April 1961
James Bond may either delight or disgust his countless acquaintances, but whatever he does to us all, he must be a source of serious anxiety to his author. Ruthless, restless, usually in the best of health, unmarried, and with a striking lack of interest in what a landlady of mine once described as ‘the little delicacies of life’, he prowls about needing new shots of crime, sex and excitement. It must be a strain to keep up with him, and Mr. Fleming is to be commended for his annual excursion.
This time Bond has been packed off to a nature cure establishment and it is here that he first comes in contact with one of the members of Spectre, an organisation so international and wicked that no one country can deal with it. In no time at all, he is in the Bahamas, awaiting atomic developments, which include aeroplanes, submarines, a lot of underwater swimming and an Italian girl called Domino.
Mr. Fleming’s plot is most conscientiously worked out, with good technical detail, admirable locations - particularly underwater - and peppered with all the ingredients which make for variety in Mr. Bond’s life: eroticism which could not stand repetition; pain and danger running their gamuts of the hero’s physique; unlimited money - there’s an emergency on - and beyond the suspense, the understandably cast-iron certainty that Bond will win through in this intensely physical world. I don’t enjoy this kind of adventure enough to appreciate the finer points, but it does seem to me that an organisation such as Spectre is a shade too Germanically inflexible about their master plans: it is also hard to believe that none of its members ever read best sellers, and are not therefore on the look-out for James Bond to queer their pitch black plans.