Worst Fleming Bond Novel?

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  • TheWizardOfIceTheWizardOfIce 'One of the Internet's more toxic individuals'
    Posts: 9,117
    LFS wrote: »
    "Goldfinger" I never found to be as fantastic as everybody claims it is - neither the book nor the film.

    First half of GF is excellent but then after Goldfinger inexplicably decides to keep Bond alive as his secretary the logic collapses.

    The film is not much better as I've never really understood the logic of Goldfinger's line 'We were quite correct to spare Mr Bond's life in Switzerland if those people are his friends.' Why?

    Kill Bond with the laser and bury him in the forest and melt down the Aston and what changes? The CIA might still be watching you but they are doing that anyway. If they knock on the door what have they got? 'No I can't help you. I haven't seen Mr Bond. The last time I saw him was when we played golf. Good day gentlemen unless you have any evidence.'
  • echoecho 007 in New York
    Posts: 6,287
    I agree with DAF. It meanders and goes nowhere. It reads like a rough draft.
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    LFS wrote: »
    "Goldfinger" I never found to be as fantastic as everybody claims it is

    I think only I claim that on here.
  • Posts: 520
    All Fleming is good Fleming but if PussyNoMore has to choose the less good they would be DAF & TMWTGG
    Pussy agrees with ‘The Wizard’s’ assertion that the plotting in GF was far from tight but feels that the sheer momentum and chutzpah behind the story drives it along.
    The one that PussyNoMore has changed his opinion about completely is TSWLM.
    When he read it as a boy, he judged it a horrendous clunker and a betrayal. Indeed, he momentarily considered that his literary hero had lost the plot and was in need of psychiatric help!
    Re-reading it last year he judges it to be a brilliant diversion into pure noir - what fun Hitchcock would have had turning it into a movie - and the way Fleming captures the ‘60s epoc and writes as a woman in the first person singular is nothing short of absolute genius.
    Ian himself pertained not to like it. He took a dreadful drumming from the critics (the men not the women) and posthumously invented this story that he was trying to deter the young from reading Bond.
    Balderdash Mr.Fleming. You wanted everybody to read and love your books. You just didn’t like the criticism.
    Happily women, who almost invariably have better taste than men, have tended to like it and viewed it as a good portrayal of a woman who found liberation through a difficult back story and some pretty horrendous events. They also admired the way he got into the female psychic.
    He should have been proud of it. Viva Fleming - viva Bond and viva Viv that’s what PussyNoMore says!
  • peterpeter Toronto
    Posts: 9,509
    Perfectly stated @PussyNoMore. I've loved it every time I've read it. I think it has an amazing, unique structure, and Fleming showed-off his writing chops-- he really does create a believable Heroine. Having Bond as a character just passing through has an amazing effect: that Bond lives and breathes in a much larger world; that he IS out there, even if he is not starring on the pages that we're reading (if that makes any sense!).
  • edited March 2018 Posts: 2,917
    Ian himself pertained not to like it. He took a dreadful drumming from the critics (the men not the women) and posthumously invented this story that he was trying to deter the young from reading Bond.
    Balderdash Mr.Fleming. You wanted everybody to read and love your books. You just didn’t like the criticism.

    Absolutely correct. Fleming said it was the easiest book he ever wrote, perhaps because he drew on his own life. The grisly cinema seduction was based on his own loss of virginity. That was probably the "psychologically traumatic" experience which "appears as one of the incidents in [Fleming's] books,” to quote his friend Ernest Cuneo. But in the book Fleming portrays the experience from the woman's point of view and paints a damning self-portrait of himself as a young cad.
    So when predominantly male critics savaged TSWLM, a very personal story, as a "pornographic" work of "male transvestism" Fleming felt deeply humiliated and told his publisher never to print a paperback edition.
    But as you note, female critics were more understanding. Esther Howard in The Spectator wrote that the early sex scenes “rather well done" and "only just as nasty as is needed to show how absolutely thrilling it is for… the narrator to be rescued from both death and worse...by a he-man like James Bond. Myself, I like the Daphne du Maurier touch and prefer it this way but I doubt his real fans will.” Ann S. Boyd, in her book The Devil with James Bond!, called TSWLM "a devastating parody of the misuse and manipulation of sex." Those words deserve to be on the back of every copy.
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    edited March 2018 Posts: 18,267
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma that the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG and OP in 1967.

    Fleming had also forbidden any further hardback editions. This too was overruled. Although we can debate the morality until the cows come home, I think Glidrose got it right in eventually issuing it in paperback some five years after the first edition appeared from Cape. At least that way readers could decide for themselves if it was a worthy entry in the Bond series (or of course not, as the case may be). It is certainly a worthy experiment in my book and I'm glad it was not stubbed forever out after 1962.

    Now literary censorship is bad enough but self-censorship due to puritanical reviewers is surely the worst of both worlds. That was the only reason Fleming acted as he did in forbidding any more reprints of TSWLM at hardback or paperback level and forbidding s film to use anything bar the title. In the end analysis, it was a win for Fleming that he was overruled by Glidrose and that therefore this remarkable novel was put out in paperback and is still on the bookshelves today in new editions.
  • echoecho 007 in New York
    Posts: 6,287
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma thst the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG in 1967.

    Possibly a legal dilemma as well, to the extent they were fiduciaries.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    Posts: 18,267
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma thst the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG in 1967.

    Possibly a legal dilemma as well, to the extent they were fiduciaries.

    Yes, they would have had a fiduciary duty under trust law. That is the other matter, but having studied Equity for my law degree I know that judges too read into matters and draw the best conclusion from the intentions of the creator of the trust.

    I don't believe this ever came before a court though or ever came even close to that. I do recall one or else two of the Glidrose board resigning though as they felt (in what you might call black letter law terms) that the Board had voted to go against or overrule Fleming's intentions for the future publication of the TSWLM novel.
  • echoecho 007 in New York
    edited March 2018 Posts: 6,287
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma thst the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG in 1967.

    Possibly a legal dilemma as well, to the extent they were fiduciaries.

    Yes, they would have had a fiduciary duty under trust law. That is the other matter, but having studied Equity for my law degree I know that judges too read into matters and draw the best conclusion from the intentions of the creator of the trust.

    I don't believe this ever came before a court though or ever came even close to that. I do recall one or else two of the Glidrose board resigning though as they felt (in what you might call black letter law terms) that the Board had voted to go against or overrule Fleming's intentions for the future publication of the TSWLM novel.

    It is an interesting dilemma, either to follow Fleming's wishes to the letter or to release a paperback whose publication was surely worth a lot of money to the trust (especially in 1967).
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma thst the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG in 1967.

    Possibly a legal dilemma as well, to the extent they were fiduciaries.

    Yes, they would have had a fiduciary duty under trust law. That is the other matter, but having studied Equity for my law degree I know that judges too read into matters and draw the best conclusion from the intentions of the creator of the trust.

    I don't believe this ever came before a court though or ever came even close to that. I do recall one or else two of the Glidrose board resigning though as they felt (in what you might call black letter law terms) that the Board had voted to go against or overrule Fleming's intentions for the future publication of the TSWLM novel.

    It is an interesting dilemma, either to follow Fleming's wishes to the letter or to release a paperback whose publication was surely worth a lot of money to the trust (especially in 1967).

    Obviously no dilemma for those sharks.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    edited March 2018 Posts: 18,267
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    echo wrote: »
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    Paperbacks were still published, despite Fleming s own wish. Kind of disrespectful.

    It was a moral dilemma thst the Board of Glidrose had to face. One of the Board persuaded the rest that Fleming had not really meant what he said and TSWLM became a Pan paperback at the same time as TMWTGG in 1967.

    Possibly a legal dilemma as well, to the extent they were fiduciaries.

    Yes, they would have had a fiduciary duty under trust law. That is the other matter, but having studied Equity for my law degree I know that judges too read into matters and draw the best conclusion from the intentions of the creator of the trust.

    I don't believe this ever came before a court though or ever came even close to that. I do recall one or else two of the Glidrose board resigning though as they felt (in what you might call black letter law terms) that the Board had voted to go against or overrule Fleming's intentions for the future publication of the TSWLM novel.

    It is an interesting dilemma, either to follow Fleming's wishes to the letter or to release a paperback whose publication was surely worth a lot of money to the trust (especially in 1967).

    Sadly, making more money by reopening the delayed heavy mining of a valuable (if experimental) Fleming Bond novel was what it all most likely came down to. That's business at the end of the day and trustees are supposed to try to do all they can to increase the value of trust assets and work in the best interests of the beneficiaries of the said trust. As these beneficiaries included the widowed Mrs Fleming and her son Caspar, it is hard to begrudge them the funds needed for say Caspar Fleming to have a comfortable life; be fed, clothed, educated etc. Sadly, of course, he had a tragic life, but that wasn't to be known in 1967, and in any case that is irrelevant.
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    Posts: 18,267
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.

    Just out of interest do you read the Bond novels in Norwegian or English or even both? If you read both, which do you prefer?
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.

    Just out of interest do you read the Bond novels in Norwegian or English or even both? If you read both, which do you prefer?

    I have read most of them in both English and Norwegian. I prefer the English, simply because it is the original versions, exactly as written by the author.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    Posts: 18,267
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.

    Just out of interest do you read the Bond novels in Norwegian or English or even both? If you read both, which do you prefer?

    I have read most of them in both English and Norwegian. I prefer the English, simply because it is the original versions, exactly as written by the author.

    Yes, thought you'd say that. Were there any major changes, edits or censorship in the Norwegian translations?

    I found out early in the year that Scandinavians have English as their second language which is something I'm ashamed to say (your impeccable English aside, @Thunderfinger) I really wasn't aware of. Glad to know it's true of course! My Norwegian is, by comparison, non-existent!
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    English is obligatory in school, but it doesn t make it an official language in the realm.

    No censorship or alterations here, but a funny thing is that the short story collections have never been translated for some mysterious reason.
  • Posts: 2,917
    Dragonpol wrote: »
    As these beneficiaries included the widowed Mrs Fleming and her son Caspar, it is hard to begrudge them the funds needed

    Yes, and for what it's worth Ann Fleming had never been in favor of Ian's decision to bury TSWLM. She would have certainly appreciated the extra money by 1968, since Caspar was likely entering Oxford around that time. Unfortunately for all, poor Caspar inherited his father's tendencies for depression and substance abuse, and the money went on to fuel his self-destruction. I often wonder how Caspar would have run the Fleming estate if he'd lived.

  • edited March 2018 Posts: 12,837
    LFS wrote: »
    "Goldfinger" I never found to be as fantastic as everybody claims it is - neither the book nor the film.

    First half of GF is excellent but then after Goldfinger inexplicably decides to keep Bond alive as his secretary the logic collapses.

    The film is not much better as I've never really understood the logic of Goldfinger's line 'We were quite correct to spare Mr Bond's life in Switzerland if those people are his friends.' Why?

    Kill Bond with the laser and bury him in the forest and melt down the Aston and what changes? The CIA might still be watching you but they are doing that anyway. If they knock on the door what have they got? 'No I can't help you. I haven't seen Mr Bond. The last time I saw him was when we played golf. Good day gentlemen unless you have any evidence.'

    In the film I always thought it made sense. As long as he's still alive they'll just assume he's still investigating himself, as the CIA do when they check in on him. But if he goes missing and they think he's dead they'll send someone else properly, or might start looking a lot closer. At the minute all he has to worry about is a couple of guys watching througb binoculars. But if Bond dies, possibly right after saying he'd found out Goldfinger was planning something? They might step things up, or even if not they'd send someone else who they might not realise is a spy. So a captured Bond is better than another one he doesn't know about on his trail.
  • Posts: 15,110
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.

    I dare to say it's better than the movie. I always imagined Sean Connery in his prime reading it.
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    Ludovico wrote: »
    I lost my copy of TSWLM, but I would rather get a new copy of Wood s TSWLM, which I traded off many years ago, because it wasn t Fleming. I regret that now, as it is rather brilliant.

    I dare to say it's better than the movie. I always imagined Sean Connery in his prime reading it.

    It IS an improvement on the film (which I also love), although another medium so not directly comparable. I find it to be up there with Fleming himself, and without comparison the best non-Fleming Bond book I have read, although that only includes Colonel Sun, the first three or four Gardners and Devil May Care. I didn t like any of those.
  • edited March 2018 Posts: 533
    For me, it was "The Spy Who Loved Me". It was an interesting story, didn't feel like a spy novel.
  • Posts: 15,110
    DRush76 wrote: »
    For me, it was "The Spy Who Loved Me". It was an interesting story, didn't feel like a spy novel.

    It's not a spy novel. More like an old fashioned hardboiled crime novel. For me it's like a British chef doing an American burger and chips. It's unexpected but he sure does it fine.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    edited March 2018 Posts: 18,267
    Ludovico wrote: »
    DRush76 wrote: »
    For me, it was "The Spy Who Loved Me". It was an interesting story, didn't feel like a spy novel.

    It's not a spy novel. More like an old fashioned hardboiled crime novel. For me it's like a British chef doing an American burger and chips. It's unexpected but he sure does it fine.

    As Kingsley Amis said in The James Bond Dossier (1965) it's not a spy story except one short interlude - the Ulhmann SPECTRE 'Bedtime Story' that James Bond tells to Vivienne Michel at the motel.

    And it sure is a tasty burger.
  • Posts: 631
    Disappointed with Goldfinger. That golf game seemed to go on forever. The only aspect I liked was that Tilly Masterson had a much larger role than she does in the film.

    The novel of YOLT on the other hand is great. There’s a feeling of destiny about it, some hints of the supernatural, which I really like.
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 8,248
    Indeed. YOLT has a different atmosphere then most of the books, a world-weary kind of feeling.
  • Goldfinger.

    Two, TWO back-to-back chapters about a golf game?!? NOOOOOOOOOOO!

    Also, Auric Goldfinger was a little too derrvative of Hugo Drax in my opinion. Another wealthy businessman that likes to cheat at cards until Bond figures out what the hell is going on. Then Bond goes on to discover the villains’ secret plan: Moonraker and Operation Grand Slam.

    But the worst one is Diamonds Are Forever. I enjoy the bit about the Wild West town, but everything else is just underwhelming. And there was something I didn’t like about the end chapter. Bond shoots down the diamond smugglers’ helicopter in South Africa? Was that the ending? I can’t remember. But then, that’s the novel: forgettable.
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 8,248
    I personally prefer Goldfinger over Drax. I think there's at least more to him, Drax is a bit one-dimentional typical nazi-evil. At least Goldfingr had his deep passion.
  • suavejmfsuavejmf Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England
    Posts: 5,131
    If I had to choose the worst book then I would say TSWLM.
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