James Bond books...

[moonbaseone]

I was lucky enough to get the entire James Bond collection from ebay. The originally books. I was also surprised at how small the books are and how they had so much to the stories.

[Hound]

I just finished Doctor No and it was so much better than the movie.

They should have done the obstacle course thing somehow in the movie.

I'm never going to be able to watch the movie ever again.

[inflatable dalek]

Yeah, the escape from Bond's cell is very odd in the film. The drop the torture course angle making it a straightforward escape rather than the nice subversion in the book, but leave in some (of the more mild) tortures, making it look as if No's vents are full of boiling water that flows out into a corridor for no reason.

[DrSpengler]

AND NO OCTOPUS.

[Hound]

Wow, it's been forever since I posted in here.

Well, I've read Goldfinger, but it was months ago and I'm not sure I remember much actually. Pretty much all I can remember is that there were only a few very minor changes in the movie and that I did like it very much.

Really I've not been disappointed in any of the stories so far. They've all been at least better than their movie counterpart.

I just recently read For Your Eyes Only. From A View to a Kill was so short a story but still had enough going on to make it a wonderful read. I can see why we haven't seen it as a movie plot though. For Your Eyes Only was interesting too. Quantum of Solace was probably my favorite of the five stories. Loved it. Risico was almost exactly like the movie. Hildebrand Rarity was great but a little gruesome and disturbing at the end.

I've started reading Thunderball, I think I'm about 5 chapters in. I'm at the part that describes Blofeld's origins. So far I'm liking it a lot.

[inflatable dalek]

Blofeld is, I find, a much more interesting character in the books. He starts off as basically the anti-Bond (no interest in sex or the trappings of wealth) and gets a very interesting character arc across the three books he's in that the films couldn't do due to filming out of order and the wildly differing portrayals of the various actors. The whole Garden of DEATH stuff in You Only Live Twice is just crying out for a proper film adaptation.

[Sades]

Quantum of Solace was probably my favorite of the five stories. Loved it.

I remember when wewerewaitingforthebusandIwasreadingoveryour shoulderandIwaslike,"Dood, that is effed". And then we finished reading the story.

[Hound]

Good times...

[inflatable dalek]

So the one Bond story you just happened to read with your wife is the one with the moral "Ladies: You may not like your husband but you'd better be good to him because if he grows some balls and leaves you your life will be worthless"?

[Hound]

Yes.

[Hound]

I finished Thunderball and also finished The Spy Who Loved Me.

Thunderball was very good. I loved the ending, it's always good when James gets especially beat up by the bad guys. I don't know why, it just makes it all that much better.

The Spy Who Loved Me definitely was a bit of a struggle. I don't think it was just flat out awful, It just wasn't especially interesting I guess. Hard to get excited when the stakes are an insurance scam. That and I so did not care about this girl and her past boyfriends and all that bullshit. It was a boring story is all, but written well... if that makes any sense.

I'm a few chapters into OHMSS and it's pretty much the movie, almost exactly. Which is making me struggle with something. With almost every other book I've read so far I've imagined Connery as the Bond I'm reading about, only Casino Royale being the exception (Craig instead), but the movie being so similar I'm kind of flip flopping between Connery and Lazenby as I read. Depends on what's going on and how fresh that scene from the movie is in my mind. Bit confusing.

[inflatable dalek]

I think you're pretty much bang on the money there, even if I find Thunderball more solid than very good. As it was based on a film script written by Fleming with other people it created all sorts of legal headaches that explain both Never Say Never Again and why we never saw Blofeld again after Diamonds Are Forever (from a legal viewpoint, the bald pussy loving guy in the OHMSS style wheelchair who has issues with Bond and steals him from his wife's grave is not Blofeld at all, oh no).

Spy of course is famously the book Fleming was so embarrassed by he jokingly started a story about how he hadn't written it. Which is also the stance that James Bond: The Authorised Biography takes (which treats the books as being about a "real" person with some embellishments), which claims the real Vivian wrote it and padded out her real experience with Bond when Fleming was burnt out.

Though oddly it claims Moonraker never happened either but was invented by Fleming when Bond had a quiet year. Still well worth a read once you've finished the books though (it was republished a couple of years ago so should be easily findable). It covers Bond's life up until Colonel Sun (the first continuation book) and is actually very, very funny in places. It carefully builds up the new details about Bond's life so they gradually get more and more ludicrous as it goes along (whilst still being in the Fleming style) so it only gradually dawns on you it's a comedy. I think it was the revelation that M is a nudist that made it click for me...

OHMSS is very good, it's easy to see why they didn't change much for the film (and what they did change is generally an improvement). It's was also written after the films had began and there's an influence from them that might help you see Connery more as it goes along (Bond is declared Scottish, he's far more of a sex machine than in previous books and there's a cameo from a Dr No actor I think you'll get a kick out of. It makes the bit in a John Gardner book where Bond sits down to watch The Untouchables and declares it stars his favourite actor seem tame).

[Hound]

I finally got back to and finished OHMSS.

I got distracted by the Hunger Games books, Dragon Ball manga, watching new anime and my wife getting pregnant.

I think a break was needed though, in less than a week I finished it and have read 6 chapters of You Only Live Twice.

OHMSS had another really solid ending where James gets the crap beat out of him and after surviving two near death trips down that mountain his new bride gets offed.

Which makes the start of YOLT kind of a downer cause James is depressed and beaten and ready to give it all up. I feel that this book didn't really get interesting until the part where M gives him the mission to Japan and James' spirits get lifted.

[inflatable dalek]

YOLT is an odd'un really, Fleming was ill when writing it and the obsession with death and a certain lack of attention to detail are both very evident. The book also tries very hard to ignore Tracey and the fall out from that for most of the middle in order to make TEH SHOCK TWIST more out of left field, which is only partially successful.

On the other hand, all the batshit insane garden of death stuff is fantastic and there's another good cliffhanger.

[Hound]

Definitely very good ending, so much so that I had to immediately read the first few pages of the next book to see what happened next.

So there's a bastard child of Bond out there in Japan somewhere... Heh.

I kind of wish this could have been an ending to the series and that even with his memory back Bond could have lived the remainder of his days with Kissy. I think he would have been happy. Oh well...

[inflatable dalek]

There's some fun legal stuff with James Suzuki that's the Bond equivalent of Furman having to use Circuit Smasher rather than Breaker.

At some point since the 60's- after the kid was formally named in the biography-EON ended up with all rights to any and all offspring of Bond (and possibly any other relatives as well). Which is what led to the classic James Bond Jr. cartoon.

So even though the books are the only place where Bond has fathered a child, none of the other authors have ever been able to feature him, despite the obvious dramatic potential there. It apparently used to annoy John Gardner a lot as people were constantly telling him he should bring in the bastard son.

Benson- the Bond version of James Roberts if Roberts were to stick the word clitoris randomly into sex scenes- actually got round the whole thing in his first short story by having young James murdered before the start (by Irma Bunt, fanwank galore) so the story could be about him without him being in it.

Golden Gun starts off great, but once it moves past the EVIL Bond stuff it falls off a lot.

[inflatable dalek]

I've started my own reread of the books for the 60th anniversary of Casino Royale. Considering the tortuous copyright situation that would later develop over Q (the later authors can use Major Bothroyd but can't call him "Q" because the idea of that as a name was originated by the films and is under EON copyright, hence things to get around that like "Q'ute" in the Gardner books) I found it rather sweet that during the initial briefing with M it feels like the Q he's talking about is a person rather than Q Branch as it'll later become ("Q will sort you out with what you need" style lines and so on).

A nice little book, but it feels a bit odd to come back to it after the film made it Bond's first adventure when the novel is very much about a seasoned, experienced agent closer to mandatory retirement age of 40 than starting out. It's certainly smaller scale stuff than the later books and Bond does have an epiphany that makes him change his attitude to his job, but he's no novice here. Suddenly the version Brosnan wanted to do as his 5th film seems a lot more plausible.

Currently 50 pages into Live and Let Die and I'd forgotten quite how racist it is when read through modern eyes. Not entirely the books fault, because as said Fleming apparently tried very hard not to be racist even if he faltered in the execution ; it's just a sign of how the world has changed for the better in the last 60 years. And in fairness, so far Felix is the only American in the book who hasn't come in for some heavy patronising, it's just the causal use of the N word and the attempts at phonetic Harlem speak are pretty painful to read now in a way the Police chief Bond meets being a bit thick and talking like he's from The Untouchables isn't.

I'm also about 50 pages into the making of OHMSS (one of two insanely thick self published paperbacks you could beat a small man to death with easily, the other being about Living Daylights), and the cutting of Roger Moore based drawings that accompanied the serialisation of the book in The Daily Express are a hoot (see, the entire Universe wanted him as Bond even that early!).

The most interesting thing about the book based section is the successful debunking of a story I've never entirely been convinced by- That Bond was made half Scottish because Fleming was impressed by meeting Connery during the making of Dr. No.

It sounds plausible; and Andreas shows up in the book as herself for similar reasons; but I've never read any quotes from Fleming that made it sound as if he especially liked Sean's take on Bond (at best they often sound like given through gritted teeth PR soundbites) so it wasn't that surprising to read that Fleming did the Collage of Arms research two years before Connery was cast and specifically asked if the name Bond had any Scottish connections at that time (the book also makes it sound as if the information about "Bond" and the family motto in the final book and film are entirely accurate to what the Collage would really tell you about the surname, which surprises me as I'd have thought they'd have been made up).

[Hound]

I thought they'd mentioned that Bond had just been made a 00 agent in the book. No?

I'm not surprised at all that Connery had nothing to do with Bond being half Scottish. Also not surprising that Fleming disliked Connery initially as Fleming so obviously sees himself as Bond or at least how he wished himself to be.

[inflatable dalek]

I thought they'd mentioned that Bond had just been made a 00 agent in the book. No?

He talks about the kills he performed that saw him promoted to 00 (interestingly he says being a 00 means you've had to kill someone in cold blood, which makes it sound more like a reward for a difficult job done rather than being a position that requires you to keep on killing. He also says you only need to have killed one person but he's done two, the film decided to make two the minimum) but the timeframe for when that happened isn't commented on. He is in the second half of his 30's though and would have to retire from front-line service at 40 so he's definitely towards the end of his 00 career regardless of when it started.

The book does however imply those are the only two people he's killed (since the war anyway), which might make it more recent. But then, he's not the non-stop sex and death machine at this point and he doesn't actually kill a single person in the whole novel.

I'm not surprised at all that Connery had nothing to do with Bond being half Scottish. Also not surprising that Fleming disliked Connery initially as Fleming so obviously sees himself as Bond or at least how he wished himself to be.

Yeah, based on the refined posh way Fleming spoke in interviews, I still think the closest of the actors to being the fantasy self image he had in his head is still Roger Moore. It's just no one else agrees with me and old Ian.

[Hound]

Perhaps, except Moore's performances always contained a great deal more humor than the Bond from the books. That and Moore's movies are so boring also.