want to be tied down. Bond turns down the offer but promises to continue the affair and be gentle with Tracy: it’s the best he can offer. But, thinking about work and his frustrated quest, Bond does ask for one thing: does Marc-Ange’s organisation know the whereabouts of a certain Blofeld? The Corsican makes a phone call and establishes that, yes, this Blofeld is somewhere in Switzerland. Aha.
Although this opening is predominantly about the men in Tracy’s life discussing her situation and fate (and so is easily criticised as sexist) nonetheless, it is another long sequence all about a woman, about her life and psychology, about the care and concern she prompts in those who love her. Not something commonly associated with Bond.
The College of Arms
Two months later Bond is back in London, keeping in touch with Tracy by phone, but being briefed by M. Extraordinarily – improbably – London’s College of Arms has been contacted by a man named Blofeld who has asked them to confirm him in what he claims is his ancestral title of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. There is some gentle and enjoyable social comedy as Bond reluctantly visits the College and meets the scholarly and obtuse experts there, the main one (Griffon Or – they all have heraldic noms de guerre) mistakenly thinking he’s visiting about his own heritage, and insists on telling Bond (and the reader) a lot about the Bond family (and title) before Bond manages to communicate that he’s come about Blofeld!
At which point Bond is handed over to a younger, more switched-on scholar – Sable Basilisk (p.75) who he consults about the Secret Service plan. Basilisk confirms the queries from Blofeld and confides that no force is as strong as snobbery; once bitten, people will do almost anything to prove they’ve got noble ancestry. This Blofeld fellow is totally hooked.
Would it be possible for Bond to adopt the identity of a heraldic expert and be sent as the official representative of the College out to Blofeld’s address in Switzerland? Yes, the man replies: they can rig him up with the false identity of one Sir Hilary Bray, and it will only take a few days’ mugging up of heraldry books to know enough about the subject to out-bluff anyone.
Switzerland
Bond briefs M, puts the finishing touches to his fake identity and flies to Switzerland as Sir Hilary, where he is met by representatives of Blofeld and driven to a remote Alpine resort, then by cable car up to a swish, modern skiing complex atop the Alp named Piz Gloria, near Pontresina in the Engadine (p.104).
NB Once again, there has been absolutely no detection involved in the novel. MI6 monitor communications coming in and out of Britain and so simply picked up the name Blofeld in his correspondence with the College of Arms. The baddy is a) known already and b) his whereabouts simply revealed. The narrative isn’t interested in crime thriller/Holmes-style detection – it instead focuses on the suspense of wondering when the (inevitable) big Confrontation / Shootout, which we all know will happen, will actually occur.
Bond is met by a squat venomous matron, Irma Bunt, taken up in the ski lift to the mountain-top complex, shown around and to his room. Along the way he identifies a dozen or so goons who are obviously SMERSH professionals. Bond finds it a strain keeping up the masquerade of being a posh heraldry scholar, especially when he is introduced to the ten stunningly good-looking young women who are sharing the base with him, ‘the girls’. To his surprise, he is told that they are all taking part in pioneering scientific work which the ‘Count’ is conducting, to help each of them overcome terrible allergies.
Over the course of a few days Bond (inevitably) gets chatty, then flirty with the women, and ends up going to bed with Ruby. He discovers she used to have a severe phobia of chickens, which was inconvenient because her family run a massive chicken farm. Sleeping in her bedroom Bond is surprised to hear a hypnotic tape start at midnight which lulls her to sleep and then – lullingly tells her that she loves chickens, she’s never happy unless she’s among chickens, and so on. Bond realises the ‘cure’ is a form of hypnotherapy, which is being applied to all the girls and their strange phobias.
Meanwhile he has the long-awaited interview with ‘Blofeld’ but is disconcerted to find a man significantly at odds with the reports of his appearance (Bond, of course, never met him in person in Thunderball). Where Blofeld was reported as immensely fat (20 stone), this Blofeld is lighter, taller and has no earlobes and also wears green (?) contact lenses (p.132).
So the narrative spends quite a few chapters slowly revealing details of the hypnotherapy, slowly revealing that each of the girls has a different phobia or allergy, each of them based on a different agricultural product (chicken, potatoes, beef cows and so on). Bond spends quiet days pretending to work studiously in his (bugged) room, poring over his books of genealogy, in the evenings enjoying the hearty meals and company of the giggling girls, having several interviews with Blofeld posing as Sir Hilary Bray, all the time trying to decide if this really is the Blofeld and what the devil he’s up to.
Two disconcerting incidents disturb the quiet flow of these days. Early on he is in his room when he hears a blood-curdling scream. Later, in the dining room, the girls are all gossiping that one of the ‘helps’ (a ‘Yugo’ named Bertil) tried to molest one of the girls; and Frau Bunt confirms the self-same man has had a terrible ‘accident’, slipping and falling down the mile-long iced bobsleigh run (unable to stop and travelling at speeds of over 60 mph, he will have been scoured and flayed to death by the ribbon-sharp ice walls.)
Secondly, Bond is at a particularly dicey moment in one of his interviews with Blofeld – a moment when Blofeld is apparently on the verge of bribing Sir Hilary – when two of the goons burst into the office and throw a blood-strewn figure down in front of him. To Bond’s horror, he realises it is the number 2 of Zurich Section, a man he knows is called Campbell (p.178).
The goons say he was caught snooping around the complex and Bond’s heart stops when the dazed, beaten-up Campbell recognises him and calls him by name – ‘James, help me, tell them I work from Universal Exports’ etc. Blofeld tells the goons to drag Campbell off to the Pressure Room where he will no doubt be tortured and then turns his green contact lenses on Bond. Bond bluffs confidently, ‘never saw the chap before in my life’ etc, but he knows it’s only a question of time till Blofeld’s men break Campbell who will blow Bond’s cover definitively.
Blofeld abruptly ends the interview and from that moment Bond is tensely planning his escape. He sidles into the ski locker room noting which pair would fit him (p.191), secretes a pair of goggles, steals the biggest pair of the girls’ gloves and so on. While poking around he opens a door into what appears to be a laboratory, illuminated by a dim red light, with sinister white-coated men moving about in it.
After a tense dinner with the girls who have obviously been told not to fraternise with him, Bond withdraws to his room, goes about his usual ablutions, and then pretends to fall asleep for the benefit of any hidden cameras or microphones.
Escape from the mountain
He gives it half an hour then gets up, dresses in his warmest gear, takes goggles, gloves, boots along to the ski room where he knocks out a guard (p.197). The phone rings (as in the corniest movie), Bond answers it in German and is told by the Head Goon that they are coming to arrest den Engländer in ten minutes. Ten minutes head start! Bond feverishly straps on boots, skis, grabs some sticks, exits the door onto the snow, locks it and throws away the key, then heads off as fast as he can down the piste.
There follows the only ski chase in the novels, although it was to become a common motif in the movies. Because it focuses on Bond’s consciousness as he tries to figure out the best way down the mountain, as he becomes aware that the ski lift is chasing him, as he cringes as bright flares are shot into the sky above him to make him an easy target – we don’t get descriptions of the pursuing forces, unlike the movies which dwell on pursuers as well as pursued. Bond has to guess what is going on behind him.
The chase ends as Bond deliberately skis out into a black run deep in new-fallen snow and deliberately triggers an avalanche. He then skis full tilt ahead of it, through a gap in a break of trees, through the narrow passage and then skis round into the protection of the woods. He and we are not absolutely sure but it seems like the pursuing skiers were swept away. As he continues downhill he gets to a road where he flies over and skewers with his ski stick a baddy who was shooting at him next to a car; Blofeld has obviously phoned his men in the valley.
In the same sequence he has seen a train steaming along the railway parallel to the road and realises he’s going to just about squeeze in front of it. The train has a snow clearing fan-rotivator fixed at the front to chew up fallen snow and spurt it out of the way. Bond whistles past it by a hair’s breadth but hears a terrible scream and then is pelted with red snow and clumps of hair and flesh from the goon pursuing him who was not so lucky (p.211).
Tracy to the rescue
Exhausted, dripping with sweat, body aching from the physical endurance test he’s just undergone (‘a grey-faced, lunging automaton’, p.212), Bond staggers on into the village at the foot of the mountain to discover it’s in the middle of a fiesta, with people everywhere drinking, wearing funny costumes, partying, congregating round a funfair and ice rink area.
Bond staggers up to the rink, not looking much the worse for wear than many other revellers, buys a ticket to the rink, gets a festival mask to wear and is staggeringly joining in some conga dancing, when up to him skates the fresh-faced, happy figure of Tracy, his beloved!
He knew she was in Italy but even so, this is a breath-taking coincidence. She immediately takes command of him, helping him towards her nifty Lancia sports car, both of them realising a crew of goons are watching out for him from a black Mercedes. As they hustle the last yards to her car, they realise the baddies have spotted them and are jumping into their car to give chase.
Cue a car chase along slippery, zig-zagging Alpine roads with the baddy car slowly accelerating and firing shots at them whenever there’s a straight line of fire, until Tracy and Bond hurtle round a corner to see a big Warning notice directing people away from a bridge which is being repaired. Bond jumps out and reverses the direction of the signs, so that the Sedan, hurtling round the corner seconds later, takes the wrong turn and goes flying over a cliff wheeeeee smashing and rebounding and crashing to the rocks below. Bond rejoins Tracy in her car and passes out before she’s even got going again.
A proposal of marriage
A few hours later they are in grey Zurich airport at dawn. Bond firms up his tickets for a flight back to London, then goes goes to sit with Tracy. She has tended his wounds and now is concerned at his wrecked state, at his health, his future. Suddenly Bond realises this is what he wants more than anything else in the world: the love of a good woman. And as he lets himself feel his love for Tracy flood through him, it dawns on him that he also needs to love. To his own surprise he asks her to marry him, and she accepts (p.231). Suddenly they are gleeful as children, and set about making plans to be married at the British Embassy in Munich. He has to fly back to London to sort out business; she will drive to Munich, sort out hotels and practicalities.
The conspiracy unmasked
Cut to later that day in London, where Bond has submitted his report to M who has called in some experts from the Ministry of Agriculture, the smartly dressed, beady-eyed Mr Franklin (p.248, it is Christmas Day but no-one is observing the niceties).
In between sleeping with her, Bond had extracted from Ruby a list of the names of the other girls who were receiving the hypnotherapy at Blofeld’s base, and got Ruby to indicate roughly where in the UK they lived (p.186).
The Agriculture expert examines the list, then points out that each of the girls lives in the main production region for the product they claimed to have a phobia of – ie one each to the country’s main areas of potato, chicken, beef production, and so on.
Now it just so happens (very conveniently for the plot) that one of the girls had already left Blofeld’s headquarters and returned to the turkey-producing region of East Anglia a few weeks earlier, and within weeks there had been the most severe outbreak of turkey blight in Britain’s history.
So the team in M’s office hypothesise that the girls are not only being hypnotised to overcome their phobias, but are being issued with germ warfare sprays or aerosols which they are being told to release at trade fairs and sales rooms ‘to boost and improve the nation’s stock’. Except the sprays infect the livestock or crops with virulent diseases: Blofeld’s fiendish plan is to decimate Britain’s agricultural sector and bring the nation to its knees.
Bond is ordered to travel back to Switzerland and foil this dastardly plot. He phones Tracy to tell her he has a bit of business to look after, but will join her in Munich in a few days time.
In Marseilles with Marc-Ange
First stop on the mission to capture Blofeld is Marseilles, the base of Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange Draco. Bond has an entertaining taxi ride from one of Marc-Ange’s tough Marseillais, along with some interesting travelogue description of France’s toughest city, and arrives at Marc-Ange’s base in a dockside warehouse to ask him a favour.
Marc-Ange is thrilled to bits that Bond is actually going to marry his daughter, as he wanted all along. So Bond takes advantage to ask him for a wedding present: will he and his organisation help him organise a raid on Blofeld’s mountain-top retreat? Marc-Ange willingly says yes and the men get down to careful planning, along with several of Marc-Ange’s lieutenants.
Shootout on a hilltop
Marc-Ange is given an interesting speech about how irritating the political situation is in France (1962-63) with the country tearing itself apart over whether to give its African colony, Algeria, independence. The conflict has led to the emergence of a far-right military organisation, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), devoted to keeping the colony French, whose most notorious action was an attempt to assassinate the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in August 1962. (This historical incident forms the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s superb thriller, The Day of The Jackal.) Marc-Ange complains to Bond that the criminal activities of the OSS – and the counter-measures of the special French security agency set up to combat them – have made for peace-loving criminals like himself and his Union Corse much harder (p.285).
Marc-Ange Draco is a humorous, winning character, one of Fleming’s best.
Turns out a renegade OAS General Salan has a helicopter at his remote chateau near Strasbourg and owes Marc-Ange a few favours. So he, his top men and Bond drive there, clamber into the helicopter (recently repainted with innocuous civilian markings) and fly south to Blofeld’s alpine headquarters.
Blofeld’s HQ issues various radio warnings but the chopper lands anyway and Marc-Ange’s men emerge to a stand-off with Blofeld’s tough goons. Two things happen: Bond notices a figure making a break from the back of the building and running towards the ski and bobsleigh shed – must be Blofeld – so Bond himself breaks into a sprint towards him. This sudden movement, plus some of the goons recognising Bond, prompts them to draw their weapons, Marc-Ange’s men to do ditto, and a massive firefight breaks out.
Bond sees Blofeld pull out a ‘skeleton’ one-man bobsleigh and throw himself into the run. He dashes into the shed, ransacking equipment out of the way till he finds another single bobsleigh, also throws it into the run, and there follows a typically detailed and hair-raising description of Bond hurtling down the run at terrifying speed, vainly trying to slow himself with the tips of his boots, finding himself thrown against the icy walls on curves which instantly rip off his protecting coat and flay the skin of his elbows. Still he is gaining on Blofeld and risks a few experimental shots from his pistol when he notices Blofeld throw a small object into the run. With horror he realises it’s a hand grenade, tries and fails to slow the sleigh, then the grenade explodes and throws him and sleigh out of the groove and into the adjacent snow.
Slowly he comes round, realises he has a cut head and a few other bruises but is basically OK. Back onto the badly mangled sleigh he climbs, which limps, grinding its bent runners on the ice, down the run to the bottom. As he descends Bond hears explosions from the mountain top and, as he finally arrives at the ski lift station at the bottom of the mountain, looks up to see Blofeld’s HQ on fire, and then Marc-Ange’s helicopter flying over him and away to safety. Mission accomplished.
Fire engines and police start to arrive and Bond pretends to be an innocent bystander who’s been injured by the broken cable of the chairlift whiplashing across him. The engine gives him a lift to the nearest station and he catches a train north into Germany.
Marriage in Munich
There are numerous pages of the kind of comfy domestic scene which Fleming does unexpectedly well. There are, for example, humorous scenes with Bond pretending to be exasperated at the amount of fuss Tracy is making about getting married; and then a comedy cruise with a Munich taxi driver to choose a wedding and engagement ring, during which spy and taxi driver become good friends (the latter admitting he was a Luftwaffe pilot in the war, and proud of it!) before they repair to a bar for Bond’s last drinking session of singledom.
The wedding itself is described with similar good humour, the British consul enthusiastically throwing confetti at the newly-wed couple which completely misses and goes all over the stocky, swarthy mafia father-in-law, Marc-Ange Draco.
They jump into Tracy’s Lancia, festooned with ribbons and balloons and motor off down Germany’s excellent Autobahns towards the village they’ve selected for their honeymoon. A few pages describing the scenery and their pleasant motoring lull the reader into a false sense of security – but when Bond waves past the flashy, red Maserati that’s been following them from a distance, when there is a sudden hail of bullets, the windscreen explodes and the car goes careering off the road into trees, crashing and Bond just has time to realise the Maserati contained Blofeld and Bunt – before he blacks out.
When he comes to, Bond sees Tracy dead, slumped forward against the steering wheel, the blood beginning to spread down her shoulders, shot by the occupants of the Maserati. A German motorcycle cop appears by the car, looking appalled at the scene of bloodshed. ‘What happened?’ he asks. It’s alright Bond replies, cuddling his murdered wife in his arms. ‘We have all the time in the world.’
I read these lines on a south-bound train on the Victoria line and confess they brought a tear to my eye. The contrast between the ten or 15 pages of whimsy and humour leading up to the wedding are smashed so brutally, and so quickly. And the poignancy of the ending, and Bond’s final stoic despairing phrase… The pacing and control which produce the emotional punch show what a very good writer Fleming was.
Biological warfare
It is interesting that this is a new enough idea for the scene in M’s office on Christmas Day to feature a detailed explanation by the man from the Ministry of Agriculture – explaining the nature and impact of Biological Warfare (chapter 22).
Marriage / all the time in the world
Bond intended to marry Vesper Lynd in the very first book of the series, until she revealed herself as a Russian double agent and killed herself. The thought has occurred to him with respect to several other girls, but this is the only time he goes through with it.
In the last few books I’d begun to notice that the phrase ‘all the time in the world’ seems to crop up at least once, like a slender thread or leitmotif. Now, here at the end of OHMSS, it is used no fewer than three times – the first two times reflecting humorous confidence:
‘Drinks,’ said Bond firmly. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world to talk about love.’ (p.314)
‘No,’ said Bond. ‘Let him go. We’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.324)
– which makes its repetition as the book’s final, bleak, tear-filled line all the more affecting.
‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see – ‘ Bond’s head sank against hers and he whispered into her hair – ‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.325)
Male bonding
No sign of Felix Leiter for once. Instead Bond has a ‘bromance’ with Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange. Just like Darko Kerim in From Russia With Love, Bond warms to the older man’s vitality, the spirit of life which is in him – his capableness, his confidence, his honesty and frankness, his dry sense of humour, his vibrant animal spirits.
[Bond] had developed much love, and total respect, for this man. He couldn’t say why. It was partly animal magnetism and partly that Marc-Ange had opened his heart to Bond, so completely trusted him with his own innermost secrets. (p.279)
Bond lost his father when he was young (as did Fleming). The sense of attraction to an older, mature and confident man after his own heart, the depth of the bond Bond makes with these men, convinces because it taps into something deep in Fleming’s own psyche, and inspires writing which conveys real feeling.
Bond biographical details
We learn that Bond’s mother was Swiss, his father Scottish, from the Highlands, near Glencoe (p.71). Loelia Ponsonby, Bond’s secretary for all the preceding books, has finally moved on, marrying a boring conventional man who works at the Baltic Exchange. She’s been replaced by ex-WREN Mary Goodnight, ‘a honey’ with the vital statistics 37-22-35. A £5 sweepstake has been organised by the male members of the office on who will bed her first with Bond equal favourite with 006, an ex-Royal Marine (p.68). (We’d heard of a 008 and 011 as long ago as the first book; this is the first mention of 006.)
He is driving his favourite car, not the DB III of Goldfinger, but a Continental Bentley, ‘the R type chassis with the big 6 engine and a 13:40 back-axle ratio’ (p.12).
Bond dislikes, in fact ‘abhors’, shoelaces (p.21). He has a new piece of equipment, a Syncraphone, an early version of the bleeper, which works within a ten-mile radius of the office (p.67).
At the Royal College of Heralds Bond is told he may be very remotely descended from a Baronet in the 17th century and remotely connected to the founder of Bond Street. The old family motto was ‘The world is not enough’ which, of course, was used as the title of the 19th Bond movie, starring Pierce Brosnan.
Credit
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming was published in April 1963 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2002 Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (book) on Amazon
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (movie) on Amazon
- Ian Fleming website
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Wikipedia article
Other thrillers from 1963
- The Golden Keel by Desmond Bagley
- Horse Under Water by Len Deighton
- The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré
- The Most Dangerous Game by Gavin Lyall
- Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
- 1963 saw the first appearance of the sexy woman special agent, Modesty Blaise, as a comic strip in the London Evening Standard.
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 