Ian Fleming’s Seven Deadlier Sins: Self-Righteousness

No Dickens today, because we would have been covering Thomas Edison's silent version and he skips right over this year's scene even more than most adaptations.

Instead, I'd like to point you towards the Literary 007 blog where they're doing a series on Ian Fleming's idea of the Seven Deadlier Sins. These are evils that Fleming felt were more worthy of punishment than the traditional list. The proprietor of the site asked if I'd like to write an entry and I eagerly snatched up Self-Righteousness. I hope you'll go read as I speculate on Fleming's relationship with the sin, point out examples of it from the novels, and explain why I agree with Fleming that it's an especially odious offense.

Thunderball (1965) | Story

Plot Summary

SPECTRE steals a couple of nuclear bombs and it's up to Bond to get them back.

Influences

It's mostly a faithful adaptation of the novel Thunderball, though that of course was adapted by Ian Fleming from the movie treatment he'd created with writer/director Kevin McClory and others. That's why McClory gets a producer credit on this film.

The court battle over Thunderball had ended during the production of Goldfinger when Fleming - who was very sick by this time - more or less gave up. The novel could remain in print with Fleming's name on the cover, but future editions would have to credit McClory and writer Jack Whittingham as contributors to the film treatment the book was based on. And McClory won the complete TV and movie rights to the story.

McClory was actually working on his own version of a Thunderball movie, but the popularity of Sean Connery as Bond made McClory realize that he'd have a hard time competing. He went to Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli with the offer to make the film together. They weren't keen on it at first, but Columbia's Casino Royale spoof was also in the works and Saltzman/Broccoli realized that a third Bond film would be bad for them. And if they were ever going to be able to adapt Thunderball, this was the time. So they scrapped their plans to make On Her Majesty's Secret Service the next movie and accepted McClory's offer.

While not strictly influences, there are a couple of references to other movies in Thunderball. For instance, when Bond tells SPECTRE assassin Fiona, "I've grown accustomed to your face," he's quoting the Audrey Hepburn version of My Fair Lady that had come out the year before. And earlier in the movie, he tells Shrublands employee Patricia Fearing that he'll see her "another time, another place," which was the name of a Sean Connery movie from 1958.

How Is the Book Different?

The plot is very close to the novel, but McClory had continued tweaking the script and there are changes, mostly great ones. For example, the movie drops M's interest in fads as the reason Bond begins the story at the Shrublands health resort. The alternative reason it offers isn't super plausible, but I'm glad that M is less of a joke than he was in the book. Speaking of which, Bond and Moneypenny's relationship is also different from the book, but I'll say more about that tomorrow.

A third, positive change is Bond's reason for going to the Bahamas to search for the missing bombs. The book makes that a hunch on M's part, but in the movie it's Bond who suggests it and he has a good reason for doing so. Which brings me to...

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



Because Bond goes to Nassau on his own hunch instead of M's, he's putting his reputation on the line with the Foreign Secretary who's running the operation. That's a big change from the book, but it gives M the opportunity to stick up for Bond to the Secretary, which is totally something that the literary M would do.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



As Sean Connery's Bond becomes increasingly solidified as a character, he moves further and further away from the literary Bond. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, but it's not entirely a bad thing. It is partly a bad thing though, because as sadistic and chauvinistic as the literary Bond is, he's not as oppressive and creepy as Sean Connery in his interaction with Patricia Fearing. Bond not only packed a weird, mink glove to take to the resort; he also blackmails Pat into having sex with him. That's in line with the way he treats Pussy Galore in the Goldfinger movie, but I can't imagine Fleming's Bond doing that. In the novel, Pat supplies the mink glove and blackmail never enters the picture.

Cold Open



The cold open for Thunderball doesn't have much to do with the main plot, but I can see what they're going for. Each cold open so far has tried to outdo the one before. From Russia With Love featured a quiet, moody death, Goldfinger had a couple of gadgets and a short fight, and Thunderball offers a prolonged fight sequence and some major gadgets, including the return of Bond's Aston Martin.

And it's not like the opening has nothing to do with the main plot. Not only does Blofeld refer to it in his SPECTRE briefing, but recovering from that fight is at least part of the reason Bond starts the movie proper at Shrublands. It's the best cold open so far, even if the opening shot of the initials JB on a coffin is a sad and poorly executed idea.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. Thunderball
2. Goldfinger
3. From Russia With Love
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Movie Series Continuity



Blofeld and SPECTRE are back of course, after sitting Goldfinger out. As in From Russia With Love, we still don't see his face and he still has the white cat.

Bond's trick of throwing his hat onto Moneypenny's hatrack makes its fourth appearance in as many movies, though with a humorous twist. Bond enters her office and is about to toss his hat when he realizes that the hatrack has been moved right next to the door where he's standing. Disappointed, he just puts it on the rack like a normal person.

And finally, there are apparently a lot more Double-O agents in the movie universe than in Fleming's. The books only talk about three, but when Bond attends the conference room briefing with "every Double-O in Europe" there are nine chairs. Incidentally, the seventh one is Bond's.

7 Days in May: The Week in What I've Been Watching

This year the blog's going to be heavily focused on James Bond, but that's not all I'm watching and it's not all I want to write about. Since I don't have a ton of time for posts that dive deeply into other interests, I thought I'd borrow from guys like Siskoid and William Bruce West and just do weekly capsule posts for some of that stuff.

So, here's what I've been up to the past seven days:

Ken Burns Presents: The West



My family was traveling in Arizona last week and that reignited my interest in the West. In preparing for it, we watched some Zane Grey movies and other films that were either shot in the state or took place there. A lot of these movies reference the Civil War, which David is studying in school, so we've had some discussions around how the war affected the West and when various events in Western history happened in relation to it.

I realized that while I know a lot of tales and legends about Western people, I don't have a great grasp of the timeline and how all of those stories fit together, so I started watching Stephen Ives' The West to help sort that out. I'm only a couple of episodes in - up to the 1840s and the gold rush - but it's as informative and easily digestible as I expect from a project produced by Ken Burns. I have a way better grasp now on the Louisiana Purchase, the roles of Spain and Mexico in the history of North America, and specific tragedies in American relations with native peoples (particularly the Trail of Tears).

Turn: Washington's Spies



Thinking about American history got me interested in finally checking out AMC's Turn: Washington's Spies. It's been showing up as recommended viewing in my Netflix queue for a while, so I pulled the trigger and watched the first couple of episodes. I'm totally hooked.

Jamie Bell and Angus Macfadyen are already favorite actors of mine, so it had that going for it, but the time period is so ripe with drama that I can't believe no one's taken advantage of it before. Turn does though by having Bell play a farmer in English-controlled territory. He's unwillingly recruited into a colonial spy ring, pitting him not only against his government, but also his neighbors and family. In addition to the espionage and family drama, there's also a murder mystery in the first couple of episodes. It's one of those shows where I finish each episode and immediately want to watch the next, but I'm going to hold off and let Diane and David catch up with me before going further. I'm hoping we can get caught up in time to watch the show live as it enters its second season soon.

The Rocketeer (1991)



This was inspired totally by Nerd Lunch's recent episode about it. I hadn't seen it in years and needed to revisit it. The last time I watched it, I'd recently discovered Bettie Page and held a grudge against Jennifer Connelly for not being her. I don't think I'd actually read Dave Stevens' comic by that point though and didn't realize how obnoxious Cliff and Betty are as a couple. As the Nerd Lunchers and Kay point out on the podcast, Cliff and Jenny are still selfish and troubled, but it's way easier to root for them to work out their differences.

The movie does suffer from being an origin story, which means that there's more of Cliff's getting used to the rocket pack than there is of his flying and being awesome with it, but the movie's still full of pulp homages and a lot of fun. Somewhere between it and Sky Captain (which would have benefitted from The Rocketeer's practical effects) is the perfect pulp adventure movie.

Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond



Not so much a biopic as a heavily fictionalized version of Fleming's life and how various events from it may have inspired aspects of James Bond's. I wouldn't give a lot of credence to the connections it draws, but they're interesting analogues and fun to wonder about. Beyond that, Fleming mixes WWII spy drama with tragic romance in a compelling way and also nails my impression of the author as an enormous butthole who also happened to be completely charming. I disliked him immensely while simultaneously feeling bad for him and wanting him to get better.

Psych, Season 1



Finally, David and I started watching Psych. David had seen the pilot episode at a friend's house, but what got us into it last week was watching an episode of Castle with the friend we were staying with in Arizona. David wanted to see more Castle, but it's not streaming on Netflix, so I suggested Psych as an even better alternative. The mysteries and detective work are more clever than Castle and the banter is funnier. We'll be adding this to David's regular viewing schedule.

The Man With the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Fleming began writing The Man With the Golden Gun in the same month that principle filming began on Goldfinger. Exploring just how much the Goldfinger movie inspired the Golden Gun novel would make a fascinating research paper, but I'm not going to do it. I don't need to quantify the influence in order to know that Fleming's writing was affected by the Bond films in general. Putting aside Ursula Andress' appearance in the novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as soon as the movies started coming out Fleming immediately started tweaking his Bond. The literary character not only became a Scot like Sean Connery, but a notorious public figure whose life could be read about in the newspaper and speculated upon. Though Fleming died before The Man With the Golden Gun was completely polished, the novel suggests that the book series was going to continue to read more and more like the films.

That's not a good thing. I started writing about the Bond novels with the theory that Bond actually grows as a character over the course of the series. And that's been born out. It's been a great and interesting trip watching the selfish, sullen spy take more and more interest in the people around him. That comes to a head in You Only Live Twice, which would've made a perfect ending to the series if Bond had more say about his fate at the end of that book. Fleming had a wonderful opportunity to wrap up the series with Bond's making a conscious choice to either continue in the Secret Service or stay with Kissy on the island. Either decision would have made a powerful statement about Bond's character and contrasted beautifully with the Bond of Casino Royale. But instead of Kissy's encouraging and supporting Bond in determining what kind of life he wanted, Fleming had her deceive Bond, raising his curiosity and propelling him into another adventure. That's great for the continued potential financial success of the series, but not for its artistic achievement. Fleming gave up a great ending in order to keep the series going.

Not that The Man With the Golden Gun is a bad book. The first chapters resolve the cliffhanger from You Only Live Twice in a really tense and exciting way. From there, the story goes in a direction that's reminiscent of Bond's early adventures, especially Dr. No. Bond is supposed to stop an assassin named Francisco Scaramanga who's working for Cuba and helping Soviet interests in the Caribbean. Bond finds Scaramanga in Jamaica and that's where the rest of the story takes place. While there, Bond does a lot of recollecting about his previous missions there. We learn that he lost touch with Honey Rider, but that last he'd heard she was married to a doctor from Philadelphia and had a couple of kids.

Unfortunately, Scaramanga isn't a great villain. He's really just a glorified henchman. But he's still plenty dangerous and Fleming does a nice job keeping Bond in danger. Fleming's always made Bond squeamish about killing in cold blood (though Golden Gun makes it clear that that's just something Bond finds extremely distasteful as opposed to something he believes is objectively immoral). Because of that, Bond chooses not to assassinate Scaramanga when he has the chance, but decides to go undercover as Scaramanga's personal assistant. It's rooted in Bond's established character, so it sort of works, but it also smacks loudly of dragging out a very thin plot. Even so, Fleming is able to create tense moments all throughout and Golden Gun is a fun, adventurous read.

That's faint praise though, especially compared with how epic the rest of Fleming's later novels are. Instead of building on those, he just seems interested in writing a passable adventure for future adaptation into film. Bond finds Scaramanga not through serious investigation, but purely by luck. His relationship with Mary Goodnight - no longer the admin for the Double-O section and recently assigned to Jamaica - is especially flirty and Connery-esque. Bond even pokes fun at Q-Branch like Connery does and a couple of things feel lifted right out of Goldfinger in particular, starting with the title character's gold-covered revolver. Bond also uses a hollow safety razor as a hiding place for spy stuff and there's a scene where the bad guy murders a squeamish ally who wants out of the caper.

I have such mixed feeling about The Man With the Golden Gun. It's simultaneously a solid little entry in the series and a horrible disappointment. As the final book in Fleming's series, it sucks and I'd prefer if it didn't exist. But as the start of something different - a new chapter in Bond's life - I kind of dig it and wish Fleming had been given more time to convince me he was headed in a worthwhile direction.

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

As I've been rereading the Bond series, I've had On Her Majesty's Secret Service in my head as the pinnacle of Bond's character development. My memory of You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun was that they're both very dark books and represent a descent for Bond into the narcissistic selfishness that marked him in the early novels. That's not true though. At least not for You Only Live Twice.

The novel opens understandably with Bond completely shattered and depressed after the murder of his wife by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He's bungled his last couple of assignments and M is at a loss for what to do with him. Even Moneypenny is openly hostile to him and has apparently forgotten the out of character crush Fleming tried to foist on her back in Thunderball. Not to be overly harsh on Bond, but good for her.

M is actually to the point of wanting to fire Bond when he has a conversation with Sir James Molony, the same neurologist who diagnosed Bond back in Dr. No. As Molony justifies Bond's shock to M, it struck me that Bond's always been prone to depression. That's especially clear in the first couple of novels and his anxiety attack in the airplane during Live and Let Die leaps to mind. Tracy's death has sent the already unstable agent spiraling.

But as often as Bond has succumbed to dark thoughts, he's always been able to fight his way through them and Molony believes that's still the case. What Bond needs is a really tough, impossible assignment. Something that will either leave no room for his current depression, or at least will put it into perspective. After giving it some thought, M comes up with the perfect mission. As he describes it to Bond, it's "totally improbable of success" and will be very different from what he's used to. "There won't be any of the strong-arm stuff," he says, "None of the gun-play you pride yourself on so much. It'll just be a question of your wits and nothing else."

The assignment gives Fleming a chance to explore a couple of things he had on his mind. One is the decline of Britain as a major world power after WWII. Bond's mission is to get information about the Soviet Union from the Japanese secret service. Japan apparently has a strong source of Soviet intelligence, but only shares it with the United States. Britain's feeling a bit left out, so Bond's job is to meet with Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese service, and convince him that Britain can be good friends too.

Which leads us to Fleming's other major interest in the book: Japan itself. Fleming had briefly visited the country in 1959 on his Thrilling Cities tour, but returned for a longer stay in '62. That trip became the basis of You Only Live Twice with the other journalists he was traveling with inspiring characters in the novel. Tiger Saito became Tanaka while Richard Hughes was the inspiration for Australian spy Dikko Henderson. (Incidentally, Dikko has way more in common with Joe Don Baker's Jack Wade in the Pierce Brosnan Bond films than he does with Charles Gray's stuffy Henderson in the movie version of You Only Live Twice.)

Long sections of the novel are devoted to Bond's introduction and acclimation to Japanese culture. At first, he's judgmental and racist and I suspected he was just imitating Fleming's own feelings about the country. Bond and Fleming both seem curious about Japan without seriously considering the country on its own terms. That made me impatient with the book and for a while I felt the same way about it as I did about From Russia With Love, which seemed less interested in telling a spy story than in scratching other itches of Fleming's.

As the novel progresses though, it becomes clear that Fleming's doing more than just writing a travelogue. Bond becomes less and less snarky about Japanese life and by the end of the book he's completely relaxed and embracing it. He's self-confident and cheerful. M's scheme has worked, though the credit goes less to the mission itself and more to Japan.

Things take a dark turn though when Tanaka conditionally agrees to give Bond the information he wants. The condition is that Bond needs to do a personal favor for Tanaka and assassinate a wealthy European named Shatterhand who's causing problems for the Japanese government. Shatterhand has bought a castle in one of the southern islands and surrounded it with a garden of the most poisonous flora and venomous fauna imaginable. Visiting the garden has become a popular way to commit suicide, which is somehow so embarrassing to the Japanese government that they want Shatterhand murdered.

I never quite understood why Tanaka decided that assassination was the best solution to what seems more like a social problem than a criminal act. It's the weakest part of the book, but after that glitch things get back on track when Bond discovers that Shatterhand is actually Blofeld. However weak Tanaka's reasons are for wanting him killed, Bond's are completely understandable.

The final chapters of the book are strong for a couple of reasons. One is Bond's infiltration of the garden and castle. Both are horrifying places, made even more weird and terrible by Blofeld's striding around them in samurai armor, accompanied by his awful wife, Irma Bunt. As evocative as that is though, my favorite bits of the novel's end are Bond's time on a fishing island with Kissy Suzuki.

Bond goes to the island because it's close to Blofeld's and can be used as a base from which to strike, but once he gets there, his transformation is profound. Not his physical transformation, which reads as unconvincing as Sean Connery's looks in the movie version, but his spiritual transformation. Away from the cynical, irony-loving Tanaka and surrounded by people who just genuinely love their way of life, Bond finds peace. He never considers not killing Blofeld, but by the time he sets out to do it, the sense is that he's doing it out of duty. It's no longer about revenge for him. Those thoughts have vanished and as a reader I'm just hoping that he can survive and maybe get back to Kissy. She has a ridiculous name, but I like her more than any of Bond's romances since Domino. She's Bond's equal and brings out goodness in him.

I wish the book ended with Bond's going back to her and settling down on his own. I mean, without his having amnesia and Kissy's taking advantage of it to deceive him and keep him there. That's a crappy thing for her to do and it makes me like her less. Part of me appreciates the pulpiness of it and how it leads into a cliffhanger for the next book to resolve, but more than that I want a happy ending for Bond. Sadly for me, You Only Live Twice gives just a little taste of one before snatching it away.

Some final comments on things I've been tracking through this project. One is that Blofeld calls Bond a "blunt instrument" in the novel. I don't remember if that's the first time Fleming has used the term (M uses it in Die Another Day, which is where I first noticed it), but it's significant and it does more or less describe Bond's approach to assassination, even though he's pretty sneaky about getting into the castle.

Another thing I've been tracking is how Fleming reveals Bond's status as an orphan. You Only Live Twice is where that happens, in an obituary M writes for Bond when the agent is presumed dead. Bond's parents died in a climbing accident when he was 11 and he went to live with an aunt. That explains some of Fleming's other statements about Bond's teen years, which didn't seem to be particularly dark in From Russia With Love, though he did need a surrogate father in "Octopussy".

Finally, Fleming does something weird with Bond's obituary and turns Bond into a public figure. It's not just strange that M runs the obit in the newspaper with lots of details about Bond and his service to the government. He also mentions a series of popular novels that have been written by a friend of Bond. With his typical, self-deprecating humor, Fleming has M dismiss the books as exaggerated and not very good, but it's still an odd thing for Fleming to write himself into the series. It also means that everyone knows all about Bond and his adventures, however inaccurate the details. Fleming will deal with some of the consequences of that in The Man With the Golden Gun, which we'll talk about in a couple of weeks. It's interesting to me though that as the literary You Only Live Twice closes by thrusting Bond into the public eye, the movie version opens with an attempt to take him out of it again.

From Russia With Love (1963) | Story

Influences
Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love
Dr. No (1962)

Plot Summary

SPECTRE seeks to profit from pitting Britain and the Soviets against each other, hoping to assassinate James Bond in the process.

How Is the Book Different?

The biggest change is substituting SPECTRE for the novel's SMERSH. Producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltman wanted to keep the Bond films light-hearted, so they avoided real politics and SPECTRE was a convenient way to do that. Making SPECTRE the bad guys though also meant changing the name of the decoding machine that's the MacGuffin of the story. It's a Spektor in the novel, so for obvious reasons it becomes a Lektor in the movie.

Otherwise, the film's plot is exactly the same as the book with all the same set pieces and story beats. It makes some improvements though, including getting things moving much more quickly and adding a couple of extra action scenes towards the end. It's one of the few Bond movie's that's better than the novel it's based on.

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



Like Dr. No, this is another tough one because so much of the movie is right out of Fleming. But the non-Fleming scene that most feels like Fleming is Bond's date with Sylvia Trench. I'll have more to say about Trench on Wednesday, but Bond's relationship with her in Russia is very much how Fleming describes Bond's relationships in the novels. They're not in any way committed to each other; they just enjoy hanging out and getting it on.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



When Bond starts to tell Tania - on tape - about an exploit he and M had in Tokyo. Fleming's Bond would never sell the old man out like that, even if they had shared some kind of sexual adventure as Bond implies, which is extremely doubtful. It's meant as a joke in the movie - and it's a funny one - but that whole recorded conversation makes no sense.

Cold Open



Harry Saltzman came up with the idea of the pre-credits cold open for the Bond series, starting with From Russia With Love. His original idea was to introduce one of the main villains in a powerful way by having him track Bond through a SPECTRE training area/obstacle course. Director Terence Young changed it though after seeing Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad featuring a romantic chateau with a Greek sculpture garden.

It is kind of a lovely scene with the danger juxtaposed against quietly chirping crickets and rippling fountains, but it doesn't hold up well next to the more exciting opens that came along later. For now we'll put it in first place because it's the only one on the list, but I expect it to drop off the Top Ten Cold Opens list once we reach the eleventh film that has one.

1. From Russia With Love
2. TBD
3. TBD
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Movie Series Continuity



Bond tosses his hat onto Moneypenny's hat rack from across the room again. And Sylvia Trench is back, of course. But the biggest continuity development is around SPECTRE. They were introduced in Dr. No as a shadowy organization that the villain belonged too, but now we get to meet some of their top members.

We learn that as a result of Dr. No's death, SPECTRE not only knows who James Bond is, but they're pretty familiar with his dossier. When Tania first meets him, she verifies his identity by finding a particular scar on his back. That scar never comes up again in the series, so it's not really continuity, but they sure act like it is in this movie. The biggest development that comes from Russia though is that Bond is now famous, at least with SPECTRE. That was also the case with SMERSH in the novel, but SMERSH died out so quickly after that that it never became an issue. The movie Bond is sometimes going to have to put up with everyone's knowing who he is. Unless that's inconvenient for the plot of course, in which case he won't. Keeping too close an eye on the movie series' continuity is a fool's game.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

It's been a while since we've visited Ian Fleming's Bond, so let's catch up real quick. The last time he appeared was in The Spy Who Loved Me, which offered a complex Bond. As I said at the time, the answer to the protagonist's question about him is that yes, Bond can be nice and he can be kind. He's not a shining hero and he should be nobody's "image of a man" as she put's it, but he's come a long way since Casino Royale and is becoming more human. The Spy Who Loves Me demonstrates that clearly even as it warns us that he's not quite there yet.

When I started this project, I mentioned how Casino Royale's Bond is a man whose selfishness has prevented him from ever having a meaningful relationship with a woman. I looked forward to watching him grow out of that, and knew he kind of would because I knew what would happen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's been fun watching him mature and become more selfless and I was eager to see him finally meet Tracy and to learn what kind of effect - if any - she would have on him.

Fleming intentionally calls back to Casino Royale many times in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, starting with the casino itself. He reveals that Bond's made an annual trip to Royale-les-Eaux to visit Vesper's grave and it's here that he meets Teresa Draco. Tracy, as she likes to be called, is clearly supposed to be the second major woman in Bond's life and there are lots of similarities between the two of them. When Bond first meets Tracy, she's clearly under a lot of stress and is emotionally manic with him, just like Vesper. Fleming's not explicit about this, but I think it's an easy connection to make that Vesper is on Bond's mind and that Tracy reminds him of her.

Even though I believe that Vesper wasn't actually Bond's first great love, I don't doubt that Bond imagines her that way. I think he cared more honestly and selflessly for Honey Rider and perhaps also Domino, but any man who makes an annual trip to the grave of a woman who betrayed him is obviously carrying a torch. Fleming doesn't show readers a lot of chemistry between Bond and Tracy, but her similarity to Vesper - especially at this location and this time of year - explains why Bond is drawn to her. Beside her being beautiful and an awesome driver, I mean.

He totally takes advantage of her at first, which is something I found creepy. It became no less disturbing and offensive the more I thought about it, but I do at least understand where Bond's mind is when he meets her. It's still very demeaning that he lets her pay off a huge debt to him by sleeping with him, but I think some of that is revenge against Vesper. Not that that's an excuse.

It's not all revenge though, and Bond clearly cares something for Tracy and wants to protect her, however imperfectly (which is very) he goes about it. Fleming has made it very clear that Bond is no hero and that's very true in the opening chapters where Tracy is concerned. He's no good for her and at one point he realizes that "for the first time in his life" he feels totally inadequate.

Bond's flaws are made even more evident when he meets Tracy's father, the head of a criminal organization in Europe. Though Draco tells stories about raping the woman who would become Tracy's mother, Bond admires and even relates to the man. He describes himself to Draco as "ruthless," and it's true. When Draco offers to pay Bond to look after Tracy, Bond's refusal isn't because he has a sense of honor. It's because he knows he won't be any good at it and doesn't especially want to try.

As the story moves away from Tracy and onto its main plot though, she doesn't leave Bond's mind. For example, back at MI6 Fleming introduces us to Bond's new secretary, Mary Goodnight. We've already met Goodnight in "The Property of a Lady," which takes place before On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but was written after it, so this is her real first appearance. Bond seems much more fond of Goodnight in OHMSS that he did in "Property," but he was already in a bad mood in "Property" and it's possible he was just taking that out on Goodnight. At any rate, he's got a playful relationship with her here, but he doesn't pursue it because he's still thinking about Tracy.

He's not all romance though and he's also doing a lot of thinking about Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It's tough to fit "Property of a Lady" anywhere in Bond's timeline than before OHMSS, but it also doesn't fit perfectly before this book either. For that matter, neither does The Spy Who Loved Me. The second chapter of OHMSS claims that Bond has been fruitlessly searching for Blofeld non-stop since the end of Thunderball and that Bond is getting tired of it to the point that he now wants to resign. The best I can do to reconcile that is to say that Bond hasn't actually been looking for Blofeld non-stop, but only feels that he has. He's had some other cases; it's just that the hunt for Blofeld now seems pointless to Bond after so many dead ends.

That changes after Bond meets Draco though. Tracy's dad gives Bond a lead on Blofeld and gets the plot moving. Apparently, Blofeld is interested in setting up a new identity for himself that includes a noble heritage, so Bond poses as a genealogist to get close to the criminal mastermind. His preparation for that role brings out a couple of interesting facts about Bond's past, including that he's from Scotland. Since OHMSS was written after the production of the movie Dr. No, that's not a coincidence. Fleming is retconning in a Scot heritage to fit Sean Connery, just like he includes Ursula Andress as a guest at Blofeld's mountain resort.

As Bond went undercover, I couldn't help but wonder how that was going to turn out. I've talked a lot about Bond as a blunt instrument and his undercover assignments have never gone very well. He gets tired and impatient with them as in Diamonds Are Forever. Surprisingly though, Blofeld brings out the best in Bond, who's able to commit to his cover remarkably well. He makes some mistakes that raise Blofeld's suspicions, but they're understandable mistakes and his cover stories for them are plausible. It's only Blofeld's extreme paranoia that makes him distrust Bond and sends Bond looking for an escape route.

(Incidentally, Bond acknowledges during this part that Universal Export has become a weak, overused cover. I think that's cool and interesting, especially in light of how it's used in the movies and how famous Bond himself becomes in the world of the movies. We'll dig into that more deeply when we discuss those films, but I like that literary Bond recognizes a bad cover when he sees one.)

When Bond does escape, there's a thrilling ski chase down the mountain. At the end of it, Bond is physically spent, but he's also worn out emotionally and psychologically. Fleming really plays up how hard Bond had it on the mountain, but that seems weird  considering so much of the suffering he's endured on other missions. Dr No especially comes to mind, but really all of them put Bond through the ringer a lot worse than hanging out at a resort with a bunch of beautiful women and then having a ski chase. It makes a little more sense though when Bond's back in England and reflecting on how nice it is to be on the job as himself. The implication is that being undercover that long took a lot out of him. More than he - or the readers - realized as it was going on.

Shortly after escaping Blofeld's resort, Bond meets Tracy again. At Bond's suggestion, Draco sent her to get professional help for her depression and it's paid off. Sort of. She's a totally different woman, but I question whether she's improved. Actually, I shouldn't question. In the context of the story, she's clearly happier and healthier. But she's also way less independent and interesting.

I imagine that Fleming saw an inverse relationship between those things; that female happiness and health are somehow in opposition to independence and uniqueness. The Tracy that rejoins Bond at the end of the novel is immature and submissive. She sobs and trembles when he proposes to her and says things like, "I suppose I've got to get used to doing what you say." She makes scenes about the dangers of his job - even using the exact same term to describe it that Le Chiffre did in Casino Royale - which is exactly what Bond's always been afraid of in relationships. He's mused many times over the course of the series about knowing that marriage wasn't for him, because he couldn't put up with that. He hates drama and Tracy is full of the stuff. She's very different in the movie, but the literary Tracy is every bit as bad as all the whiny girls whom Bond has always said he despised. I honestly couldn't understand why he liked her.

And then it hit me. The point isn't that Tracy is some kind of remarkable, new woman that Bond has never encountered before. On the contrary, she's exactly like every woman he's ever encountered before and feared. The point is that she isn't different. He is.

The Bond of Casino Royale would have had zero time for "cured" Tracy Draco. He would have been into "damaged" Tracy, but only for the sex. By the time we get to OHMSS, he's a changed man. He wants her to get well, even if that means becoming someone he's always said he hates. But he realizes, here at the end, that he doesn't hate that at all. He understands and acknowledges that her worry is a manifestation of her love. She's not a drag on him; she's someone who cares enough about him that she wants to take care of him and protect him. And he wants to do the same for her. However imperfectly.

Fleming is either very sloppy about how he communicates this or he's a genius. I like to think it's the latter. None of what I've concluded is spelled out. It's all subtext. On the surface, Bond's relationship with Tracy makes no sense. But in the context of the previous books in the series, he's been growing toward this point all along. He's always had a sappy, sentimental side to him, even back in Casino Royale. It's just that now it's unfettered by his extreme selfishness.

Which makes the last page all the more heart-breaking.

The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming once explained the oddity of The Spy Who Loved Me as his response to young readers' seeing Bond as a hero. Fleming had a different opinion of Bond, so instead of letting readers into the agent's head as usual, The Spy Who Loved Me presents him completely through the eyes of other people.

Mostly that's the first person narrator of the novel, Vivienne Michel, who's left as the sole occupant/caretaker of an isolated motor lodge in the Adirondacks. The novel takes place over the course of an evening. Vivienne spends the first part of it alone, reminiscing over her life and especially her experiences with a couple of men. Then in the middle of the novel, a couple of gangsters show up, sent to burn down the motel for the insurance money, murder Vivienne, and frame her for the "accident." In the last third of the story, Bond shows up and becomes a deadly fly in the gangsters' ointment.

When I first read The Spy Who Loved Me as a teenager, I was impatient with it. It's so different from the other Bond novels not just in structure, but in tone. The first third reads sort of like a romance novel, then the second part becomes a horror story with Bond finally bringing things home at the end. As an adult though, I found a lot to like in the shifting genres. Vivienne is a great character on her own and I enjoyed spending time with her. Fleming's attitudes about women still creep in, but he's written a beautifully complicated person whom I was able to relate to and feel for.

My fondness for Vivienne led me to feeling discouraged though when the novel was wrapping up. She'd been emotionally devastated by a couple of men in her life, so it's kind of heart-breaking to see her fall so hard for Bond who's completely incapable of having a healthy relationship with a woman. (I still don't know what happened with Domino, dang it.) She claims to understand that Bond isn't for keeping, but I despaired a little that her worship of him - because that's what it amounts to - is going to affect her ability to find happiness in future relationships.

She thinks at one point, while watching him sleep after they've had sex, "I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him - own any larger piece of him than I now did. And for all my life I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him for ever as my image of a man."

Holding Bond as her image of a man is understandable after the weasels Vivienne had previously known, but it's still sad. He was kind and charming to her and they had great sex, but that's still a pretty low bar to get over. And knowing why Fleming wrote the novel, I believe that's exactly his point. He was concerned that some of his readers were like Vivienne, idolizing Bond and turning him into their image of a man.

So after Bond takes off the next morning, leaving Vivienne asleep, but with a very nice note, Fleming lets the story continue as Vivienne interacts with the police whom Bond has sent to wrap up the affair. She has a long conversation with a middle-aged captain who sees her as a daughter figure and is worried about her. He intuits that she's infatuated with Bond and warns her against romanticizing the experience. Bond, he claims, is no different from the gangsters who threatened Vivienne's life the night before. He operates on the side of the angels, but he's just as cold and just as ruthless as the people he fights.

It's impossible not to hear Fleming's voice in this speech. It's the same message he introduced back in Casino Royale when Bond was recovering from Le Chiffre's torture and struggling to differentiate himself from the villains. But all the lecturing about Bond's being "a different species" and not fit for normal human interaction is undercut by the way Bond actually acts in the novel. No, he's not going to commit to a long, meaningful relationship with Vivienne, but he's also not the same man we met in Casino Royale.

We've been tracking his growth all through the series and The Spy Who Loved Me is an important check point in that development. On the surface, Bond is bad news. The police captain believes it and even Vivienne feels it in those thoughts above. Right after she declares Bond as her image of a man, she realizes the silliness of that and adds, "He was trained to fire guns, to kill people. What was so wonderful about that? Brave, strong, ruthless with women - these were the qualities that went with his calling - what he was paid to be. He was only some kind of a spy, a spy who had loved me. Not even loved, slept with. Why should I make him my hero, swear never to forget him? I suddenly had an impulse to wake him up and ask him: 'Can you be nice? Can you be kind?'"

And yet, we've seen Bond be nice and kind. He's done it with Vivienne, but also with Honey and with Domino and with M and with Felix. Over the course of the series, he's become more human. Earlier, when Bond explains his job to Vivienne and how he just completed a mission to protect a double agent, he talks about the spy business in negative terms. He describes it as a foolish, complicated game that no one will stop playing. Vivienne concurs and says that her generation finds ideas like nationalism and power struggles to be idiotic. To which Bond replies, "As a matter of fact I agree, but don't spread your ideas too widely or I'll find myself out of a job."

There's another part where Vivienne asks Bond why he didn't kill the two gangsters when they were sitting ducks. His response is that he's never been able to kill in cold blood. I've pointed out before how that's clearly false, but it is something that Bond's been claiming for a while and he's obviously uncomfortable with killing outside the heat of battle.

The answer to Vivienne's question then is that yes, Bond can be nice and he can be kind. He's not a shining hero and he should be nobody's "image of a man," but he's getting better and The Spy Who Loves Me bears that out even as it warns us that he's not quite there yet. In that way, it's a perfect leap off spot for the next novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

"Thunderball": The Comic Strip

When Fleming published "The Living Daylights" in the Sunday Times, the newspaper he worked for, rather than in the Daily Express, which had been the home of most of Bond's other newspaper adventures, it created a rift between Fleming and the Express. In fact, the feelings were so bad that the Express abruptly cancelled the James Bond comic strip less than halfway into its adaptation of Thunderball.

The "Thunderball" strip begins well and looks like it would have maintained the quality of the adaptations that immediately preceded it. Gammidge and McLusky's version is funny, but not as hilarious as Fleming's. On the other hand, they also don't make too much out of Moneypenny's sudden, but retroactive crush on Bond. There's some minor flirting, but it's much less an abrupt change than what Fleming suggests in the novel.

Gammidge continues his recent trend of including as much of the plot as possible, which is either awesome or tedious, depending on the scene. I enjoyed all the shenanigans at Shrublands, for instance, but the SPECTRE meeting went on longer than I wanted it to. Like I've said before though, I'm glad the longer version is in there for me to either read or skim, depending on how I feel at the time.



Though Fleming and the Express made up later, "Thunderball" was never properly finished. Six extra strips were added to complete the story for syndication to other papers, but they only sketch out the last two thirds of the novel in the loosest possible way. McLusky's art looks as good as always, but the story is jarring in its speed to wrap up. The legitimate adaptation ends with Giaseppe Petacchi's hijacking the plane carrying the atomic bombs, but not having landed it in the ocean yet. The very next strip has Bond and Leiter discovering the location of the plane. There's no mention of how they found it or why they're even in the Caribbean in the first place. Domino is completely missing from the story and though Largo is mentioned, he's never seen.

"Thunderball" ends up being a lousy adaptation, but it's an interesting look at the people behind it (the creators, but also the newspaper they work for) trying to make the best of a bad situation. I say that without excusing the cancellation of the strip. I don't know the thought process the Express went through before making that decision, so maybe they had a valid gripe or maybe they were just greedy and petulant. But moral judgments about how they got there aside, they found themselves in a creative dilemma with a cancelled strip and syndication obligations to fulfill. I'm not even saying that they made the right creative choices in "finishing" the story, but from a process standpoint, it's fascinating to watch them try.



(By the way, this is my 4000th post on this blog. Yikes.)

Octopussy and The Living Daylights | "007 in New York"

Though James Bond had a long relationship with the Daily Express, Ian Fleming had an even longer one with rival newspaper the Sunday Times. I've already mentioned how "The Living Daylights" was first published in the Times and how that affected the Express' Bond comic strip, but Fleming went back with the Sunday Times a long way. After Fleming left military intelligence in 1945, he became the Foreign Manager of the group that owned the Times, overseeing their global network of correspondents. He quit his full time gig with the paper in '59, but continued writing articles for them. That's where "007 in New York" has its origins.

It was also in '59 that the Times' features editor offered Fleming a five-week, all-expenses-paid trip around the world as fodder for a series of travel articles. Fleming didn't think he'd be good at it and was resistant at first, but changed his mind when he realized he could use the experience as material for Bond. The series ran in the first months of 1960 and was then collected into a book called Thrilling Cities.

Sadly, Fleming had become tired and cranky towards the end of the tour and that was reflected in the tone of his article on New York City (though he's very up front in the essay about that being the case). When Thrilling Cities was looked at for publication in the US, publishers there asked Fleming if he could rework the article to be less scathing, but he refused. In order to balance out his negative article though, he included in the US edition a piece that he'd had published in the New York Herald Tribune the year before. The original title of the article was "Agent 007 in New York," but that was shortened for Thrilling Cities to just "007 in New York".

About the story's inclusion, Fleming wrote, "By way of a postscript I might say I am well aware these grim feelings I’ve expressed for New York may shock or depress some of my readers. In fact, I would be disappointed if this were not the case. In deference to these readers, I here submit the record of another visitor to the city, a friend of mine with the dull name of James Bond, whose tastes and responses are not always my own and whose recent minor adventure in New York (his profession is a rather odd one) may prove more cheerful in the reading."

In keeping with the travelogue tone of the other essays, "007 in New York" is mostly just Bond's musing on the city as he's being driven to his hotel from the airport. Fleming mentions a mission having to do with Bond's telling a former Secret Service agent (who also happens to be a past lover) that her new boyfriend works for the KGB. We get none of that conversation except for a couple of final, unexpectedly funny sentences at the end, because it's not the purpose of the piece. The article is simply to entertain and to tell readers how to make awesome scrambled eggs. It does those both very well.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights | "The Property of a Lady"

In 1963, English auction house Sotheby's commissioned Fleming to write a short story for their annual journal, The Ivory Hammer. The result was "The Property of a Lady," with Bond attending a Sotheby's auction for a Fabergé egg. The egg was sent by the Soviets as payment to a known double agent in MI6, so Bond suspects that the woman's KGB contact in London will be present at the auction to help drive up the price. Bond's job is identify this contact so that he can later be deported, throwing a kink in the Soviets' activities in Britain.

It's no surprise that a writer who makes card games and golf sound exciting can do the same thing for a jewelry auction, so there's nothing wrong with the build up and tension in the story. But "The Property of a Lady" doesn't hold together logically super well. Why exactly is the KGB contact risking exposure when the egg will fetch a very nice price without his interference? It seems unnecessarily greedy, especially on behalf of a double agent who's conceivably doing her job out of patriotism. Fleming kind of fumbles the ending too. All the drama is in the auction scene, but once Bond identifies his target, there's nothing else to keep me interested and it feels like Fleming knows it. He agreed that "The Property of a Lady" wasn't great work and reportedly refused payment for it. A couple of decades later though, the major elements of the story found their way into the movie Octopussy, which did a better job of building a compelling story around the idea.

There's not any character development for Bond in the story, but a couple of important characters do show up. Ronald Vallance of Scotland Yard reappears after his introduction in Moonraker and also contributing to Bond's work in Diamonds Are Forever and "Risico." He's mentioned as Sir Ronald Vallance in this story, which I think is new, so congratulations to him on that.

The other major character is Mary Goodnight. This isn't her true introduction to the series, but since I'm reading stories in the order of Bond's experience and not in the order that Fleming wrote them, it's the first time she's showing up for me. She's the new secretary in the Double-O section, replacing Lil, and it's tough to get a handle on her from just this story. Presumably she gets a better introduction in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, her true first appearance. In "The Property of a Lady" though, I missed Lil and it feels like Bond does too, though he doesn't mention her. He seems to think Goodnight is hot, but he doesn't flirt with her and doesn't even seem to respect or like her. Fleming does specifically mention that Bond's already in a bad mood about something else though, so maybe I shouldn't read much into that. Look forward to getting to know her better in OHMSS, because she becomes a major player in Bond's life in the last Fleming novels.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights | "Octopussy"

The short story “Octopussy” was written late in 1962, but wasn’t published until 1965, after Fleming’s death. It was serialized in the Daily Express, which had also published “From a View to a Kill,” “Risico,” the James Bond comic strip, and had serialized both Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia with Love.

Fans of the movie Octopussy will remember that Maude Adams’ character is friendly towards Bond because he had once allowed her proud, but criminal father the choice of suicide instead of the humiliation of a public trial. The short story is the account of that confrontation and choice.

“Octopussy” sometimes gets compared to “Quantum of Solace” in that Bond’s participation in the story is basically a bookend to the actual tale. But unlike “Quantum of Solace,” where Bond is simply being told the story as a way to pass time, he’s the catalyst for “Octopussy.” His investigation of a decade-old murder has led him to Dexter Smythe and Bond already has all the evidence he needs to put the old man away. As the movie Octopussy says, Bond does offer Smythe a week to get his affairs in order before he’s arrested, which Smythe believes is an opportunity to kill himself. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that it’s not as clean and simple as the way Maud Adams tells it.

Whatever Smythe’s final fate, it is pretty clear that Bond intends to let Smythe commit suicide as an alternative to spending his final days in prison. Which is an enormous kindness on Bond’s part considering Bond’s personal investment in the case. The reason Bond requested the investigation when it happened across his desk is that he had a personal relationship with Smythe’s victim. Bond reveals that the dead man was not only the person who taught Bond to ski as a teenager, but was also a surrogate father at a time when Bond really needed one. He offers no more detail than that, but it’s a major clue in the mystery of Bond’s childhood.

I’m reading the short stories in the order that they take place in Bond’s career, not in the order that Fleming wrote them, so it’s possible that Fleming confirms Bond’s being an orphan in one of the last novels. But chronologically, “Octopussy” is the first indication that Bond may have lost his parents and it seems to indicate that he was a teenager when it happened.

"For Your Eyes Only": The Comic Strip

Like the other short story adaptations, the "For Your Eyes Only" strip leaves very little out. But what it does trim down actually improves the story.

When I wrote about Fleming's version, I pointed out that Bond seems a little nervous about pronouncing a death sentence on someone. That's usually M's job, but M is too close to the case, so Bond helpfully and compassionately takes that responsibility from his boss. That's very explicit in the short story, but in the comic strip, the conversation is abridged so that Bond isn't quite so on the hook. He endorses the mission, but he's not forced to make the call about whether the mission will even exist.



That takes out my favorite moment in Fleming's version, but it also allows a different reading of the entire story; a reading that fixes my least favorite part of Fleming's version. Since this is just another mission for Bond (albeit one with a personal angle for M), it offers some insight on Bond's attitude about assassination assignments. We'll talk more about this when we get to Fleming's "The Living Daylights," a story all about Bond's attitude towards assassination, but there are several moments in the "For Your Eyes Only" strip that reveal Bond's distaste for these kinds of jobs.



In Fleming's version of "For Your Eyes Only," Bond keeps telling Judy Havelock that assassination is "man's work" and it kills me that she accepts that by the end. But I let my distaste for Fleming's gender politics take over my reading and the comic strip version allows a different take. Bond expresses himself in a sexist way, but what lies beneath that is that he's protecting Judy from an action that he himself finds repellant. It's his job to sometimes assassinate people in cold blood, but he's growing less and less tolerant of that part of his duties. Again, we'll see this very clearly in "The Living Daylights."

So when Judy breaks down at the end of "For Your Eyes Only," she's not admitting that Bond was right about her being fragile because she's a woman. She's simply admitting that he was right about how horrible murder is. I'm curious to reread the end of Fleming's version and see if that reading makes sense there, but I suspect that it does. I'm betting that it's just buried more deeply, so I'm grateful to the strip for uncovering it.

Thunderball by Ian Fleming

The creation of Thunderball is notoriously complicated. If most of For Your Eyes Only was the result of Fleming’s trying to bring Bond back to television, Thunderball was the result of his trying to get a film made. In late 1958, he teamed up with a few people including Irish writer/director Kevin McClory, hoping to create a Bond movie. Fleming and McClory weren’t the only people involved, but they were the two who ended up in court, so I’ll focus on them. Not that I’m going to spend much time on that drama, but it’s important to see how the book developed.

According to Wikipedia, Fleming’s confidence in the potential movie fluctuated throughout its development, in part because one of McClory’s other movies bombed at the box office around that same time. So Fleming was more involved at some times and less at others, but between him and the other writers, close to a dozen different treatments, outlines, and scripts were created with lots of different titles. It’s impossible to verify who created what exactly, especially when it comes to the story’s most famous contributions to Bond lore: Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. Though the courts gave those elements to McClory for years, there’s a strong case to be made for Fleming’s contributing to them, especially since Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia with Love clearly show that he had a fondness for the word “spectre.”

Regardless of who contributed how much and which parts, Fleming was certainly on ethically shaky ground when he turned the collaboration into a novel with just his name on it. Once McClory got wind of that, he petitioned the courts to stop publication. That was denied, but the courts left the door open for McClory to pursue later action, starting a long, bitter feud between him and Fleming (as well as future caretakers of Bond’s adventures).

"From Russia with Love": The Comic Strip

It would be heresy (and not even true) to say that the comic strip version of From Russia with Love is better than Fleming's novel, but it does fix the problems I had with the first half of the book. Scenes of the Soviets planning Bond's fall are intercut with scenes of Bond in London that Fleming alludes to in the novel, but never shows. The strip also shows Kerim's initial meeting with Tatiana as it happens in relation to other events instead of Bond's only hearing about it later. This all front loads the story with more action than the novel has and works really well.

In fact, the whole adaptation is one of the best in the comic strip series so far. My only nitpicks are a couple of character designs: Red Grant looks old and out of shape and Kerim Bey distractingly resembles Clark Gable. Oh yeah, and Kronsteen is accidentally referred to as Klonsteen a couple of times. But if any of Fleming's novels could use a faster paced, slimmed down adaptation, it's From Russia with Love. The strip focuses the right amount of attention on the good parts while breezing through the dull ones.

There's of course not nearly as much tension in Bond's being stabbed with a poison shoe-knife at the end, because newspaper readers only had to wait until the next day for the resolution instead of the whole year that book readers endured. That can't be helped though and Bond's falling unconscious after being stabbed is a perfectly good if not unusual cliffhanger for that day's strip.