thanks for playing, Barbel!
if I was to knock on my neighbours door and start babbling about all this makebelieve stuff, they'd have me locked up for sure
My pleasure, cp! {[] I'm happy to ramble on about this as long as you are, but I'll repeat my main point from above that continuity is impossible and just sitting back and accepting Bond's time-defying age/lifespan is the way to go.
superadoRegent's Park West (CaliforniaPosts: 2,656MI6 Agent
Thing is, I think Griswold's research may itself be canonical, since it's one of seven Reference texts officially approved by IFP. It should be read by anybody interested in Fleming's Bond, and should be more readily available.
Can you please list or point us to the IFP approved references?
sure Superado, I had to verify this claim myself, as I was dubious.
go to the FAQ page on the Ian Fleming Publications website
click on the button labeled Reference Books, and you will see seven titles
if you don't see the list at first. click on the + sign on the bar where it says More Information on Ian Fleming and the James Bond Books to expand the list
these seven titles are:
-The Man With the Golden Typewriter
-Pearson's Fleming bio
-Lycett's Fleming bio
-Parker's Goldeneye book
-the Chronologies and Annotations book
-Benson's Bedside Companion
-John Gilbert's Bibliography
you will have to excuse me, that page is very code heavy and I cannot do a direct hyperlink to the references page, but have tried to describe the steps
and cannot copy and paste the titles, but those other six books should be familiar enough
let me know if you have trouble getting to the page I am describing? the word FAQ above should be a hyperlink that will get you most of the way there
if that is not the official Ian Fleming Publications website I apologise for misrepresenting. It sure looks official to me, not like any fan-site I've ever seen.
Thank you very much, Professor Potts! Some of those titles are definite adds to my reading list.
"...the purposeful slant of his striding figure looked dangerous, as if he was making quickly for something bad that was happening further down the street." -SMERSH on 007 dossier photo, Ch. 6 FRWL.....
thanks for playing, Barbel!
if I was to knock on my neighbours door and start babbling about all this makebelieve stuff, they'd have me locked up for sure
My pleasure, cp! {[] I'm happy to ramble on about this as long as you are, but I'll repeat my main point from above that continuity is impossible and just sitting back and accepting Bond's time-defying age/lifespan is the way to go.
+1 it's all part of the fun and as Brian Eno has it in Backwater " it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine" Unless you find it fun and illuminating. Such monkeying around with timelines and non linear progressions is very moderne but Bond has been doing it for ages.
Of that of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence- Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Thank you very much, Professor Potts! Some of those titles are definite adds to my reading list.
glad I could help! of those, I have only read Pearson's bio and the Goldeneye book, and discussed both in the What Are You Reading (that is Bond related) thread.I thought they were both hugely informative, and am especially pleased that Goldeneye book made the list. (Pearson's bio is a more obvious choice).
The others I'm still looking for myself, and even though most are recent, they are proving elusive.
Maybe I shouldn't call that a list of "Reference texts officially approved by IFP".
More accurate to say they're the seven titles specifically listed as recommended reference texts by IFP?
But it's interesting what doesn't make the list, since so much has been written about Fleming and his creation. Another recent book, The Man Who Saved Britain, is not on that list and damn right too, it was dreadful. Completely irrelevant waste of trees.
On the other hand, Amis's James Bond Dossier is conspicuously not there, and (our pal Revelator has assured us) the real Ian Fleming did read and approve of that one - maybe it's a bit slim and not serious enough? I think most of those seven books on the list are quite substantial, solid with information that will aid the understanding of any Fleming obsessive.
as Brian Eno has it in Backwater "it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine"
zaphod you just gained so many bonus points by quoting a Brian Eno lyric you are now entitled to skip a grade!
I thought Eno wrote most of those lyrics the same way Bowie was writing around that time, by throwing sentence fragments into a hat and arranging them together by chance? he was into all those strategies to minimise the ego and draw from the subconscious. but he would want us to study those chance constructions and find deeper meanings.
ok I just read though the entirety of the Timeline thread and want that hour of my life back.
Barbel already reposted his best contributions here, much better than that thread deserves.
It's mostly one rookie agent bragging he has only watched two films but nonethelessinsists on constructing a continuity that feels right to him. No wonder all you veteran agents prefer to not even worry about it
But best single post is from Chrisisall, post 150
In between assignments Bond actually enters a stasis chamber until reactivated for duty, that's why those around him age faster than he does.
that theory has so much explaining power, it should be shown within the films. Q defrosting Bond just before his next meeting with M and handing him a new suit that is currently in fashion.
regarding the concept of Canon,
I know the Star Wars fan community got in a kerfuffle a few years back when Disney bought the franchise, and declared all materials outside the six previous films were officially no longer canon. I suppose to clear the way for their new stories (and gosh it was worth it).
Marvel Comics began telling new stories starting with Star Wars issue 7, (the first six issues adapted the first film), and the comic ran for hundreds of issues before being continued by rival publisher Dark horse in the 1990s. Hundreds of new characters created, decades of additional events in the life of Luke Skywalker evolving his character.
Then shortly after there was the first new novel, Splinter in the Mind's Eye, written by Alan Dean Foster, who'd ghostwritten the original novelization. The plot was already contradicted by the time Empire... came out, but it too was the first of hundreds of officially sanctioned spin-off books, with their own following of fan-obsessives. And I think those Star Wars fans are much more obsessive about internal consistencies within their fictional universe of choice than we are.
So Disney told several generations of the most dedicated Star Wars fans "the universe you care about is no longer true. Here's The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi instead".
Kerfuffle a foreseeable risk, because those old fans will pay to see the new films anyway, no matter what they vow online, and the market Disney is really interested in the next generation of children and their insatiable demand for lunchboxes and bedsheets.
In between assignments Bond actually enters a stasis chamber until reactivated for duty, that's why those around him age faster than he does.
that theory has so much explaining power, it should be shown within the films. Q defrosting Bond just before his next meeting with M and handing him a new suit that is currently in fashion.
...after which Bond pees for an unfeasibly long time before going on a mission to defeat his foster brother. Yeah, baby! More borrowing from Austin Powers is exactly what 007 needs.
superadoRegent's Park West (CaliforniaPosts: 2,656MI6 Agent
In between assignments Bond actually enters a stasis chamber until reactivated for duty, that's why those around him age faster than he does.
that theory has so much explaining power, it should be shown within the films. Q defrosting Bond just before his next meeting with M and handing him a new suit that is currently in fashion.
...after which Bond pees for an unfeasibly long time before going on a mission to defeat his foster brother. Yeah, baby! More borrowing from Austin Powers is exactly what 007 needs.
Funny, I just watched SP last night, my first Bond movie in several months and all those little niggles just came rushing to mind. The wife asked (typical of women ), “Didn’t Blofeld die already?” SP must be good enough though for me to have chosen it for viewing!
"...the purposeful slant of his striding figure looked dangerous, as if he was making quickly for something bad that was happening further down the street." -SMERSH on 007 dossier photo, Ch. 6 FRWL.....
Amis's James Bond Dossier is conspicuously not there, and (our pal Revelator has assured us) the real Ian Fleming did read and approve of that one - maybe it's a bit slim and not serious enough?
Now that does surprise me- perhaps they thought Benson's Companion covered similar territory? (Which it does, but only in part)
Amis's James Bond Dossier is conspicuously not there, and (our pal Revelator has assured us) the real Ian Fleming did read and approve of that one - maybe it's a bit slim and not serious enough?
Now that does surprise me- perhaps they thought Benson's Companion covered similar territory? (Which it does, but only in part)
Do you remember what Ann Fleming thought about Amis? 8-)
I have all the books of that list except the last one
one other book that is missing from the IFP list of references:
-Robert Sellers the Battle For Bond: The Genesis of Cinema's Greatest Hero
I've seen you guys discuss this book plenty of times over the years, enough so it's one of the books I'm always trying to find.
Probably includes too much material from McClory's point of view … maybe even goes too far admitting McClory even existed? Pearson's bio did convince me it was the lawsuit that killed Fleming, I'm sure the heirs would love to erase him from history.
There's five pages of extracts from the book in this Double-O-Seven Magazine website, including early plot iterations and the secret origin of Fatima Blush!
question: should Canon include Fleming's abandoned and incomplete plots or other fragments?
e.g. his early ideas for Thunderball (mostly unrelated to the final story), at least what's been published in books such as Sellers'?
e.g. the two raw synopses in the back of some editions of Horowitz's two books?
e.g. the two very short fragments within Pearson's Fleming bio?
if we're defining Canon as what Fleming wrote, there's slightly more of it than most of us have ever seen.
____________________________
EDIT: searching though this forum's old posts, I see Fleming's heirs actually had the Battle For Bond
banned until certain materials were removed. No wonder it's not on the list.
regarding Star Wars canon, check out the Wikipedia entry on this very topic:
until the sale to Disney, George Lucas maintained the legal right to incorporate or contradict any new ides from the hundreds of licensed properties.
LucasFilm tracked these and maintained a database, dividing all existing Star Wars stories into five layers of Canonicity (G-canon (Lucas's own work), T-canon, C-canon, S-canon, and W-canon (what if stories), you'll have to look up the rest for yourself). no mention of the Star Wars Holiday Special
so should we be dividing Fleming's original books, the continuation novels, the comic strip, the EON films and others, the video games and various other products into multiple levels of Canonicity?
(and which should get the designation "F-canon": Fleming or film?)
one important distinction: with Star Wars, the films came first, and the books are secondary spin-offs.
With James Bond, the films are mere adaptations of the primary canon (Fleming's 14 books), just one possible and non-definitive re-interpretation of what the original author already told us. Just because the films are so successful does not change that, they are no different than any other book later adapted to film.
question: should Canon include Fleming's abandoned and incomplete plots or other fragments?
e.g. his early ideas for Thunderball (mostly unrelated to the final story), at least what's been published in books such as Sellers'?
e.g. the two raw synopses in the back of some editions of Horowitz's two books?
e.g. the two very short fragments within Pearson's Fleming bio?
IMHO no, since he never finished them and no-one knows where the stories would have gone. That's why TB and of course NSNA don't feature a planeful of celebrities.
what about the fact the story Octopussy was found hidden in a drawer in Goldeneye after Fleming's death?
and that he himself tried to suppress the Spy Who Loved Me after its original hardcover publication?
he didn't intend for Octopussy to be published at all, and chose to withdraw ...Spy... from his own Canon (imagine it's semi-mythic rarity status if he had lived and there never was a paperback).
The hardcover of Octopussy, the paperback of ...Spy..., and the respective comic strip adaptations came out after his death, without his knowledge.
Should the first two and a half films be given a higher status, since he was involved with the filmmaking?
(I think he expressed disappointment with the Casino Royale teleplay, and would wish that one forgotten)
He did finish OP (and possibly would have included it in a future second volume of short stories), and both finished & published TSWLM so both are canon. The comic strips did start in his lifetime, and were fairly faithful up till and shortly after his death (from TMWTGG on, the writers begin to pad out the stories- I like the comic strip version of OP very much!).
Re the films, I agree more with what you said in post 48 above, and would include all the films in that.
what I meant is the comic strip adaptations of Octopussy and the Spy Who Loved Me were done after his death (November 14, 1966 - May 27, 1967and December 18, 1967 - October 3, 1968, according to wikipedia), and he would have gone to his grave assuming neither of those would happen.
You're right, we can only guess his intentions for Octopussy had he lived, but if he wrote it in summer 1962, he left it unpublished for 2 1/2 years while he did publish two inferior short stories.
Re the films, I agree more with what you said in post 48 above, and would include all the films in that.
its interesting, the films being interpretations of the books, since the films are so much better known, they are the True versions to vastly more people.
Going back to that original religious definition of Canon, it has something to do with what people collectively choose to believe as the Truth. Already the majority perceive the films as the Truth and feel no need to read the books, if they know about them at all (just like Tolkien). If in another few decades the books go out of print and are forgotten, will the films then become the primary Canon and Fleming's books an obscure footnote?
Those other two short stories were commissioned though, while OP wasn't.
I think you're right in that he wouldn't have thought certain works would be turned into comic strips- or movies for that matter! (Not that the film's bore much resemblance to them)
Future generations? Who knows? As before, I think the obvious comparison is to Sherlock Holmes- new stories are regularly being created both in print (some by Anthony Horowitz) and on film/TV alongside new adaptations of the older original stories. Maybe someday there'll be as many film/TV versions of, say, TB as there are of "Hound of the Baskervilles"!
superadoRegent's Park West (CaliforniaPosts: 2,656MI6 Agent
Those other two short stories were commissioned though, while OP wasn't.
I'm sorry, Barbel, I've gotten confused with the thread's progression ) ...which two short stories were commissioned?
"...the purposeful slant of his striding figure looked dangerous, as if he was making quickly for something bad that was happening further down the street." -SMERSH on 007 dossier photo, Ch. 6 FRWL.....
"The Property Of A Lady" for Sotheby's, and TLD for the "Sunday Times". Caractacus mentioned them in the post above mine.
superadoRegent's Park West (CaliforniaPosts: 2,656MI6 Agent
Didn't realize that TLD was commissioned in the same way by the Sunday Times like the Thrilling Cities installments. I don't consider TLD "inferior" if it's one of the two Caractacus was referring to; I think it's one of Fleming's more exciting and interesting short stories!
"...the purposeful slant of his striding figure looked dangerous, as if he was making quickly for something bad that was happening further down the street." -SMERSH on 007 dossier photo, Ch. 6 FRWL.....
what about the fact the story Octopussy was found hidden in a drawer in Goldeneye after Fleming's death?
and that he himself tried to suppress the Spy Who Loved Me after its original hardcover publication?
he didn't intend for Octopussy to be published at all, and chose to withdraw ...Spy... from his own Canon (imagine it's semi-mythic rarity status if he had lived and there never was a paperback).
The hardcover of Octopussy, the paperback of ...Spy..., and the respective comic strip adaptations came out after his death, without his knowledge.
Should the first two and a half films be given a higher status, since he was involved with the filmmaking?
(I think he expressed disappointment with the Casino Royale teleplay, and would wish that one forgotten)
To your list above we could add that Fleming was so disappointed with Property of a Lady that he refused payment from Sotheby's auction house, which had commissioned the story.
I think in general, however, artists are not the best judges of their own work.
Didn't realize that TLD was commissioned in the same way by the Sunday Times like the Thrilling Cities installments. I don't consider TLD "inferior" if it's one of the two Caractacus was referring to; I think it's one of Fleming's more exciting and interesting short stories!
sorry, I actually meant 007 in New York, not The Living Daylights. 007 in New York was specially written for the American edition of Thrilling Cities, because the American publishers didn't like what Fleming had to say about New York in particular. It was first published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 1963, according to Wikipedia. That one is barely a story, and is one of the two I meant as inferior.
Property of a Lady was commissioned for the 1963 annual Sotheby's journal, The Ivory Hammer, published November 1963 according to wkipedia. I'm sure I've seen that Fleming himself was dissatisfied, and it is the other one I meant as inferior.
Octopussy we now know was written summer 1962, after Fleming had a big fight with his wife he took an extra trip to Goldeneye that year, wrote that story almost as a selfportrait, and supposedly left it in a drawer to be found after his death. See this thread.
So its PoAL and 007inNY I'm suggesting are inferior stories he allowed published after having written the unpublished Octopussy. I know its bad form to make a value judgement and make it read like a factual statement. The value judgement is really to contrast with his decision to leave Octopussy hidden in a drawer, because that seems like a deliberate choice once you compare its quality with those two stories.
The Living Daylights was first published in The Sunday Times colour supplement, 4 February 1962, under the title Berlin Escape, again according to Wikipedia. Between Thunderball and the Spy Who Loved Me. And I think its by far the best of those four stories. I don't know why Fleming wrote and published a short story at that point, and I didn't guess it was commissioned either?
all this just to argue, should stories Fleming chose not to publish count as Canon? or stories that had only been published once in out-of-print periodicals? if the Octopussy collection had not been compiled after his death, those would be obscure rarities, only known about by hardcore fans.
Didn't realize that TLD was commissioned in the same way by the Sunday Times like the Thrilling Cities installments. I don't consider TLD "inferior" if it's one of the two Caractacus was referring to; I think it's one of Fleming's more exciting and interesting short stories!
There's also "007 In New York", of course, which is certainly inferior.
Fleming publishing TLD in the "Times" didn't go down well with the "Express", which was running the Bond comic strip. He had some apologising to do afterwards.
Edit: I see Caractacus has clarified above! Thanks and apologies for the confusion. Almost simultaneous posts.
From Ian Fleming The Man Behind James Bond by Andrew Lycett, 1995:
"Ian's other main writing task [in autumn 1961] was to produce a short story for the first issue of the Sunday Times colour magazine, scheduled for early 1962.... they agreed that the magazine would publish a new short story "The Living Daylights".... on 23 September [1961], following his return from Provence, Ian suggested that the piece be ilustrated with an original Graham Sutherland design...
Ian's file on "The Living Daylights"- or "Trigger Finger", in an early draft- revealed the speed with which he went about such a project... By 10 November [1961], Captain E.K. LeMesurier, secretary of the NRA [National Rifle Association] had... read and returned corrections to the manuscript.... on 9 February 1962 the ... magazine duly appeared with Ian's story."
Comments
My pleasure, cp! {[] I'm happy to ramble on about this as long as you are, but I'll repeat my main point from above that continuity is impossible and just sitting back and accepting Bond's time-defying age/lifespan is the way to go.
Thank you very much, Professor Potts! Some of those titles are definite adds to my reading list.
+1 it's all part of the fun and as Brian Eno has it in Backwater " it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine" Unless you find it fun and illuminating. Such monkeying around with timelines and non linear progressions is very moderne but Bond has been doing it for ages.
The others I'm still looking for myself, and even though most are recent, they are proving elusive.
Maybe I shouldn't call that a list of "Reference texts officially approved by IFP".
More accurate to say they're the seven titles specifically listed as recommended reference texts by IFP?
But it's interesting what doesn't make the list, since so much has been written about Fleming and his creation. Another recent book, The Man Who Saved Britain, is not on that list and damn right too, it was dreadful. Completely irrelevant waste of trees.
On the other hand, Amis's James Bond Dossier is conspicuously not there, and (our pal Revelator has assured us) the real Ian Fleming did read and approve of that one - maybe it's a bit slim and not serious enough? I think most of those seven books on the list are quite substantial, solid with information that will aid the understanding of any Fleming obsessive.
zaphod you just gained so many bonus points by quoting a Brian Eno lyric you are now entitled to skip a grade!
I thought Eno wrote most of those lyrics the same way Bowie was writing around that time, by throwing sentence fragments into a hat and arranging them together by chance? he was into all those strategies to minimise the ego and draw from the subconscious. but he would want us to study those chance constructions and find deeper meanings.
Barbel already reposted his best contributions here, much better than that thread deserves.
It's mostly one rookie agent bragging he has only watched two films but nonethelessinsists on constructing a continuity that feels right to him. No wonder all you veteran agents prefer to not even worry about it
But best single post is from Chrisisall, post 150 that theory has so much explaining power, it should be shown within the films. Q defrosting Bond just before his next meeting with M and handing him a new suit that is currently in fashion.
regarding the concept of Canon,
I know the Star Wars fan community got in a kerfuffle a few years back when Disney bought the franchise, and declared all materials outside the six previous films were officially no longer canon. I suppose to clear the way for their new stories (and gosh it was worth it).
Marvel Comics began telling new stories starting with Star Wars issue 7, (the first six issues adapted the first film), and the comic ran for hundreds of issues before being continued by rival publisher Dark horse in the 1990s. Hundreds of new characters created, decades of additional events in the life of Luke Skywalker evolving his character.
Then shortly after there was the first new novel, Splinter in the Mind's Eye, written by Alan Dean Foster, who'd ghostwritten the original novelization. The plot was already contradicted by the time Empire... came out, but it too was the first of hundreds of officially sanctioned spin-off books, with their own following of fan-obsessives. And I think those Star Wars fans are much more obsessive about internal consistencies within their fictional universe of choice than we are.
So Disney told several generations of the most dedicated Star Wars fans "the universe you care about is no longer true. Here's The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi instead".
Kerfuffle a foreseeable risk, because those old fans will pay to see the new films anyway, no matter what they vow online, and the market Disney is really interested in the next generation of children and their insatiable demand for lunchboxes and bedsheets.
Thank you!
...after which Bond pees for an unfeasibly long time before going on a mission to defeat his foster brother. Yeah, baby! More borrowing from Austin Powers is exactly what 007 needs.
Funny, I just watched SP last night, my first Bond movie in several months and all those little niggles just came rushing to mind. The wife asked (typical of women
Now that does surprise me- perhaps they thought Benson's Companion covered similar territory? (Which it does, but only in part)
I have all the books of that list except the last one
They are -{
???
-Robert Sellers the Battle For Bond: The Genesis of Cinema's Greatest Hero
I've seen you guys discuss this book plenty of times over the years, enough so it's one of the books I'm always trying to find.
Probably includes too much material from McClory's point of view … maybe even goes too far admitting McClory even existed? Pearson's bio did convince me it was the lawsuit that killed Fleming, I'm sure the heirs would love to erase him from history.
There's five pages of extracts from the book in this Double-O-Seven Magazine website, including early plot iterations and the secret origin of Fatima Blush!
question: should Canon include Fleming's abandoned and incomplete plots or other fragments?
e.g. his early ideas for Thunderball (mostly unrelated to the final story), at least what's been published in books such as Sellers'?
e.g. the two raw synopses in the back of some editions of Horowitz's two books?
e.g. the two very short fragments within Pearson's Fleming bio?
if we're defining Canon as what Fleming wrote, there's slightly more of it than most of us have ever seen.
____________________________
EDIT: searching though this forum's old posts, I see Fleming's heirs actually had the Battle For Bond
banned until certain materials were removed. No wonder it's not on the list.
until the sale to Disney, George Lucas maintained the legal right to incorporate or contradict any new ides from the hundreds of licensed properties.
LucasFilm tracked these and maintained a database, dividing all existing Star Wars stories into five layers of Canonicity (G-canon (Lucas's own work), T-canon, C-canon, S-canon, and W-canon (what if stories), you'll have to look up the rest for yourself). no mention of the Star Wars Holiday Special
so should we be dividing Fleming's original books, the continuation novels, the comic strip, the EON films and others, the video games and various other products into multiple levels of Canonicity?
(and which should get the designation "F-canon": Fleming or film?)
one important distinction: with Star Wars, the films came first, and the books are secondary spin-offs.
With James Bond, the films are mere adaptations of the primary canon (Fleming's 14 books), just one possible and non-definitive re-interpretation of what the original author already told us. Just because the films are so successful does not change that, they are no different than any other book later adapted to film.
IMHO no, since he never finished them and no-one knows where the stories would have gone. That's why TB and of course NSNA don't feature a planeful of celebrities.
and that he himself tried to suppress the Spy Who Loved Me after its original hardcover publication?
he didn't intend for Octopussy to be published at all, and chose to withdraw ...Spy... from his own Canon (imagine it's semi-mythic rarity status if he had lived and there never was a paperback).
The hardcover of Octopussy, the paperback of ...Spy..., and the respective comic strip adaptations came out after his death, without his knowledge.
Should the first two and a half films be given a higher status, since he was involved with the filmmaking?
(I think he expressed disappointment with the Casino Royale teleplay, and would wish that one forgotten)
Re the films, I agree more with what you said in post 48 above, and would include all the films in that.
You're right, we can only guess his intentions for Octopussy had he lived, but if he wrote it in summer 1962, he left it unpublished for 2 1/2 years while he did publish two inferior short stories. its interesting, the films being interpretations of the books, since the films are so much better known, they are the True versions to vastly more people.
Going back to that original religious definition of Canon, it has something to do with what people collectively choose to believe as the Truth. Already the majority perceive the films as the Truth and feel no need to read the books, if they know about them at all (just like Tolkien). If in another few decades the books go out of print and are forgotten, will the films then become the primary Canon and Fleming's books an obscure footnote?
I think you're right in that he wouldn't have thought certain works would be turned into comic strips- or movies for that matter! (Not that the film's bore much resemblance to them)
Future generations? Who knows? As before, I think the obvious comparison is to Sherlock Holmes- new stories are regularly being created both in print (some by Anthony Horowitz) and on film/TV alongside new adaptations of the older original stories. Maybe someday there'll be as many film/TV versions of, say, TB as there are of "Hound of the Baskervilles"!
I'm sorry, Barbel, I've gotten confused with the thread's progression
I want that book, but there was some kind of controversial in the past, even some kind of ban on it?
Anybody knows what could be the complete version I should buy? Thanks.
To your list above we could add that Fleming was so disappointed with Property of a Lady that he refused payment from Sotheby's auction house, which had commissioned the story.
I think in general, however, artists are not the best judges of their own work.
007 in New York was specially written for the American edition of Thrilling Cities, because the American publishers didn't like what Fleming had to say about New York in particular. It was first published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 1963, according to Wikipedia. That one is barely a story, and is one of the two I meant as inferior.
Property of a Lady was commissioned for the 1963 annual Sotheby's journal, The Ivory Hammer, published November 1963 according to wkipedia. I'm sure I've seen that Fleming himself was dissatisfied, and it is the other one I meant as inferior.
Octopussy we now know was written summer 1962, after Fleming had a big fight with his wife he took an extra trip to Goldeneye that year, wrote that story almost as a selfportrait, and supposedly left it in a drawer to be found after his death. See this thread.
So its PoAL and 007inNY I'm suggesting are inferior stories he allowed published after having written the unpublished Octopussy. I know its bad form to make a value judgement and make it read like a factual statement. The value judgement is really to contrast with his decision to leave Octopussy hidden in a drawer, because that seems like a deliberate choice once you compare its quality with those two stories.
The Living Daylights was first published in The Sunday Times colour supplement, 4 February 1962, under the title Berlin Escape, again according to Wikipedia. Between Thunderball and the Spy Who Loved Me. And I think its by far the best of those four stories. I don't know why Fleming wrote and published a short story at that point, and I didn't guess it was commissioned either?
all this just to argue, should stories Fleming chose not to publish count as Canon? or stories that had only been published once in out-of-print periodicals? if the Octopussy collection had not been compiled after his death, those would be obscure rarities, only known about by hardcore fans.
There's also "007 In New York", of course, which is certainly inferior.
Fleming publishing TLD in the "Times" didn't go down well with the "Express", which was running the Bond comic strip. He had some apologising to do afterwards.
Edit: I see Caractacus has clarified above! Thanks and apologies for the confusion. Almost simultaneous posts.
From Ian Fleming The Man Behind James Bond by Andrew Lycett, 1995:
"Ian's other main writing task [in autumn 1961] was to produce a short story for the first issue of the Sunday Times colour magazine, scheduled for early 1962.... they agreed that the magazine would publish a new short story "The Living Daylights".... on 23 September [1961], following his return from Provence, Ian suggested that the piece be ilustrated with an original Graham Sutherland design...
Ian's file on "The Living Daylights"- or "Trigger Finger", in an early draft- revealed the speed with which he went about such a project... By 10 November [1961], Captain E.K. LeMesurier, secretary of the NRA [National Rifle Association] had... read and returned corrections to the manuscript.... on 9 February 1962 the ... magazine duly appeared with Ian's story."