I just finished Doubleshot, my first time reading this novel...or in this case, listening to it as I don't own a hard copy so I bought it on Audible. I don't think Benson's books made it to South Africa in substantial numbers so they tend to be very hard to find here, despite my frequent, almost obsessive, scrounging around for them in used bookshops.
I found Doubleshot to be a reasonably enjoyable Bond adventure. I was glad that there were fewer gadgets than in other Benson books that I've read. No Jaguar with a build in drone and self healing bodywork, for instance! The story was interesting, with the politics around Gibraltar and the doppelganger idea, but I didn't enjoy the twin CIA agents. I found them quite annoying, although it could have something to do with the male audiobook performer, Simon Vance, doing the performance of young American women not really working for me. Not the worst continuation novel by any means, but the Gardner variety remains my favourite flavour of continuation book (with Amis and Horowitz alongside). The last two Benson novels and his TWINE novelisation remain the only corner of the literary Bond canon that I've yet to fully explore. Sadly I've never come across any reviews of those books that encourages me to peruse them anytime soon.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,912Chief of Staff
I just finished Doubleshot, my first time reading this novel...or in this case, listening to it as I don't own a hard copy so I bought it on Audible. I don't think Benson's books made it to South Africa in substantial numbers so they tend to be very hard to find here, despite my frequent, almost obsessive, scrounging around for them in used bookshops.
I found Doubleshot to be a reasonably enjoyable Bond adventure. I was glad that there were fewer gadgets than in other Benson books that I've read. No Jaguar with a build in drone and self healing bodywork, for instance! The story was interesting, with the politics around Gibraltar and the doppelganger idea, but I didn't enjoy the twin CIA agents. I found them quite annoying, although it could have something to do with the male audiobook performer, Simon Vance, doing the performance of young American women not really working for me. Not the worst continuation novel by any means, but the Gardner variety remains my favourite flavour of continuation book (with Amis and Horowitz alongside). The last two Benson novels and his TWINE novelisation remain the only corner of the literary Bond canon that I've yet to fully explore. Sadly I've never come across any reviews of those books that encourages me to peruse them anytime soon.
I think Doubleshot is my favourite - well, least disliked - Benson Bond novel...although I will always add I think Benson wasn’t served well by the publishers...Never Dream of Dying just left a horrible taste in my mouth, I find no redeeming feature in that novel at all...The Man With The Red Tattoo was a marked improvement for me, although it may be because the previous novel was SO bad...TWINE isn’t bad either...
I suppose I should read all of Benson’s Bond novels again, as it’s been awhile...you should get them if only for completeness -{
I just finished Doubleshot, my first time reading this novel...or in this case, listening to it as I don't own a hard copy so I bought it on Audible. I don't think Benson's books made it to South Africa in substantial numbers so they tend to be very hard to find here, despite my frequent, almost obsessive, scrounging around for them in used bookshops.
I found Doubleshot to be a reasonably enjoyable Bond adventure. I was glad that there were fewer gadgets than in other Benson books that I've read. No Jaguar with a build in drone and self healing bodywork, for instance! The story was interesting, with the politics around Gibraltar and the doppelganger idea, but I didn't enjoy the twin CIA agents. I found them quite annoying, although it could have something to do with the male audiobook performer, Simon Vance, doing the performance of young American women not really working for me. Not the worst continuation novel by any means, but the Gardner variety remains my favourite flavour of continuation book (with Amis and Horowitz alongside). The last two Benson novels and his TWINE novelisation remain the only corner of the literary Bond canon that I've yet to fully explore. Sadly I've never come across any reviews of those books that encourages me to peruse them anytime soon.
I think Doubleshot is my favourite - well, least disliked - Benson Bond novel...although I will always add I think Benson wasn’t served well by the publishers...Never Dream of Dying just left a horrible taste in my mouth, I find no redeeming feature in that novel at all...The Man With The Red Tattoo was a marked improvement for me, although it may be because the previous novel was SO bad...TWINE isn’t bad either...
I suppose I should read all of Benson’s Bond novels again, as it’s been awhile...you should get them if only for completeness -{
I agree with all the comments. Doubleshot, despite not being excellent was certainly his best and most consistently interesting novel. Some decent characters, good locations and a half-decent (as opposed to half-assed plot). The Truant Twins were my major dislike - one or the other of them does nothing, then they swap around, it was a tiresome exercise. I think Benson was just tickled with the idea of Bond making love to twins. In general Benson's ickysome sex scenes are my main memory of his fairly dismal run of books.
The author is the editor of the James Bond Studies journal, which releases serious work. The publisher's description of the book indicates it will be a nuanced examination of Fleming's attitudes toward race and empire.
Another important-looking book will published in June:
Normally I'd say the world doesn't need a new biography of Fleming, but as the publisher's description indicates, this work will study Fleming's life through the lens of Bond (unlike the Pearson and Lycett biographies) and include literary criticism and analysis. I can personally vouch for Prof. Buckton's credentials, having contributed an essay to his collection The Many Facets of Diamonds Are Forever: James Bond on Page and Screen.
I didn't realise this thread was specifically about Bond. I must have been a bit thick. Not sure I've ever posted in this one before. Anyways, this is a cut and paste job from Off Topic Chat where I reviewed the 2000 Fleming retrospective. Thanks to Caractacus Potts for redirecting me.
MY NAME IS BOND, JAMES BOND
2000
(Compiled by Simon Winder)
A celebration of Ian Fleming’s descriptive prowess as a novelist, My Name is Bond, James Bond doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Fleming or about Bond.
It’s an interesting compilation of scenes taken from across the spectrum of the novels and not always from the places we would expect them to come from. In his preface, Simon Winder painfully points out that he doesn’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment by revealing details of a novel’s narrative, in particular their conclusions. This rather reduces the material available to him, but he does a fair job of assessing and categorising Fleming’s work.
He’s split it into sixteen sections with heading such as The Man, Foreign Travel, Sex or Eating. It was strange to read these passages out of context. Some of them didn’t sit well at all. Many of the quotes from The Spy Who Loved Me are horrible in their misunderstanding [or perhaps a misrepresentation?] of women’s emotions. The stuffiness of the atmosphere and pretentions of Blades in Moonraker comes across as terribly dated and pompous. Other extracts amused me with the author’s almost childlike prose. Several excerpts from Goldfinger do not come across well at all.
I was more surprised by the sections Winder left out. He reproduces in full three long scenes: the centipede menacing Bond from Dr No, Bond in the Garden of Death from You Only Live Twice, Tatiana meeting Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love) and Bond meeting Oddjob from Goldfinger. While each of these scenes have merit, I can’t fathom why we don’t have: Bond’s midnight scuba swim to the Disco Volante from Thunderball, the opening scene and sentence of Casino Royale, the death of the Mexican from Goldfinger, Bond’s seduction of Tatiana (From Russia With Love), or the final paragraphs from You Only Live Twice. These surely reveal Fleming’s abilities as a descriptive and intuitive writer far more than the extended passages chosen – or even the shorter ones which abound the full 140+ pages.
Simply letting the extracts sit without explanation or analysis feels like a missed a an opportunity. Winder should have studied Fleming’s craft and examined why some scenes, characters and situations work so well and others do not. Now that would be a book worth reading. This celebration is rather aimless.
I like the idea of a Fleming's Greatest Hits or a sampler of his style. Most other books analysing his writing focus on plot structure, or his technique with the detail and the cliffhangers. I think Amis's first two Bond related books sampled some passages (I still remember a run-on sentence concatenating all the adjectives Fleming used for his characters' breasts, from reading the Dossier when I was twelve!) but those were definitely set in the context of the author's own analysis.
We don't usually think of Fleming of a writer of great sentences the way we think of Chandler or Wodehouse for example. Usually we discuss the imaginative plots, and his personal writing technique that favoured those fast moving plots with no rewrites until the annual Jamaica vacation was over. But he was a professional journalist, and we can see from all his interviews and letters he was witty and highly quotable in real life.
I recently re-read Andrew Lycett's biography of Ian Fleming. being older and wiser this time around, I can fully appreciate how much of an achievement it is--the research involved was monumental in scope. Many readers who just want to find out more about Bond will be frustrated by the book's immense amount of detail regarding the English social scene, but that's part of the package (The New Yorker's Anthony Lane called Lycett "an awesome fact hog"). Lycett shows what a complicated man Fleming was, so it's disappointing that many of the reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads complained of how supposedly unlikable Fleming was.
I read the 2020 updated edition, which includes a lengthy new introduction by Lycett. The rest of the text has apparently been revised and updated, though a couple of errors still linger (Peter Lorre supposedly getting up after being killed in Casino Royale, Fleming supposedly wanting Roger Moore for Bond).
My re-reading of Lycett was the prelude to beginning The World Is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming by Oliver Buckton. I'm only a couple chapters into this new book, so my review will have to wait, but thanks to @Thunderpussy for pointing out that a review has recently been published by the New Republic: “The World Is Not Enough” Explores the Failures That Made Ian Fleming.
The subeditor went for a decidedly belittling header ("The creator of James Bond had an unremarkable career in intelligence and considered his own books 'piffle' ") that simply isn't true. Fleming did important work in intelligence that doesn't deserve to be dismissed. And like many Englishmen of his type he was self-deprecating, so his opinions on his books shouldn't be taken at face value.
As for the reviewer, he gets off to a shaky start by attaching vast importance to Fleming's "disdain for the working class" without noting that (1) working class characters are rare in the Bond novels, since Fleming wasn't terribly interested in English class issues, and (2) Bond eventually puts aside his negative feelings for the cabbie in [i]Thunderball[/i] and talks to him as an equal; he wants to earn his respect. The New Republic has gone from being a centrist magazine to an angry Leftie one, so I understand why the review is stressing class issues, but fear of the working class simply isn't a big part of the Bond books.
The reviewer also makes a couple of silly mistakes--"Eric" Blofeld? His discussion of Fleming's ethnically mixed villains fails to mentioned that Bond and many of his allies are ethnically mixed themselves. And once again we're treated to the debunked rumor that Roger Moore was one of Fleming's first choices for Bond.
But from hereon things improve. The reviewer sensitively discusses (and praises) The Spy Who Loved Me ("the prose is some of Fleming’s most energetic and surprising, and as often happens in the weird history of literature, the effect was so disconcerting that typical Bond fans hated it") and "Quantum of Solace," which shows he ultimately knows his stuff. He also mentions Amis's Bond Dossier and Umberto Eco's "The Narrative Structure of Ian Fleming," which remain the two best critical studies of the Bond books.
Overall, I think the reviewer got off to a bad start but ultimately showed he was familiar with Fleming and respected his achievements as a writer of "great genre fiction." Plenty of other reviewers would have consigned the man and his books to the trash can or treated them with condescension. So all's well that ends well, as Bill Shakespeare said a few years ago.
Not nearly so impressive a trick as Wood's first novelization James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me , in which Wood re-told the least Fleming-like of any James Bond plot persuasively in Fleming's voice. He doesn't really attempt that here.
The plot is nearly exactly what we see on screen, with only minor details different. There are a few specific paraphrases of Fleming near the beginning, most notably the physical description of Drax. But for most of it, the dialog is precisely from the film, thus could only be spoken by Roger Moore, never by Fleming's Bond. So far the most part its just a simplistically written transcription of an inherently visual experience.
One of the tricks Wood did in his first book was to devote full chapters to the backstories of Anya, Stormberg and Jaws, as Fleming did for example with Red Grant or Blofeld. And Fleming would have devoted further chapters just to the nuts and bolts of all that technology. There's none of that here.
One noteworthy difference: Drax's helicopter pilot is not Corinne Dufour, but rather Trudi Parker, a blonde California girl with a surfer's tan and swimmer's shoulders. And her death by Doberman occurs between chapters, only told secondhand when Dr Goodhead meets Bond in Venice, much like Jill Masterton's offstage death in Goldfinger.
Minor detail: Goodhead knows Bond is agent 007 Licensed to Kill when they first meet: how does she know this? I don't think even Drax knows. Did the CIA tell her in advance? Why is Bond not surprised? He of course does not know she is CIA til Venice.
There may not be any conspicuous plot additions, but there is one very good chapter describing Bond's boat journey in the amazon: four days and ten pages go by of tactile description of just how difficult such a journey would actually be, something the film did not convey. The encounter with the enemy boat is perfunctory, then there is another detailed description of Bond's crash landing and discovery of the lost city. This section of the film's plot could be straight out of Rider Haggard!
Unseen Missions: Bond is returning from an unspecified mission in Dakar at the start, when he is attacked. M refers back to the Stromberg affair, and this latest attempt on Bond's life is just one of a pattern since then, specifically something similar happened on Chamonix, otherwise left to our imaginations. Presumably Jaws has been trying to kill Bond ever since Atlantis sunk. No mention of Anya, though. When last seen, Bond had declared Anya was the first woman he could love since losing Tracy, and she had shown up on his doorstep in London ready to move in. Evidently that didn't work out, but no hints as to what happened next.
Continuity: Wood's first book could have fit seamlessly into Fleming's timeline, except for the unspoken issue of Bond's age. Maybe his most recent mission previous to that had been versus Irma Bunt and her giant rats? But despite this being an explicit sequel (therefor the same continuity, or at least an overlapping continuity), there is the problem of Drax. The naming of the shuttles after a deadly rocket once aimed at London could be unfortunate coincidence, but it's a man named Drax !! entrusted to build these shuttles, and Wood gives him the precise physical description of Fleming's Drax (and Bond speculates he is a German WWII vet with a grudge). It would have been simpler just to name him Hugo Drax Jr!
Why were there no further novelizations until License to Kill? For Your Eyes Only didn't need one. but Octopussy was a sequel to the short story, not an adaptation, and its auction scene barely related to the one in Property of a Lady. And A View to a Kill was all new. The Living Daylights has the problem that it'd be improbable Bond should twice encounter beautiful cellists working as snipers in near identical situations, but otherwise the plot is all new. And certainly the coincidence of two different cellist characters is more likely than Felix Leiter being eaten by a shark a second time. License to Kill was in fact the film least in need of a novelization!
I love the Christopher Wood novelisations, no one has captured Fleming as well as he did. I only wish he had been commissioned to continue the adventures instead of John Gardner. Like Barbel, I must find the time to read them again.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
"Fleming wrote forcefully and succinctly, aiming for 60,000 words per novel. His style, sharpened by his work as both a journalist and military man, is marked by precise observation, judicious use of concrete detail, and clear, unaffected diction. He excelled at description. Though Fleming’s characters, especially the villains, are often remembered for their physical deformities—shortness, baldness, protruding teeth, missing earlobes, prosthetic steel claws, a supernumerary nipple—most often they evince his eye for the telling detail, the revealing throwaway gesture, the tic. He had a corresponding knack for narrating vivid and energetic action, and his explanations and descriptions of processes, of men purposefully undertaking complicated tasks, are clear, his pacing and suspense superb.
"He wrote not only skillfully but beautifully, something seen most clearly in his settings. His most vividly realized locations, those of the Caribbean, combine the tactile and the visual in a manner that also establishes tone. Thus, in the short story 'Octopussy,' the same reef can be a place of beauty, wonder, and comforting familiarity at the beginning and a place of inescapable horror at the end.
"Fleming’s talents extended to another crucial element of the thriller—plot structure. Fifty years of moviegoers have become familiar with the 'Bond formula,' a reliable but predictable and easily parodied form. Fleming’s novels are much more varied. He plays with structure to create tension and construct surprises, such as killing the villain two-thirds of the way through, as in Casino Royale; delaying the start of the action with a seemingly unrelated low-stakes adventure, as in Moonraker, Thunderball, or Goldfinger; or shifting between tones and genres—detective story, survival story, travelogue, horror—as in Dr. No or You Only Live Twice."
Thanks for that, Revelator. Yes, Fleming's playing with the plot structure is an often underrated part of his prowess, the most extreme example being of course From Russia With Love. He builds interest and tension by keeping Bond off-stage for an extended part of the novel.
Have been rereading John Gardeners Bond books of late and have got to his novelisation of LTK. As I remember from the first time I read it, either Gardener was bored with Bond or had a strong dislike for LTK. It's very much by the numbers and there is not an ounce of life or soul in it.
I went into the novelisation of LTK expecting very little from it. LTK was never one of my favourite films, and I know Gardner's later work is often a bit uninspired and sometimes dull. So perhaps I'd just set my expectations too low, but when I read it I thought he'd done a pretty decent job novelising the film. Since then, my opinion of LTK as a film has actually increased quite a bit. Who know, maybe my positive experience of the novelisation helped contribute to my improved opinion of the movie. But I'll say this...I have a tendency to be quite lenient with Gardner, and am less critical of his Bond novels than maybe I should be.
John Pearson, author of The Life of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Authorised Biography has died at age 91.
Fleming fans owe him a lot. His biography of Ian Fleming stood for 30 years as the definitive one. And even today it remains the best-written Fleming biography. Having served as Fleming's assistant at The Sunday Times, Pearson undertstood his subject in a way no later biographers will.
As for his "biography" of James Bond, it remains the most unconventional of all continuation novels and one of the very best.
Earlier this year MI6-HQ conducted an interview with Pearson that turned out to be his last. It's very much worth your time.
After all this defence, I may say something against the fans. They are decidedly wrong when they say that the Bond books which most depart from the formula are the least enjoyable. The Spy Who Loved Meis not written from Bond’s perspective, and in any case, like with From Russia with Love, he turns up for the first time a hundred pages in. Both books are better for it, and The Spy Who Loved Meis surprisingly good in describing the dull humiliations wrought on otherwise decent girls by the hypocrisies of 1950s sexual politics. And after all that, some gangsters still get shot up in the end.
The best books of Fleming’s are each not Bond novels. Two collections of short stories — For Your Eyes Onlyand the posthumous Octopussy and the Living Daylights— contain brilliant work: Fleming’s best of Bond. “Quantum of Solace” takes the form of a long conversation between Bond and an elderly colonial administrator. As a piece of Somerset Maugham-adjacent social drama it is both true to life and riveting. “Risco” is a good old fashioned adventure story amid gangsters in Venice. “The Hildebrand Rarity” and “Octopussy” are nautical-themed attacks on the abuses of arrogant tough-guy men. (The ‘Octopussy’ of the short story is not a lewdly-named woman. It refers, in actual fact, to an octopus.)
I actually tried to get through all of them a long time ago, about 10-12 years ago, and I made it pretty far (up to 'Death is Forever'), but then I fizzled out after that. I'm going to try it again though, and this time to see if I can get through the ones I missed too!
I'm reading them out of order, but I'd still started on Casino Royale which was great, I really liked the romance between Bond and Vesper, the plot was realistic, one of Fleming's strongest novels. The story, it's near perfect, Bond does actual spying, Le Chiffre was a great and scary villain, he's full of menace, Vesper was a great Bond girl, ahead of her time, competent, complex, almost like Bond himself, they are the mirrors and reflections of each, they're cut from the same cloth, a perfect match, the ending was heartbreaking. One of Fleming's best. The film was also great, but I'm still leaning on the novel because it's not that much action oriented, the 50's noir spy thriller drama (almost Hitchcockian) type of thriller and story. But I liked both, but the novel has that special feel to me.
Moonraker is the Bond novel I'm re-reading the most, a perfect Bond novel, Fleming was firing all of his cylinders here, all were top notch from Gala Brand, the realistic plot, Hugo Drax, and the scenes. The most entertaining Bond novel, the most fun, the most thrilling, the most exciting, you can't go wrong with this novel, Fleming's absolute Best, it's such a roller coaster ride of a Bond novel, a great experience. The number one in my novel rankings.
Then Diamonds Are Forever, though I'd think this one was severely underrated, Tiffany Case is one of the best Bond Girls, her romance with Bond was realistic, believable and fleshed out, yes the villains didn't have much of a presence, but everything in this book is good, the henchmen (Wint and Kidd), the SPECTREVILLE lair, it's a good novel.
My favorite will always be Thunderball, I'd found it even better than the film, it has the combination of action, comedy, thrill, intrigue and suspense. The best of the Blofeld Trilogy for me. The plot was realistic, menacing villains, fully fleshed out characters and great descriptions.
The weakest of the trilogy? Sorry, but OHMSS for me. But there's so many things in that book that didn't feel right, granted, Fleming's writing is great, but there so many issues I've had with this book.
I'm starting on the big one, Tracy, yes it's her character what keeps this book down for me, she's annoying, whiny, more of baggage for Bond, a liability than an asset, she's problematic. I know that she has a backstory but I felt that the backstory was too much, it's very OTT, like all of that happened to her, how unlucky was she, was she born on Friday the 13th to happen all of that things to her?, Tiffany Case's backstory was so much better because it's realistic, simple and not over the top tragic, with Tracy, like Fleming had put all of the problems in the world in her backstory, it's a bit too much, over the top tragedy.
She's the typical damaged woman that Bond needs to cure and cling to him after that. She's weepy, the way she treats Bond, I just didn't liked it, Bond loves her for sure, but I'm not sure if Tracy does the same, if she also love Bond, based on my reading, no, she didn't. She didn't served anything to the story, what did she do? Nothing. She's just like a drama queen who arrived at the story and when Bond is in trouble she didn't helped him, the car escape? It's only a coincidence, she even just drives him out of the situation, then she's gone again for many pages. Her inclusion was only an afterthought because Bond needs to fall in love, that's all, but she didn't served any purpose. Then after her lost of presence for the majority of pages, she returned only to be a subservient character, she's weak she's devoid of personality, then she's killed. Do I felt any emotion? I felt pity for Bond, but their romance, I didn't feel anything.
And don't get me started on some of her dialogues like "Treat me like the lowest whore in creation?" I can't believe that she could tell something like that to a stranger, to a man that she didn't know that much?
And that's why of the many reasons I truly loved the film so much, Diana Rigg's Tracy is so much better, she played it with inner fire, vulnerable yet competent, her participation in the story, her presence, great.
Another one is Blofeld's plot in the book, I'd get it, Biological warfare, but his plan was only aimed at UK when he's making this very wide plot? He's brainwashing Irish and British women, like really? It lacked realism that I liked in the previous novels, Blofeld's description here was a bit of a let down.
It's the same as in the film, but at least in the film, it's international and his plot was aimed at worldwide, making the stakes higher.
There's also a bunch of foreign words like German, Swiss and French that's very hard for me to understand, and don't get me started on the repetitive use of exclamation points.
It's an overrated novel for me, but an underrated and divisive film.
You Only Live Twice? It's a great novel, the characters are great compared to OHMSS, where the characters only functioned as plot devices, here, they felt like real people. Blofeld's description here was again like in Thunderball, he's menacing again here. It's the most darkest Bond novel I've read, Fleming's writing was really great probably one of the best. I was so disappointed of how No Time To Die wasted those elements from this novel, but here's hoping that they could use it again and much better im the future Bond films.
Early in the year I fizzled out a bit with my reading and didn't make as much progress, but now I'm back on the wagon again, and overall I'm still doing good with my quest to read through every Bond novel in order. Currently on Goldfinger.
Dr. No has been my favourite so far. More fantastical than the others, but that's what I enjoyed about it. A tense, epic adventure, and surprisingly heartfelt too.
Comments
Although I dare any man to read the
Chapter with the buzzsaw, and not
Cross their legs and wince.
I found Doubleshot to be a reasonably enjoyable Bond adventure. I was glad that there were fewer gadgets than in other Benson books that I've read. No Jaguar with a build in drone and self healing bodywork, for instance! The story was interesting, with the politics around Gibraltar and the doppelganger idea, but I didn't enjoy the twin CIA agents. I found them quite annoying, although it could have something to do with the male audiobook performer, Simon Vance, doing the performance of young American women not really working for me. Not the worst continuation novel by any means, but the Gardner variety remains my favourite flavour of continuation book (with Amis and Horowitz alongside). The last two Benson novels and his TWINE novelisation remain the only corner of the literary Bond canon that I've yet to fully explore. Sadly I've never come across any reviews of those books that encourages me to peruse them anytime soon.
I think Doubleshot is my favourite - well, least disliked - Benson Bond novel...although I will always add I think Benson wasn’t served well by the publishers...Never Dream of Dying just left a horrible taste in my mouth, I find no redeeming feature in that novel at all...The Man With The Red Tattoo was a marked improvement for me, although it may be because the previous novel was SO bad...TWINE isn’t bad either...
I suppose I should read all of Benson’s Bond novels again, as it’s been awhile...you should get them if only for completeness -{
I agree with all the comments.
Doubleshot, despite not being excellent was certainly his best and most consistently interesting novel. Some decent characters, good locations and a half-decent (as opposed to half-assed plot). The Truant Twins were my major dislike - one or the other of them does nothing, then they swap around, it was a tiresome exercise. I think Benson was just tickled with the idea of Bond making love to twins. In general Benson's ickysome sex scenes are my main memory of his fairly dismal run of books.
I’m not surprised 8-)
As I said, I don’t think Benson was well served by the publishers
There doesn't seem to be a thread devoted to new and upcoming books, so I hope no one minds if I share the following.
2021 should be a good year for Bond reference books. In exchange for an Amazon review I have been sent this:
It covers similar ground to another new book.
Then in June we can expect this study:
The author is the editor of the James Bond Studies journal, which releases serious work. The publisher's description of the book indicates it will be a nuanced examination of Fleming's attitudes toward race and empire.
Another important-looking book will published in June:
Normally I'd say the world doesn't need a new biography of Fleming, but as the publisher's description indicates, this work will study Fleming's life through the lens of Bond (unlike the Pearson and Lycett biographies) and include literary criticism and analysis. I can personally vouch for Prof. Buckton's credentials, having contributed an essay to his collection The Many Facets of Diamonds Are Forever: James Bond on Page and Screen.
I didn't realise this thread was specifically about Bond. I must have been a bit thick. Not sure I've ever posted in this one before. Anyways, this is a cut and paste job from Off Topic Chat where I reviewed the 2000 Fleming retrospective. Thanks to Caractacus Potts for redirecting me.
MY NAME IS BOND, JAMES BOND
2000
(Compiled by Simon Winder)
A celebration of Ian Fleming’s descriptive prowess as a novelist, My Name is Bond, James Bond doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Fleming or about Bond.
It’s an interesting compilation of scenes taken from across the spectrum of the novels and not always from the places we would expect them to come from. In his preface, Simon Winder painfully points out that he doesn’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment by revealing details of a novel’s narrative, in particular their conclusions. This rather reduces the material available to him, but he does a fair job of assessing and categorising Fleming’s work.
He’s split it into sixteen sections with heading such as The Man, Foreign Travel, Sex or Eating. It was strange to read these passages out of context. Some of them didn’t sit well at all. Many of the quotes from The Spy Who Loved Me are horrible in their misunderstanding [or perhaps a misrepresentation?] of women’s emotions. The stuffiness of the atmosphere and pretentions of Blades in Moonraker comes across as terribly dated and pompous. Other extracts amused me with the author’s almost childlike prose. Several excerpts from Goldfinger do not come across well at all.
I was more surprised by the sections Winder left out. He reproduces in full three long scenes: the centipede menacing Bond from Dr No, Bond in the Garden of Death from You Only Live Twice, Tatiana meeting Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love) and Bond meeting Oddjob from Goldfinger. While each of these scenes have merit, I can’t fathom why we don’t have: Bond’s midnight scuba swim to the Disco Volante from Thunderball, the opening scene and sentence of Casino Royale, the death of the Mexican from Goldfinger, Bond’s seduction of Tatiana (From Russia With Love), or the final paragraphs from You Only Live Twice. These surely reveal Fleming’s abilities as a descriptive and intuitive writer far more than the extended passages chosen – or even the shorter ones which abound the full 140+ pages.
Simply letting the extracts sit without explanation or analysis feels like a missed a an opportunity. Winder should have studied Fleming’s craft and examined why some scenes, characters and situations work so well and others do not. Now that would be a book worth reading. This celebration is rather aimless.
I like the idea of a Fleming's Greatest Hits or a sampler of his style. Most other books analysing his writing focus on plot structure, or his technique with the detail and the cliffhangers. I think Amis's first two Bond related books sampled some passages (I still remember a run-on sentence concatenating all the adjectives Fleming used for his characters' breasts, from reading the Dossier when I was twelve!) but those were definitely set in the context of the author's own analysis.
We don't usually think of Fleming of a writer of great sentences the way we think of Chandler or Wodehouse for example. Usually we discuss the imaginative plots, and his personal writing technique that favoured those fast moving plots with no rewrites until the annual Jamaica vacation was over. But he was a professional journalist, and we can see from all his interviews and letters he was witty and highly quotable in real life.
I recently re-read Andrew Lycett's biography of Ian Fleming. being older and wiser this time around, I can fully appreciate how much of an achievement it is--the research involved was monumental in scope. Many readers who just want to find out more about Bond will be frustrated by the book's immense amount of detail regarding the English social scene, but that's part of the package (The New Yorker's Anthony Lane called Lycett "an awesome fact hog"). Lycett shows what a complicated man Fleming was, so it's disappointing that many of the reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads complained of how supposedly unlikable Fleming was.
I read the 2020 updated edition, which includes a lengthy new introduction by Lycett. The rest of the text has apparently been revised and updated, though a couple of errors still linger (Peter Lorre supposedly getting up after being killed in Casino Royale, Fleming supposedly wanting Roger Moore for Bond).
My re-reading of Lycett was the prelude to beginning The World Is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming by Oliver Buckton. I'm only a couple chapters into this new book, so my review will have to wait, but thanks to @Thunderpussy for pointing out that a review has recently been published by the New Republic: “The World Is Not Enough” Explores the Failures That Made Ian Fleming.
The subeditor went for a decidedly belittling header ("The creator of James Bond had an unremarkable career in intelligence and considered his own books 'piffle' ") that simply isn't true. Fleming did important work in intelligence that doesn't deserve to be dismissed. And like many Englishmen of his type he was self-deprecating, so his opinions on his books shouldn't be taken at face value.
As for the reviewer, he gets off to a shaky start by attaching vast importance to Fleming's "disdain for the working class" without noting that (1) working class characters are rare in the Bond novels, since Fleming wasn't terribly interested in English class issues, and (2) Bond eventually puts aside his negative feelings for the cabbie in [i]Thunderball[/i] and talks to him as an equal; he wants to earn his respect. The New Republic has gone from being a centrist magazine to an angry Leftie one, so I understand why the review is stressing class issues, but fear of the working class simply isn't a big part of the Bond books.
The reviewer also makes a couple of silly mistakes--"Eric" Blofeld? His discussion of Fleming's ethnically mixed villains fails to mentioned that Bond and many of his allies are ethnically mixed themselves. And once again we're treated to the debunked rumor that Roger Moore was one of Fleming's first choices for Bond.
But from hereon things improve. The reviewer sensitively discusses (and praises) The Spy Who Loved Me ("the prose is some of Fleming’s most energetic and surprising, and as often happens in the weird history of literature, the effect was so disconcerting that typical Bond fans hated it") and "Quantum of Solace," which shows he ultimately knows his stuff. He also mentions Amis's Bond Dossier and Umberto Eco's "The Narrative Structure of Ian Fleming," which remain the two best critical studies of the Bond books.
Overall, I think the reviewer got off to a bad start but ultimately showed he was familiar with Fleming and respected his achievements as a writer of "great genre fiction." Plenty of other reviewers would have consigned the man and his books to the trash can or treated them with condescension. So all's well that ends well, as Bill Shakespeare said a few years ago.
James Bond and Moonraker
Christopher Wood, 1979
Not nearly so impressive a trick as Wood's first novelization James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me , in which Wood re-told the least Fleming-like of any James Bond plot persuasively in Fleming's voice. He doesn't really attempt that here.
The plot is nearly exactly what we see on screen, with only minor details different. There are a few specific paraphrases of Fleming near the beginning, most notably the physical description of Drax. But for most of it, the dialog is precisely from the film, thus could only be spoken by Roger Moore, never by Fleming's Bond. So far the most part its just a simplistically written transcription of an inherently visual experience.
One of the tricks Wood did in his first book was to devote full chapters to the backstories of Anya, Stormberg and Jaws, as Fleming did for example with Red Grant or Blofeld. And Fleming would have devoted further chapters just to the nuts and bolts of all that technology. There's none of that here.
One noteworthy difference: Drax's helicopter pilot is not Corinne Dufour, but rather Trudi Parker, a blonde California girl with a surfer's tan and swimmer's shoulders. And her death by Doberman occurs between chapters, only told secondhand when Dr Goodhead meets Bond in Venice, much like Jill Masterton's offstage death in Goldfinger.
Minor detail: Goodhead knows Bond is agent 007 Licensed to Kill when they first meet: how does she know this? I don't think even Drax knows. Did the CIA tell her in advance? Why is Bond not surprised? He of course does not know she is CIA til Venice.
There may not be any conspicuous plot additions, but there is one very good chapter describing Bond's boat journey in the amazon: four days and ten pages go by of tactile description of just how difficult such a journey would actually be, something the film did not convey. The encounter with the enemy boat is perfunctory, then there is another detailed description of Bond's crash landing and discovery of the lost city. This section of the film's plot could be straight out of Rider Haggard!
Unseen Missions: Bond is returning from an unspecified mission in Dakar at the start, when he is attacked. M refers back to the Stromberg affair, and this latest attempt on Bond's life is just one of a pattern since then, specifically something similar happened on Chamonix, otherwise left to our imaginations. Presumably Jaws has been trying to kill Bond ever since Atlantis sunk. No mention of Anya, though. When last seen, Bond had declared Anya was the first woman he could love since losing Tracy, and she had shown up on his doorstep in London ready to move in. Evidently that didn't work out, but no hints as to what happened next.
Continuity: Wood's first book could have fit seamlessly into Fleming's timeline, except for the unspoken issue of Bond's age. Maybe his most recent mission previous to that had been versus Irma Bunt and her giant rats? But despite this being an explicit sequel (therefor the same continuity, or at least an overlapping continuity), there is the problem of Drax. The naming of the shuttles after a deadly rocket once aimed at London could be unfortunate coincidence, but it's a man named Drax !! entrusted to build these shuttles, and Wood gives him the precise physical description of Fleming's Drax (and Bond speculates he is a German WWII vet with a grudge). It would have been simpler just to name him Hugo Drax Jr!
Why were there no further novelizations until License to Kill? For Your Eyes Only didn't need one. but Octopussy was a sequel to the short story, not an adaptation, and its auction scene barely related to the one in Property of a Lady. And A View to a Kill was all new. The Living Daylights has the problem that it'd be improbable Bond should twice encounter beautiful cellists working as snipers in near identical situations, but otherwise the plot is all new. And certainly the coincidence of two different cellist characters is more likely than Felix Leiter being eaten by a shark a second time. License to Kill was in fact the film least in need of a novelization!
a couple of links that may be of interest:
here is an interview with Christopher Wood where he discusses the two novelizations
here is an exhaustive list of differences between film and novelization.
Lovely write-up, cp, makes me want to go read it again.
I love the Christopher Wood novelisations, no one has captured Fleming as well as he did. I only wish he had been commissioned to continue the adventures instead of John Gardner. Like Barbel, I must find the time to read them again.
A recent article worth reading from The University Bookman: "On Ian Fleming as Craftsman."
Some key paragraphs:
"Fleming wrote forcefully and succinctly, aiming for 60,000 words per novel. His style, sharpened by his work as both a journalist and military man, is marked by precise observation, judicious use of concrete detail, and clear, unaffected diction. He excelled at description. Though Fleming’s characters, especially the villains, are often remembered for their physical deformities—shortness, baldness, protruding teeth, missing earlobes, prosthetic steel claws, a supernumerary nipple—most often they evince his eye for the telling detail, the revealing throwaway gesture, the tic. He had a corresponding knack for narrating vivid and energetic action, and his explanations and descriptions of processes, of men purposefully undertaking complicated tasks, are clear, his pacing and suspense superb.
"He wrote not only skillfully but beautifully, something seen most clearly in his settings. His most vividly realized locations, those of the Caribbean, combine the tactile and the visual in a manner that also establishes tone. Thus, in the short story 'Octopussy,' the same reef can be a place of beauty, wonder, and comforting familiarity at the beginning and a place of inescapable horror at the end.
"Fleming’s talents extended to another crucial element of the thriller—plot structure. Fifty years of moviegoers have become familiar with the 'Bond formula,' a reliable but predictable and easily parodied form. Fleming’s novels are much more varied. He plays with structure to create tension and construct surprises, such as killing the villain two-thirds of the way through, as in Casino Royale; delaying the start of the action with a seemingly unrelated low-stakes adventure, as in Moonraker, Thunderball, or Goldfinger; or shifting between tones and genres—detective story, survival story, travelogue, horror—as in Dr. No or You Only Live Twice."
Thanks for that, Revelator. Yes, Fleming's playing with the plot structure is an often underrated part of his prowess, the most extreme example being of course From Russia With Love. He builds interest and tension by keeping Bond off-stage for an extended part of the novel.
Have been rereading John Gardeners Bond books of late and have got to his novelisation of LTK. As I remember from the first time I read it, either Gardener was bored with Bond or had a strong dislike for LTK. It's very much by the numbers and there is not an ounce of life or soul in it.
Interesting thoughts, Simon78.
I went into the novelisation of LTK expecting very little from it. LTK was never one of my favourite films, and I know Gardner's later work is often a bit uninspired and sometimes dull. So perhaps I'd just set my expectations too low, but when I read it I thought he'd done a pretty decent job novelising the film. Since then, my opinion of LTK as a film has actually increased quite a bit. Who know, maybe my positive experience of the novelisation helped contribute to my improved opinion of the movie. But I'll say this...I have a tendency to be quite lenient with Gardner, and am less critical of his Bond novels than maybe I should be.
John Pearson, author of The Life of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Authorised Biography has died at age 91.
Fleming fans owe him a lot. His biography of Ian Fleming stood for 30 years as the definitive one. And even today it remains the best-written Fleming biography. Having served as Fleming's assistant at The Sunday Times, Pearson undertstood his subject in a way no later biographers will.
As for his "biography" of James Bond, it remains the most unconventional of all continuation novels and one of the very best.
Earlier this year MI6-HQ conducted an interview with Pearson that turned out to be his last. It's very much worth your time.
That interview is a good read. Thanks for the link @Revelator
I will certainly give John Pearson's biography of Fleming a read after seeing the praise for it.
I'm just re-starting the Bond novels in order; Casino Royale is my current read.
I just finished this fine article: "Double or Nothing: The Works of Ian Fleming".
This part was especially interesting:
After all this defence, I may say something against the fans. They are decidedly wrong when they say that the Bond books which most depart from the formula are the least enjoyable. The Spy Who Loved Me is not written from Bond’s perspective, and in any case, like with From Russia with Love, he turns up for the first time a hundred pages in. Both books are better for it, and The Spy Who Loved Me is surprisingly good in describing the dull humiliations wrought on otherwise decent girls by the hypocrisies of 1950s sexual politics. And after all that, some gangsters still get shot up in the end.
The best books of Fleming’s are each not Bond novels. Two collections of short stories — For Your Eyes Only and the posthumous Octopussy and the Living Daylights — contain brilliant work: Fleming’s best of Bond. “Quantum of Solace” takes the form of a long conversation between Bond and an elderly colonial administrator. As a piece of Somerset Maugham-adjacent social drama it is both true to life and riveting. “Risco” is a good old fashioned adventure story amid gangsters in Venice. “The Hildebrand Rarity” and “Octopussy” are nautical-themed attacks on the abuses of arrogant tough-guy men. (The ‘Octopussy’ of the short story is not a lewdly-named woman. It refers, in actual fact, to an octopus.)
That's an interesting point of view. I've always been under the impression that most critics preferred the long stories to the short.
Casino Royale
I decided a couple weeks ago that I want to read through every single Bond novel. 😀
Well done on starting with Casino Royale. It's definitely recommended to read them all in order of publication.
Thanks. 😀
I actually tried to get through all of them a long time ago, about 10-12 years ago, and I made it pretty far (up to 'Death is Forever'), but then I fizzled out after that. I'm going to try it again though, and this time to see if I can get through the ones I missed too!
I'm reading them out of order, but I'd still started on Casino Royale which was great, I really liked the romance between Bond and Vesper, the plot was realistic, one of Fleming's strongest novels. The story, it's near perfect, Bond does actual spying, Le Chiffre was a great and scary villain, he's full of menace, Vesper was a great Bond girl, ahead of her time, competent, complex, almost like Bond himself, they are the mirrors and reflections of each, they're cut from the same cloth, a perfect match, the ending was heartbreaking. One of Fleming's best. The film was also great, but I'm still leaning on the novel because it's not that much action oriented, the 50's noir spy thriller drama (almost Hitchcockian) type of thriller and story. But I liked both, but the novel has that special feel to me.
Moonraker is the Bond novel I'm re-reading the most, a perfect Bond novel, Fleming was firing all of his cylinders here, all were top notch from Gala Brand, the realistic plot, Hugo Drax, and the scenes. The most entertaining Bond novel, the most fun, the most thrilling, the most exciting, you can't go wrong with this novel, Fleming's absolute Best, it's such a roller coaster ride of a Bond novel, a great experience. The number one in my novel rankings.
Then Diamonds Are Forever, though I'd think this one was severely underrated, Tiffany Case is one of the best Bond Girls, her romance with Bond was realistic, believable and fleshed out, yes the villains didn't have much of a presence, but everything in this book is good, the henchmen (Wint and Kidd), the SPECTREVILLE lair, it's a good novel.
My favorite will always be Thunderball, I'd found it even better than the film, it has the combination of action, comedy, thrill, intrigue and suspense. The best of the Blofeld Trilogy for me. The plot was realistic, menacing villains, fully fleshed out characters and great descriptions.
The weakest of the trilogy? Sorry, but OHMSS for me. But there's so many things in that book that didn't feel right, granted, Fleming's writing is great, but there so many issues I've had with this book.
I'm starting on the big one, Tracy, yes it's her character what keeps this book down for me, she's annoying, whiny, more of baggage for Bond, a liability than an asset, she's problematic. I know that she has a backstory but I felt that the backstory was too much, it's very OTT, like all of that happened to her, how unlucky was she, was she born on Friday the 13th to happen all of that things to her?, Tiffany Case's backstory was so much better because it's realistic, simple and not over the top tragic, with Tracy, like Fleming had put all of the problems in the world in her backstory, it's a bit too much, over the top tragedy.
She's the typical damaged woman that Bond needs to cure and cling to him after that. She's weepy, the way she treats Bond, I just didn't liked it, Bond loves her for sure, but I'm not sure if Tracy does the same, if she also love Bond, based on my reading, no, she didn't. She didn't served anything to the story, what did she do? Nothing. She's just like a drama queen who arrived at the story and when Bond is in trouble she didn't helped him, the car escape? It's only a coincidence, she even just drives him out of the situation, then she's gone again for many pages. Her inclusion was only an afterthought because Bond needs to fall in love, that's all, but she didn't served any purpose. Then after her lost of presence for the majority of pages, she returned only to be a subservient character, she's weak she's devoid of personality, then she's killed. Do I felt any emotion? I felt pity for Bond, but their romance, I didn't feel anything.
And don't get me started on some of her dialogues like "Treat me like the lowest whore in creation?" I can't believe that she could tell something like that to a stranger, to a man that she didn't know that much?
And that's why of the many reasons I truly loved the film so much, Diana Rigg's Tracy is so much better, she played it with inner fire, vulnerable yet competent, her participation in the story, her presence, great.
Another one is Blofeld's plot in the book, I'd get it, Biological warfare, but his plan was only aimed at UK when he's making this very wide plot? He's brainwashing Irish and British women, like really? It lacked realism that I liked in the previous novels, Blofeld's description here was a bit of a let down.
It's the same as in the film, but at least in the film, it's international and his plot was aimed at worldwide, making the stakes higher.
There's also a bunch of foreign words like German, Swiss and French that's very hard for me to understand, and don't get me started on the repetitive use of exclamation points.
It's an overrated novel for me, but an underrated and divisive film.
You Only Live Twice? It's a great novel, the characters are great compared to OHMSS, where the characters only functioned as plot devices, here, they felt like real people. Blofeld's description here was again like in Thunderball, he's menacing again here. It's the most darkest Bond novel I've read, Fleming's writing was really great probably one of the best. I was so disappointed of how No Time To Die wasted those elements from this novel, but here's hoping that they could use it again and much better im the future Bond films.
I'm continuing my review of other Bond novels.
Early in the year I fizzled out a bit with my reading and didn't make as much progress, but now I'm back on the wagon again, and overall I'm still doing good with my quest to read through every Bond novel in order. Currently on Goldfinger.
Dr. No has been my favourite so far. More fantastical than the others, but that's what I enjoyed about it. A tense, epic adventure, and surprisingly heartfelt too.
I'm almost halfway through Brokenclaw. Began with Forever And a Day last August 2022.
On His Majesty's Secret Service - so far, so good.