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Colonel Sun. Definitely.
Cheers, I'll be sure to give that one a read.
Same here.
Where I am in the book, Scaramanga hasn't been in it yet. I'm guessing Lee's version was fairly different then? That's intresting.
The NYC section is problematic (both in terms of political incorrectness, and its complete lack of story momentum). But it does have some great prose. I think the description of the topless dancer might be the sexiest thing Fleming ever wrote.
I have a question for all of you who have read all the books: are any of the continuation novels worth reading once I've finished the Fleming books?[/quote]
Colnel Son is up there with the top Flemings. The spin off series "Young Bond" and "Moneypenny Diaries" are both excellent and the first five Gardner's are well worth reading.
The rest are absolute crap!
For me, DAF was the turkey and TMWTGG was well below his normal standard. The rest are peerless.
Scaramanga was the flipped side to the same coin as Bond. There was lots of untapped potential in Fleming's last novel, and its a shame he never got chance to polish it fully.
And then there's Thunderball, which I love, but I have the feeling Fleming is somehow not completely at ease with Bond. It certainly is influenced by the fils though, as I find it has more humour then the previous books.
I find TB to be the weakest novel. It reads more like an adapted script, which is what it essentially was anyway.
As for TSWLM I find that I actually really enjoy Fleming's "diversions" like this (and QoS). One of Fleming's strengths was his ability to fully illustrate a world and the life of the person inside it; to break away from Bond's world and follow a different character is still interesting to me. I would have loved Fleming to try this more often than he did - I'd love there to be one last short story collection discovered and have it be, say, five stories something like the non-Bond parts of TSWLM or QoS.
The more than before explicit sexual descriptions may be a matter of taste, I find them crude. At all, I was bored with the description of Domino.
Blofeld is described in fascinating detail, but after that he practically isn't existing, he has nothing to do with he actual story.
Similar it is with Bond's car. Bond gets a call on the most-urgent line, and instead of cranking the tension up, Fleming has nothing better to do than rave at length about Bond's car, which after this description isn't used again.
The novel picks up momentum in he second half, but until then it kind of senselessly meanders along.
Cheers guys. I'm glad its not just me who found TB to be a weak novel.
TB was the first novel that I noticed characters speaking in exposition, not dialogue (sadly, it wasn't the last). It was also the novel where I noticed that coincidence and wild guesses really drove the plot which, again, was not the last time. When I reread the Fleming novels last year I was surprised to agree with my girlfriend's father's criticisms of Fleming as a writer, but still find his stories engrossing and entertaining.
For me it's The Spy Who Loved Me and I find my self getting irritated with Bond in Diamonds Are Forever as he has clues to the henchmen but keeps forgetting them! He does suffer a damn good kicking though and escape from Spectreville.
Better still, reread Fleming! Or read non Bond books...
Agreed. The first chapter of FRWL is entirely better than all of DAF.
I thoroughly enjoyed TSWLM as well, even though it was a bit experimental.
There are still good things about DAF, it is still a good book, but it is often lacking. The villains are barely developed, for instance. I often have the feeling that it is a hardboiled crime novel with James Bond in it, larger scale than what Raymond Chandler would have written, but lacking its authenticity. As crime fiction, I actually think TSWLM works better, even though it is as atypical a Bond novel as it can be.
Oh I agree with you, but the first chapter of FRWL is still better than all of DAF. There's more development to Grant (one character) in the first three chapters of FRWL than all of the characters in DAF.
FRWL was indeed far superior, you could tell Fleming worked a lot and hard on it. Maybe his most accomplished work. Many of Fleming's short stories were like this, masterpieces of intimate dramas. QOS was like this, it's almost a modern Madame Bovary. TSWLM is not much of a Bond novel, but it is certainly a solid. entertaining novel, both a neat little crime drama with larger than life characters and a coming of age story. Oh and Vivienne Michel has to make it to the big screen one day as a Bond girl. Obviously in a more typical Bond story, but we need more Bond girls like her: outsider to the world of crime or espionnage, trapped in a game bigger than what they know.
Bearing in mind that this is in response to the title of the thread - Worst Fleming Bond Novel? - it has to be one of the most ludicrous statements ever uttered.
We can all argue about the merits of TSWLM (my personal pick for worst novel - just a low rent melodrama) versus TMWTGG and perhaps DAF and TB in the scrap for worst but when you start including OHMSS in the debate you just embarrass yourself.