Just read Casino Royale- Spoilers!

[peas_and_corn]

…anyway, after being a Bond fan for some time I decided to actually start reading the books, and I started at the beginning- which is a good place to start. I was very impressed- straight forward narrative but one that kept me interested all the way. I prefer the structure of the story in the book over the film- Le Chiffre being a Soviet spy running a fifth column union in France. The Bond-Vespa stuff was much better handled as well.

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[Pete Part Three]

It sounds like a really poncey thing to say (considering it’s the first one) but Casino Royale really is the best of the books.

You might want to avoid Live and Let Die if you’re easily shocked.

[ChrisM]

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.)

[Andrew]

Comparisons to the movies get redundant pretty quickly – the first three Connerys and OHMSS are pretty close, but for the most part Fleming was poached for ideas rather than full stories. It’s hilarious when you get to, say For Your Eyes Only to see two different short stories AND one of the novels being thrown into the mix.

Certainly a direct adaptation of Casino Royale would have been impossible now. Vesper isn’t a particularly three-dimensional character in the book, and obviously the political situation is impossible to match up. Plus there simply isn’t enough going on to get an entire film out of. The movie has a curious structure, though – it’s actually two three-act stories put together. The film acts as its own sequel, and the Casino Royale sections are essentially part two.

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy in the books – once you get past lines like “all women love semi-rape” and “homosexuals cannot whistle” – and Moonraker is a particular favourite of mine.

[Pete Part Three]

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.

[Andrew]

The Spy gets a bad rap for trying to be something it’s not – which is fair enough. But on its own terms is not as bad as they say.

The recent Faulks book was a bit of a disappointment. Half the book trying to insist really hard that “Yes, see, I’m a proper Bond book” by dropping in a stack of back-references, and the other half strapping together some fairly perfunctory old-hat sequences.

On the other hand, Higson’s Young Bond books are superb. Genuinely worthy, and not at all the cash-in I’d expected.

[pfm]

Yeah.

[peas_and_corn]

>It sounds like a really poncey thing to say (considering it?s the first one) but Casino Royale really is the best of the books.

It certainly would be hard to top

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

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

>Comparisons to the movies get redundant pretty quickly – the first three Connerys and OHMSS are pretty close, but for the most part Fleming was poached for ideas rather than full stories. It?s hilarious when you get to, say For Your Eyes Only to see two different short stories AND one of the novels being thrown into the mix.

I’m more and more just seeing them as completely different texts and am approaching them as such- it’s just the films were inspired and take a lot from the books. Didn’t they just take the title of ‘Live and Let Die’ and none of the story within?

[Andrew]

> 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.

[Zombie Jim Undead]

I remember reading a Bond book called something like “Aquator” years and years ago. Liked it at the time but was but a foolish easily-pleased child as opposed to the foolish easy-pleased adult I’ve become.

[Author]

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