Category: Tour de Bond

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).
Continue reading “Tour de Bond: For Your Eyes Only (1960)”

A lot of folks consider Goldfinger to be the best of the James Bond novels. I disagree — it is undeniably iconic, but to my mind, that status is achieved largely as a result of conflating the book with the film (which is hands-down the best of the Bond films), but I find it lacking when compared to gems like Casino Royale. “Iconic” doesn’t always translate into “excellent,” and while I find Goldfinger to be a great entry in the best run of books in the series, there are flaws which keep it from true excellence.
Continue reading “Tour de Bond: Goldfinger (1959)”

A slight change in schedule for this week — I was away on a business trip to the NYCC. I’ve realized that missing the usual upload day results in a week’s delay, and that sort of delay is contributing to my “blogfade” — I’m not writing on this thing as much as I want to be. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to make a shift to posting daily content– and what better way to begin than with the latest installment of the Tour de Bond, whether it’s Monday or not.

I love this week’s novel. Not only is it part of what I consider the best stretch of quality in the series (for those wondering, that would be the run from 1957 through 1961– From Russia With Love through Thunderball), but it’s Fleming’s tribute to Sax Rhomer’s Fu Manchu novels (my love of which I mentioned in the entry on Live and Let Die). Above and beyond that, though, it represents Fleming’s embrace of the series– in many ways marking the turning point from the occasional novel that he’d write during his stays in Jamaica, into a full-fledged series that became his focus.
Continue reading “Tour de Bond: Dr. No (1958)”