In ‘Octopussy’ I got a real flavour of the Caribbean with all its drug-running gangster culture. What I enjoyed about the stories were the flashbacks into the world 50 years ago. ‘007 in New York’ was more of a thinly disguised personal view of the city rather than a Bond story (and Fleming admits as much). It would have made for a killer cliff-hanger ending. I would have loved it if the secret bidder was sitting right next to Bond and he was thwarted just this once. ‘The Property of a Lady’ had a very good premise, but needed a stronger ending in my opinion. Two of these titles were made into full-length films only because they were the only two that had half-decent endings and enough of a back-story to build a script around. In a little over 100 pages we have ‘ Octopussy‘, ‘The Property of a Lady’, ‘ The Living Daylights‘ and ‘007 in New York’. I say ‘scraps’ because some of these stories have a distinct ‘unfinished’ quality about them as if they were fleeting scenarios penned-down in the heat of the moment. This is my first taste of Bond, and the four short stories or ‘scraps’ as I came to see them, was a nice introduction to Fleming’s work. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to see his beloved character hit the bigtime but word has it most of what he wrote came from his own life as a jet-setting, suave intelligence officer. Fleming wrote 14 Bond novels altogether, and is said to be his last. The genre itself became synonymous with the Christian Dior style of 1950’s glamour thanks to titles like ‘ Diamonds are Forever‘, ‘ The Man with the Golden Gun‘ and ‘Casino Royale’. He single-handedly painted the otherwise secret world of Mi5 operatives in gold gilt. Thanks to Fleming, being a spy has never been so attractive. “Whether it is tracking down a wayward major who has taken a deadly secret with him to the Caribbean or identifying a top Russian agent secretly bidding for a Fabergé egg in a Sotheby’s auction room, Bond always closes the case-with extreme prejudice.”Īhh, the world of international espionage.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming

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