So this is an odds and sods collection of leftover James Bond stories published after Ian Fleming died, and a few years into the movie series. It includes two stories that “became films” in the sense that their titles became titles of films. The story “The Living Daylights” forms part of the movie version, but “Octopussy” bears little resemblance to that movie. “Octopussy” is a good short story in the same way that several of Agatha Christie novels are good. Rather than put James Bond […]
Finger. Goldfinger.
Read for CBR10 Bingo: Birthday between August and November. The fictional James Bond’s birthday has been listed in several sources as November 11. I’ve gotten into Anthony Horowitz’s work this past year so when I saw his James Bond book at a used bookstore, I grabbed it. I later discovered it was a direct sequel to Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. I hadn’t read Fleming for several years but I remembered liking Casino Royale, warts and all, so I decided to pick it up. Ah man. I’m not a James […]
“Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner parties and leaving with the soup.”
In 1959, The Sunday Times gave James Bond writer Ian Fleming a round-the-world plane ticket and charged him with quickly traveling through 14 of the world’s major cities. (Fleming had been foreign editor for the paper for some time previously.) The result is Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, a memorialized account of the writer’s experiences. While I am a known fan of the James Bond books (you’ll find several of my reviews on this very site), this little non-fiction gem is one of my favorites of all of Fleming’s books. […]
A Case Where the Book and Movie have *VASTLY* Different Plots
It would appear that I am in the minority as regards my opinions regarding Moonraker, the third James Bond novel by Sir Ian Fleming. I didn’t much enjoy it. Moonraker is back to the three-act structure we found in Casino Royale, and the three acts are decidedly similar. Act one is background knowledge via gambling, act two is the discovery of the mission and its true scope, act three is the part where Bond makes his moves and recovers from the physical cost of the […]