Tour de Bond: For Your Eyes Only (1960)

For Your Eyes Only is a monument to the adage that the best writers never let a good idea go to waste. In 1958, CBS Television offered Ian Fleming a contract for a television show based on the James Bond character. Fleming agreed and prepared a set of outlines for the first episodes of the proposed series — a combination of adaptations of his earlier novels, along with new material. Unfortunately, CBS eventually dropped the idea, and the series never happened. The new material Fleming had created, though, wouldn’t go to waste.

Gathering up the five original outlines that he had developed for the series, Fleming expanded them into short stories — the plots, developed for series television, weren’t detailed enough for full-length novels. The stories– “From a View to a Kill”, “For Your Eyes Only”, “Quantum of Solace”, “Risico” and “The Hildebrand Rarity” — were published as a collection originally titled For Your Eyes Only – Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond (although the subtitle was dropped in later editions).
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