Poll Results - Who would have made the best James Bond?

No contest!

1. Roy Kinnear - 100%
2. Bob Latchford - 0%
2. Steve Peregrine-Took - 0%
2. Ivor Cutler - 0%

Poll Results - Bond Villains

"No Mister Bond, I expect you to die!"

1 - Ernst Stavro Blofeld
2 - Sir Hugo Drax
3 - Goldfinger
4 - Dr No
5 - Count Lippe

James Bond novel #3 - Moonraker

Without doubt Moonraker is the most underestimated of the Bond novels, probably because it was one of the few early books that wasn’t adapted for film until much later (and a fairly lamentable adaptation it was too, with Roger Moore gooning his way through a very poor script and the normally excellent Michael Lonsdale playing a demented Drax).

The novel begins with M asking James Bond to investigate the multi-millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax, who is winning a lot of money playing bridge at M's favourite club, Blades. M suspects Drax of cheating, but although claiming indifference, he is concerned why a multi-millionaire and national hero, such as Sir Hugo, would cheat at a card game. Bond confirms Drax's deception and manages to "cheat the cheater" — aided by a cocktail of powdered Benzedrine mixed with non-vintage champagne and a deck of stacked cards — winning £15,000 and infuriating the out-smarted Drax.

Drax is the product of a mysterious background, unknown even to himself (allegedly). As a supposed British soldier in WWII, he was badly injured, and stricken with amnesia, in the explosion of a bomb planted by a German saboteur at his field headquarters. After extensive rehabilitation in an army hospital, however, he would eventually return home to become a major aerospace industrialist.

Now, Drax and his firm are building the "Moonraker", Britain's first nuclear missile project, intended to defend the United Kingdom against its Cold War enemies (c.f. the real Blue Streak missile). Essentially, the Moonraker rocket is an upgraded V-2 rocket using liquid hydrogen and fluorine as propellants. It can withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures in its engine thanks to the use of columbite, of which Drax has a monopoly. Therefore, because the rocket's engine can withstand higher heat, the Moonraker can use more powerful fuels, greatly expanding its effective range.

After a Ministry of Supply security officer working at the project is shot dead, M assigns Bond to replace him, and also to investigate what may be going on at the missile-building base, which is located between Dover and Deal on the coast of England. Oddly, all of the rocket scientists working on the project seem to be German.

At his post on the complex (where he is billeted in the Drax mansion), Bond meets Gala Brand, a beautiful Special Branch agent working undercover as Personal Assistant to Drax. He also uncovers some clues concerning his predecessor's death, concluding that the former Security Chief might have been killed for witnessing the clandestine delivery of some secret cargo by submarine off the coast.

Drax's henchman Krebs is caught by Bond while he snoops through his room. Later, an attempted assassination nearly kills Bond and Gala under a landslide, as they swim beneath the Dover cliffs. Drax takes Gala to London where she discovers the truth about the "Moonraker" (by comparing her own launch trajectory figures with those in a notebook picked from Drax's pocket) - but she is caught. She soon finds herself captive at a secret radio station (intended to serve as a beacon for the missile's guidance system) in the heart of London. While attempting to rescue her in a car chase, Bond is captured, as well.

It turns out that Drax was never a British soldier and has never suffered from amnesia. In fact, he was a German commander of a Skorzeny commando unit and the saboteur (in British uniform) Graf Hugo von der Drache who set the bomb at the army field headquarters, only to be injured, himself, in the detonation. The amnesia story was simply a cover he used while recovering in hospital, in order to avoid allied retribution - though it would lead to a whole new British identity. Drax, however, remains a dedicated Nazi, bent on revenge against England for the wartime defeat of his Third Reich Fatherland and his prior history of social slights he suffered as a youth growing up in England before the war. He now means to destroy London with the very missile he has constructed for Britain, by means of a Soviet supplied nuclear warhead that has been secretly fitted to the "Moonraker". He also plays the stock market the day before to make a huge profit from the planned disaster.

Brand and Bond are imprisoned under the Moonraker's booster engines so as to leave no trace of them once the Moonraker is launched. But before this first (supposedly un-armed) test firing, Bond and Gala escape. Gala gives Bond the proper coordinates to reprogram the gyros and send the Moonraker into the sea. Having been in collaboration with Soviet Intelligence all along, Drax and his henchman attempt to escape by Russian submarine - only to be killed as the vessel flees through the very waters onto which the "Moonraker" has been re-targeted.

Later, after their de-briefing at headquarters, Bond meets up with Gala, expecting her company - but they part ways after Gala reveals that she is engaged to be married. It is the only Bond novel (discounting some of the short stories) in which Bond does not end up having a romantic relationship with the girl.

Moonraker is my favourite Bond novel, not least because there are no cinematic comparisons to blur the imagination. The Kent setting also resonates. In later years I couldn’t help but try and draw some comparisons between Sir Hugo Drax and Robert Maxwell, although for all of his many failings Maxwell was certainly never a Nazi!

Not a lot of people know that: The first adaption of Moonraker was on South African radio in 1956, with Bob Holness providing the voice of Bond. “I’ll have a consonant please M.”

James Bond Novels # 2 - Live & Let Die

James Bond is sent to New York City to investigate "Mr. Big", an underworld voodoo leader who is suspected by M of selling 17th century gold coins to finance Soviet spy operations in America. These gold coins have been turning up in Harlem and Florida and are suspected of being part of a treasure that was buried in Jamaica by the Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. Although Bond is at first reluctant to take on the mission, his attitude quickly changes upon learning that Mr. Big is an agent of SMERSH and that this mission offers him a chance of retaliation for previously being tortured by SMERSH operative Le Chiffre and having a Russian (Cyrilic) letter carved into the back of his hand by a SMERSH assassin in Casino Royale.

In New York, Bond meets up with his counterpart in the CIA, Felix Leiter. The two decide to visit some of Mr. Big's nightclubs in Harlem, but Mr. Big is aware of their movements through his network of informers and they are easily captured. Bond is personally interrogated by Mr. Big, who uses his fortune telling-girlfriend, Solitaire, to determine if Bond is telling the truth. Solitaire lies to Mr. Big, supporting Bond's cover story. Mr. Big decides to release Bond and Felix with only a mild beating, and has one of his men break one of Bond's fingers by pulling it backward until it snaps, but Bond then escapes and kills several of Mr. Big's men in the process. Leiter is released by a sympathetic gang member who shares his love of jazz.

Solitaire later contacts Bond and they travel to St. Petersburg, Florida. While Bond and Leiter are scouting one of Mr. Big's warehouses that is used for storing exotic fish, Solitaire is kidnapped by Mr. Big's minions. Felix later returns to the warehouse by himself, but is either captured and fed to a shark or tricked into standing on a trap door over the shark tank. He survives, losing an arm and a leg. Bond finds him in their safe house with a note pinned to his chest "He disagreed with something that ate him". After getting Felix to the hospital, Bond investigates the warehouse himself, and discovers that Mr. Big is indeed smuggling gold by placing it in the bottom of fish tanks holding poisonous tropical fish. Bond destroys much of the warehouse and then causes Mr. Big's gunman (the "Robber") to fall into the shark tank without leaving evidence that he has discovered the coin-smuggling scheme.

Bond continues his mission in Jamaica where he meets Quarrel and John Strangways, the head of the MI6 station in Jamaica. Quarrel gives Bond training in scuba diving in the local waters. Bond swims through shark and barracuda infested waters to Mr. Big's island and manages to plant a limpet mine on the hull of his yacht before being captured once again by Mr. Big. In the grand finale, Mr. Big ties Solitaire and Bond to a line behind his yacht and plans to drag them over the shallow coral reef and into deeper water so that the sharks and barracuda that he attracts in to the area with regular feedings will eat them.

Bond and Solitaire are saved when the limpet mine explodes moments before they are dragged over the reef: though temporarily stunned by the explosion and injured on the coral Bond and Solitaire are protected from the explosion by the reef, and Bond watches as Mr. Big, who survived the explosion, is killed by the sharks and barracuda. Bond and Solitaire then stay in Jamaica for a brief holiday in the book's close.

Ian Fleming intended the follow-up to Casino Royale to be of a more serious tone, a meditation on the nature of evil. The novel's original title, The Undertaker's Wind, reflects this. Fleming conducted research for Live and Let Die and completed it before Casino Royale was published; his publishers had offered him a contract for three books following Royale's popularity. Drawing from personal experiences, the opening with Bond's arrival at New York's Idlewild Airport was inspired by Fleming's own arrivals in 1941 and 1953. Also, the warehouse at which Felix Leiter is attacked by a shark was based on a warehouse Fleming had visited in 1953.

One of the weaker Bond novels, Live & let die betrays a barely concealed racist view of Black American and Jamaican culture that leaves the modern reader more than a little uncomfortable. Fleming's belief that Britain could save a decadent and addled American society from Communist infiltration through the hard graft of just one man is now quite an amusing construct though.

James Bond Novels - Casino Royale

The first of Ian Fleming's Bond novels, Casino Royale was apparently written in response to the looming shadow of getting married and the impending 'castration' from all the good things in life.

He started working on it in January 1952. At the time, Fleming was the Foreign Manager for Kemsley Newspapers, an organisation owned by The Sunday Times. Upon accepting the job, Fleming sensibly requested that he be allowed two months vacation per year. Every year thereafter, until his death in 1964, Fleming would retreat for the first two months of the year to his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye, to write a James Bond book.

Fleming used all aspects of his life as inspiration when writing: Every acquaintance of Ian Fleming ran the risk of ending up in one of his Bond books, and almost every character in his fiction is based on a real person, even if only by name. He plucked these monikers from his social circle, his memory, his reading, his favourite newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, and his imagination: old school friends (and enemies), clubmen, colleagues in the City and Fleet Street, golfing partners, girlfriends and others found themselves transported into Fleming’s fiction. The fact that my father's name Peter Franks appears in Diamonds are Forever, was always an intriguing adjunct to my fascination with the Bond novels.

Between 1953 and 1966, twelve James Bond novels and two short story collections by Fleming were published, including one novel and one collection issued posthumously. (It is still argued whether Fleming himself actually finished 1965's The Man with the Golden Gun, as he died very soon after it is known to have been completed.)

In Casino Royale MI6 assigns James Bond, Special Agent 007, to bankrupt Le Chiffre, the paymaster for a SMERSH-controlled trade union, in a high-stakes baccarat game at the Royale-Les-Eaux casino. With him is Vesper Lynd, an MI6 accountant sent to make sure Bond handles the agency's money properly. He initially thinks of her as a nuisance, but over time grows to have romantic feelings for her.

The game soon turns into a one-on-one confrontation between Le Chiffre and Bond that soon bankrupts the latter. As Bond contemplates killing Le Chiffre outright, he is approached by CIA agent Felix Leiter, who offers to stake Bond for another hand. Bond accepts the offer and eventually wins the game, taking from Le Chiffre tens of millions of francs belonging to SMERSH. Desperate, Le Chiffre kidnaps Lynd and subjects Bond to brutal torture, threatening to kill them both if he does not get the money back. Suddenly, a SMERSH assassin bursts in and kills Le Chiffre as punishment for losing the money, saving Bond's life.

Lynd visits Bond every day as he recuperates in the hospital, and he gradually realizes that he loves her; he even contemplates leaving Her Majesty's Secret Service to settle down with her. When Bond is released, they go on holiday together, and eventually become lovers. One day, they see a mysterious man named Gettler tracking their movements, which greatly distresses Vesper. The following morning, Bond finds that Lynd has committed suicide, leaving behind a note explaining that she had been working as an unwilling double agent for the MVD. SMERSH had kidnapped her lover, a Polish RAF pilot, who had revealed information about her under torture; SMERSH then used that information to blackmail her into helping them undermine Bond's mission, including her own faked kidnapping. She had tried to start a life with Bond, but upon seeing Gettler — a SMERSH agent — she realized that she would never be free of her tormentors, and that staying with Bond would only put him in danger.

Bond copes with the loss by renouncing Lynd as a traitor and going back to work as if nothing has happened, coldly telling M, "The bitch is dead now." Nevertheless, subsequent novels reveal that he never truly gets over her death; in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, for example, it is revealed that he makes an annual pilgrimage to Royale-Les-Eaux to visit her grave, while in Diamonds Are Forever, he avoids listening to "La Vie en Rose", a song closely associated with Lynd in Casino Royale.

Fleming stated that Casino Royale was inspired by certain incidents that took place during his career at the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty. Childhood friend Brett Hart was the basis for the novel, including a trip to Lisbon that Fleming and the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, took during World War II en route to the United States.

While there, they went to the Estoril Casino in Estoril, which (due to the neutral status of Portugal) had a number of spies of warring regimes present. Fleming claimed that while there he was cleaned out by a "chief German agent" at a table playing chemin de fer. Admiral Godfrey tells a different story: Fleming only played Portuguese businessmen and that afterwards Fleming had fantasized about there being German agents and the excitement of cleaning them. His references to 'Red Indians' (four times, twice on last page) comes from Fleming's own 30 Assault Unit, which he nicknamed his own 'Red Indians'.

The failed assassination attempt on Bond while at Royale-Les-Eaux is also claimed by Fleming to be inspired by a real event. The inspiration comes from a failed assassination on Franz von Papen who was a Vice-Chancellor and Ambassador under Adolf Hitler. Both Papen and Bond survive their assassination attempts, carried out by Bulgarians, due to a tree that protects them both from a bomb blast.

On a geographic note, the city of Royale-les-Eaux and its casino are inspired by Le Touquet-Paris-Plage or by Deauville, where Fleming used to play as a young man.

Casino Royale is a fanatstic introduction to Bond, the otherwordly almost exotic atmosphere of a late-night French casino was in stark contrast to the austerity of both post-war and mid-seventies (when I first read it) Britain. Bond's willingness to take on the cunning Le Chiffre, whilst polishing off numerous drinks and enemies in equal measure sets a pace that didn't let up in his writing for the next ten years.

Bond's latent racism and inherent sexism, whilst not to be dismissed, must be taken in the context of the time and Fleming's upbringing. In fact compared to some of the crass examples of both in the latter films his prejudices are quite mild. That being said, Casino Royale is the only place to start for anybody discovering him for the first time and indeed the only place for anyone returning to his annual trawl through the files of Commander Sir James Bond, (KCMG, RNVR).

James Bond & Harry Palmer

It is often said that where Bond glamourised the world of espionage, Palmer epitomised the mundane nature of life in the British Secret Service. For every one of Bond's rather rich meals in a french casino, Palmer rustles up a nice little omelette for his current acquaintance. It is new money v old England, Flash v Stylish, Fleming v Deighton...

Interestingly enough, Deighton was actually invited to write the screenplay for From Russia with love. Although little of it was actually used. Either way, the truth of the matter is, they both looked good, dressed well & drank steadily. All in all, enough to satisfy Gentlemen of any era!