Just read Casino Royale- Spoilers!

I’ve read one Bond book, one that never made it to film: Colonel Sun. (I think it had a different author too.)

Not bad, but not great. Extremely raunchy too,(quite an eye opener compared to the toned down nature of the films. With the exception of the latter films which are a lot more explicit.)

Yeah, I rather like Moonraker (seemed to be stylistically similar to Casino Royale). From Russia With Love is nicely epic. Goldfinger is pretty good, despite focusing on the world’s longest game of golf.

Didn’t like LALD or Diamonds Are Forever. Have had The Spy Who Loved Me for quite some time, but still haven’t read it.

Yeah.

> Yeah, not one by the original author- though is it an ?official sequel??

That gets kinda hard to pin down. It’s official in as much as Gildrose, who own the literary Bond rights, commissioned the book from Kingsley Amis as a direct continuation. He wrote under the Richard Markham name and the plan was to continue the series under that pseudonym with other novelists. But it never happened.

John Gardner and Raymond Benson eventually wrote further follow-ups, and in theory they’re all ‘official’…though they’re all set in the present day, so they share the films’ ageing issues with the main character. Then Faulks’s book came along and returned to a Cold War period setting…it’s all a bit of a mess.

With Bond – literary and cinematic – it’s generally not worth worrying about what’s canon and what isn’t. They’re all legally bone fide, but I tend to stick to Fleming for the books; Colonel Sun maybe slips in under the wire because it’s close enough to the originals.

> Didn?t they just take the title of ?Live and Let Die? and none of the story within?

Not quite, but almost. There are a fair few elements – the girl, the villain, many of the settings – that come from the book, but in general Mankiewicz’s screenplay went its own way. The book’s keelhaul sequence ended up in the movie of For Your Eyes Only, and Leiter’s shark attack wound up in Licence to Kill.