The Spy Who Loved Me
Encyclopedia
The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel in Ian Fleming
's James Bond
series, first published by Jonathan Cape
on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels as well as a clear departure from previous Bond novels in that the story is told in the first person by a young Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel
. Bond himself does not appear until two thirds of the way through the book. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving Michel credit as a co-author.
Due to the reactions by critics and fans, Fleming was not happy with the book and attempted to suppress elements of it where he could: he blocked a paperback edition in the UK and only gave permission for the title to be used when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman
and Albert R. Broccoli
, rather than any aspects of the plots. However, the character of Jaws is loosely based on one of the characters in the book and the paperback edition was published in the UK after his death.
A heavily adapted version of The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in the Daily Express
newspaper in daily comic strip format in 1967-1968. In 1977 the title was used for the tenth film
in the Eon Productions
series. It was the third to star Roger Moore
as Bond and used no plot elements from the novel.
Vivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian
woman narrates her own story, detailing her past love affairs, the first being with Derek Mallaby, who took her virginity in a field after being thrown out of a cinema in Windsor
for indecent exposure. Their physical relationship ended that night and Viv was subsequently rejected when Mallaby sent her a letter from Oxford University
saying he was forcibly engaged to someone else by his parents. Viv's second love affair was with her German
boss, Kurt Rainer, with whom she would eventually become pregnant. She informed Rainer and he paid for her to go to Switzerland
to have an abortion
, telling her that their affair was over. After the procedure, Viv returned to her native Canada and started her journey through America, stopping to work at "The Dreamy Pines Motor Court" in the Adirondack Mountains
for managers Jed and Mildred Phancey.
Them
At the end of the vacation season, the Phanceys entrust Viv to look after the motel for the night before the owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, can arrive to take inventory and close it up for the winter. Two mobsters, "Sluggsy" Morant and Sol "Horror" Horowitz, both of whom work for Sanguinetti, arrive and say they are there to look over the motel for insurance purposes. The two have been hired by Sanguinetti to burn down the motel so that Sanguinetti can make a profit on the insurance. The blame for the fire would fall on Viv, who was to perish in the fire. The mobsters, are cruel to Viv and, when she says she does not want to dance with them, they attack her, holding her down and starting to remove her top. They are about to continue the attack with rape when the door buzzer stops them.
Him
British secret service agent James Bond appears at the door asking for a room, having had a flat tyre while passing. Bond quickly realizes that Horror and Sluggsy are mobsters and that Viv is in danger. Pressuring the two men, he eventually gets the gangsters to agree to provide him a room. Bond tells Michel that he is in America in the wake of Operation Thunderball and was detailed to protect a Russian nuclear expert who defected to the West and who now lives in Toronto
, as part of his quest to ferret out SPECTRE
. That night Sluggsy and Horror set fire to the motel and attempt to kill Bond and Michel. A gun battle ensues and, in the process of escaping, Horror and Sluggsy's car crashes into a lake. Bond and Michel retire to bed, but Sluggsy is still alive and makes a further attempt to kill them when Bond shoots him.
Viv wakes to find Bond gone, leaving a note in which he promises to send her police assistance and which he concludes by telling her not to dwell too much on the ugly events through which she has just lived. As Viv finishes reading the note, a large police detachment arrives. After taking her statement, the officer in charge of the detail, reiterates Bond's advice, but also warns Viv that all men involved in violent crime and espionage, regardless of which side they are on - including Bond himself - are dangerous and that Viv should avoid them. Viv reflects on this fact as she motors off at the end of the book, continuing her tour of America, but despite the officer's warning still devoted to the memory of the spy who had loved her.
sees Vivienne Michel as the best realised female characterisation undertaken by Fleming, partly because the book is written in story is told in the first person narrative. Academic Jeremy Black
notes that Michel is the closest Fleming gets to kitchen sink realism
in the Bond canon: she has been a victim of life in the past, but is wilful and tough too.
The other characters in the novel are given less attention and Vivienne's second lover, Kurt, is a caricature of a cruel German, who forces her to have an abortion before finishing their affair. According to Black, the two thugs, Sluggsy and Horror, are "comic-book villains with comic-book names". Their characters are not given the same status as other villains in Bond stories, but are second-rate professional killers and it makes them more believable in the story.
As with Casino Royale
, the question of morality between Bond and the villains is brought up, again by Bond, but also by the police officer involved. This runs counter to another theme in the novel, which had also appeared in a number of other Bond books, such as Goldfinger, which was the concept of Bond as Saint George
against the dragon. In this Black agrees, who sees The Spy Who Loved Me as being "an account of the vulnerable under challenge, of the manipulative nature of individuals and of the possibility of being trapped by evil".
in January and February 1961 and was the shortest manuscript Fleming had produced for a novel, being only 113 pages long. Fleming found the book the easiest for him to write and apologised to his editor at Jonathan Cape for the ease. The Spy Who Loved Me has been described by Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett
as Fleming's "most sleazy and violent story ever", which may have been indicative of his state of mind at the time.
Fleming borrowed from his surroundings, as he had done with all his writing up to that point, to include places he had seen, such as a motel in Adirondacks in upstate New York, which Bond would drive past on the way to Ivar Bryce's Black Hollow Farm, which became the Dreamy Pines motel. Similarly he took incidents from his own life and used them in the novel and Vivienne Michel's seduction in a box in a Windsor cinema mirrors Fleming's loss of virginity in the same establishment, the Royalty Kinema, Windsor. A colleague at The Sunday Times
, Robert Harling
, gave his name to a printer at a "steam-age jobbing printers in Pimlico", while one of the stories told by the publisher at the printers involves a bus conductor named "Frank Donaldson": the name of one of Fleming's wife's friends who was staying with the couple when Fleming was writing the novel was Jack Donaldson. One of Fleming's neighbours in Jamaica was Vivienne Stuart, whose first name Fleming purloined for the novel's heroine.
; it was 221 pages long and cost 15 shilling
s. Artist Richard Chopping
once again undertook the cover art, and raised his fee from the 200 guineas
he had charged for Thunderball, to 250 guineas. The artwork included a commando knife
which was borrowed from Fleming's editor, Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape. The Spy Who Loved Me was published in the US by Viking Books on 11 April 1962 with 211 pages and costing $3.95.
The reception to the novel was so bad that Fleming wrote to Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, to explain why he wrote the book: "I had become increasingly surprised to find my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, being read in schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond…So it crossed my mind to write a cautionary tale about Bond, to put the record straight in the minds particularly of younger readers. …the experiment has obviously gone very much awry".
Fleming subsequently requested that there should be no reprints or paperback version of the book and for the British market no paperback version appeared until after Fleming's death. Because of the heightened sexual writing in the novel, it was banned in a number of countries. In the US the story was also published in Stag
magazine, with the title changed to Motel Nymph.
, for example, wrote "Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear! And to think of the books Mr Fleming once wrote!" whilst The Glasgow Herald
thought Fleming finished: "His ability to invent a plot has deserted him almost entirely and he has had to substitute for a fast-moving story the sorry misadventures of an upper-class tramp, told in dreary detail" Writing in The Observer
, Maurice Richardson described the tale as "a new and regrettable if not altogether unreadable variation", going on to lament: "I hope this doesn't spell the total eclipse of Bond in a blaze of cornography". Richardson ended his piece by berating Fleming, asking: "why can't this cunning author write up a bit instead of down?" The critic for The Times
was not dismissive of Bond, who they describe as "less a person than a cult" who is "ruthlessly, fashionably efficient in both love and war". Rather the critic dismisses the experiment, writing that "the novel lacks Mr. Fleming's usual careful construction and must be written off as a disappointment." John Fletcher thought that it was "as if Mickey Spillane had tried to gatecrash his way into the Romantic Novelists' Association"
Philip Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement
considered the novel to be "a morbid version of that of Beauty and the Beast". The review noted that once Bond arrives on the scene to find Michel threatened by the two thugs, he "solves [the problem] in his usual way. A great quantity of ammunition is expended, the zip-fastener is kept busy and the customary sexual consummation is associated with the kill." Stead also considered that with the words of the police captain "Mr. Fleming seems to have summarized in this character's remarks some of the recent strictures on James Bond's activities." Vernon Scannell
, as critic for The Listener considered The Spy Who Loved Me to be "as silly as it is unpleasant". What aggrieved him most however was that "the worst thing about it is that it really is so unremittingly, so grindingly boring."
The critic for Time
lamented the fact that "unaccountably lacking in The Spy Who Loved Me are the High-Stake Gambling Scene, the Meal-Ordering Scene, the Torture Scene, the battleship-grey Bentley, and Blades Club." The critic also bemoaned the fact that "among the shocks and disappointments 1962 still has in store…is the discovery that the cruel, handsome, scarred face of James Bond does not turn up until more than halfway through Ian Fleming's latest book. Anthony Boucher
meanwhile wrote that the "author has reached an unprecedented low".
Fleming's original novel was adapted as a daily comic strip
which was published in the British Daily Express
newspaper and syndicated around the world. The adaptation ran from 18 December 1967 to 3 October 1968. The adaptation was written by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Yaroslav Horak
. It was the last Ian Fleming work to be adapted as a comic strip. The strip was reprinted by Titan Books
in The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 2, published in 2011.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
In 1977 the title was used for the tenth film
in the Eon Productions
series. It was the third to star Roger Moore
as British Secret Service agent, Commander James Bond. The only elements from the novel that are used in the film are the character of James Bond (along with his MI6 associates) and the title. Although Fleming had insisted that no film should contain anything of the plot of the novel, the steel-toothed character of Horror was included, although under the name Jaws.
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
's James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
series, first published by Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels as well as a clear departure from previous Bond novels in that the story is told in the first person by a young Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel
Vivienne Michel
Vivienne "Viv" Michel is the main fictional character in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel The Spy Who Loved Me. She has not appeared as a character in a James Bond film, as Danjaq, the copyright holder to the characters, elements, and other material related to James Bond on screen agreed never to use...
. Bond himself does not appear until two thirds of the way through the book. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving Michel credit as a co-author.
Due to the reactions by critics and fans, Fleming was not happy with the book and attempted to suppress elements of it where he could: he blocked a paperback edition in the UK and only gave permission for the title to be used when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman
Harry Saltzman
Harry Saltzman was a Canadian theatre and film producer best known for his mega-gamble which resulted in his co-producing the James Bond film series with Albert R...
and Albert R. Broccoli
Albert R. Broccoli
Albert Romolo Broccoli, CBE , nicknamed "Cubby", was an American film producer, who made more than 40 motion pictures throughout his career, most of them in the United Kingdom, and often filmed at Pinewood Studios. Co-founder of Danjaq, LLC and EON Productions, Broccoli is most notable as the...
, rather than any aspects of the plots. However, the character of Jaws is loosely based on one of the characters in the book and the paperback edition was published in the UK after his death.
A heavily adapted version of The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in the Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
newspaper in daily comic strip format in 1967-1968. In 1977 the title was used for the tenth film
The Spy Who Loved Me (film)
The Spy Who Loved Me is a spy film, the tenth film in the James Bond series, and the third to star Roger Moore as the fictional secret agent James Bond. It was directed by Lewis Gilbert and the screenplay was written by Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum...
in the Eon Productions
EON Productions
Eon Productions is a film production company known for producing the James Bond film series. The company is based in London's Piccadilly and also operates from Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom...
series. It was the third to star Roger Moore
Roger Moore
Sir Roger George Moore KBE , is an English actor, perhaps best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in seven films from 1973 to 1985. He also portrayed Simon Templar in the long-running British television series The Saint.-Early life:Moore was born in Stockwell, London...
as Bond and used no plot elements from the novel.
Plot summary
MeVivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
woman narrates her own story, detailing her past love affairs, the first being with Derek Mallaby, who took her virginity in a field after being thrown out of a cinema in Windsor
Windsor, Berkshire
Windsor is an affluent suburban town and unparished area in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire, England. It is widely known as the site of Windsor Castle, one of the official residences of the British Royal Family....
for indecent exposure. Their physical relationship ended that night and Viv was subsequently rejected when Mallaby sent her a letter from Oxford University
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
saying he was forcibly engaged to someone else by his parents. Viv's second love affair was with her German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
boss, Kurt Rainer, with whom she would eventually become pregnant. She informed Rainer and he paid for her to go to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
to have an abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
, telling her that their affair was over. After the procedure, Viv returned to her native Canada and started her journey through America, stopping to work at "The Dreamy Pines Motor Court" in the Adirondack Mountains
Adirondack Mountains
The Adirondack Mountains are a mountain range located in the northeastern part of New York, that runs through Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, Saint Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties....
for managers Jed and Mildred Phancey.
Them
At the end of the vacation season, the Phanceys entrust Viv to look after the motel for the night before the owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, can arrive to take inventory and close it up for the winter. Two mobsters, "Sluggsy" Morant and Sol "Horror" Horowitz, both of whom work for Sanguinetti, arrive and say they are there to look over the motel for insurance purposes. The two have been hired by Sanguinetti to burn down the motel so that Sanguinetti can make a profit on the insurance. The blame for the fire would fall on Viv, who was to perish in the fire. The mobsters, are cruel to Viv and, when she says she does not want to dance with them, they attack her, holding her down and starting to remove her top. They are about to continue the attack with rape when the door buzzer stops them.
Him
British secret service agent James Bond appears at the door asking for a room, having had a flat tyre while passing. Bond quickly realizes that Horror and Sluggsy are mobsters and that Viv is in danger. Pressuring the two men, he eventually gets the gangsters to agree to provide him a room. Bond tells Michel that he is in America in the wake of Operation Thunderball and was detailed to protect a Russian nuclear expert who defected to the West and who now lives in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, as part of his quest to ferret out SPECTRE
SPECTRE
SPECTRE is a fictional global terrorist organisation featured in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, the films based on those novels, and James Bond video games...
. That night Sluggsy and Horror set fire to the motel and attempt to kill Bond and Michel. A gun battle ensues and, in the process of escaping, Horror and Sluggsy's car crashes into a lake. Bond and Michel retire to bed, but Sluggsy is still alive and makes a further attempt to kill them when Bond shoots him.
Viv wakes to find Bond gone, leaving a note in which he promises to send her police assistance and which he concludes by telling her not to dwell too much on the ugly events through which she has just lived. As Viv finishes reading the note, a large police detachment arrives. After taking her statement, the officer in charge of the detail, reiterates Bond's advice, but also warns Viv that all men involved in violent crime and espionage, regardless of which side they are on - including Bond himself - are dangerous and that Viv should avoid them. Viv reflects on this fact as she motors off at the end of the book, continuing her tour of America, but despite the officer's warning still devoted to the memory of the spy who had loved her.
Characters and themes
Continuation Bond author Raymond BensonRaymond Benson
Raymond Benson is an American author best known for being the official author of the adult James Bond novels from 1997 to 2003. Benson was born in Midland, Texas and graduated from Permian High School in Odessa in 1973...
sees Vivienne Michel as the best realised female characterisation undertaken by Fleming, partly because the book is written in story is told in the first person narrative. Academic Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black (historian)
Jeremy Black MBE is a British historian and a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute...
notes that Michel is the closest Fleming gets to kitchen sink realism
Kitchen sink realism
Kitchen sink realism is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose 'heroes' usually could be described as angry young men...
in the Bond canon: she has been a victim of life in the past, but is wilful and tough too.
The other characters in the novel are given less attention and Vivienne's second lover, Kurt, is a caricature of a cruel German, who forces her to have an abortion before finishing their affair. According to Black, the two thugs, Sluggsy and Horror, are "comic-book villains with comic-book names". Their characters are not given the same status as other villains in Bond stories, but are second-rate professional killers and it makes them more believable in the story.
As with Casino Royale
Casino Royale (novel)
Casino Royale is Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel. It paved the way for a further eleven novels by Fleming himself, in addition to two short story collections, followed by many "continuation" Bond novels by other authors....
, the question of morality between Bond and the villains is brought up, again by Bond, but also by the police officer involved. This runs counter to another theme in the novel, which had also appeared in a number of other Bond books, such as Goldfinger, which was the concept of Bond as Saint George
Saint George
Saint George was, according to tradition, a Roman soldier from Syria Palaestina and a priest in the Guard of Diocletian, who is venerated as a Christian martyr. In hagiography Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Catholic , Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox...
against the dragon. In this Black agrees, who sees The Spy Who Loved Me as being "an account of the vulnerable under challenge, of the manipulative nature of individuals and of the possibility of being trapped by evil".
Background
The Spy Who Loved Me was written in Jamaica at Fleming's Goldeneye estateGoldeneye (estate)
Goldeneye was the name given by Ian Fleming to his estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica. He purchased the land next door to Golden Clouds estate and built his house on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a private beach. The original house was a modest structure consisting of three bedrooms and a swimming...
in January and February 1961 and was the shortest manuscript Fleming had produced for a novel, being only 113 pages long. Fleming found the book the easiest for him to write and apologised to his editor at Jonathan Cape for the ease. The Spy Who Loved Me has been described by Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett
Andrew Lycett
Andrew Lycett is an English biographer and journalist.He was educated at Charterhouse School and studied history at Christ Church, Oxford University. He then worked for a while for The Times as a correspondent in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia...
as Fleming's "most sleazy and violent story ever", which may have been indicative of his state of mind at the time.
Fleming borrowed from his surroundings, as he had done with all his writing up to that point, to include places he had seen, such as a motel in Adirondacks in upstate New York, which Bond would drive past on the way to Ivar Bryce's Black Hollow Farm, which became the Dreamy Pines motel. Similarly he took incidents from his own life and used them in the novel and Vivienne Michel's seduction in a box in a Windsor cinema mirrors Fleming's loss of virginity in the same establishment, the Royalty Kinema, Windsor. A colleague at The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
, Robert Harling
Robert Harling (typographer)
Robert Henry Harling was a British typographer, designer, journalist and novelist who lived to the age of 98.-Books and other work:* The Letterforms and Type Designs of Eric Gill...
, gave his name to a printer at a "steam-age jobbing printers in Pimlico", while one of the stories told by the publisher at the printers involves a bus conductor named "Frank Donaldson": the name of one of Fleming's wife's friends who was staying with the couple when Fleming was writing the novel was Jack Donaldson. One of Fleming's neighbours in Jamaica was Vivienne Stuart, whose first name Fleming purloined for the novel's heroine.
Release and reception
The Spy Who Loved Me was published on 16 April 1962 in the UK as a hardcover edition by publishers Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
; it was 221 pages long and cost 15 shilling
Shilling
The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
s. Artist Richard Chopping
Richard Chopping
Richard Wasey Chopping was a British illustrator and author best known for painting the dust jackets of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels starting with From Russia, with Love .-Early life:...
once again undertook the cover art, and raised his fee from the 200 guineas
Guinea (British coin)
The guinea is a coin that was minted in the Kingdom of England and later in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1663 and 1813...
he had charged for Thunderball, to 250 guineas. The artwork included a commando knife
Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife
The Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife is a double-edged fighting knife resembling a dagger or poignard with a foil grip developed by William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes in Shanghai based on concepts which the two men initiated before World War II while serving on the Shanghai Municipal...
which was borrowed from Fleming's editor, Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape. The Spy Who Loved Me was published in the US by Viking Books on 11 April 1962 with 211 pages and costing $3.95.
The reception to the novel was so bad that Fleming wrote to Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, to explain why he wrote the book: "I had become increasingly surprised to find my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, being read in schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond…So it crossed my mind to write a cautionary tale about Bond, to put the record straight in the minds particularly of younger readers. …the experiment has obviously gone very much awry".
Fleming subsequently requested that there should be no reprints or paperback version of the book and for the British market no paperback version appeared until after Fleming's death. Because of the heightened sexual writing in the novel, it was banned in a number of countries. In the US the story was also published in Stag
Stag (magazine)
Stag was the name of various American men's magazines published from the 1930s through at least the 1990s.-Publication history:The first, published by Leeds Publishing Corp., beginning with vol...
magazine, with the title changed to Motel Nymph.
Reviews
Broadly the critics did not welcome Fleming's experiment with the Bond formula and academic Christoph Linder pointed out that The Spy Who Loved Me received the worst reception of all the Bond books. The Daily TelegraphThe Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
, for example, wrote "Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear! And to think of the books Mr Fleming once wrote!" whilst The Glasgow Herald
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
thought Fleming finished: "His ability to invent a plot has deserted him almost entirely and he has had to substitute for a fast-moving story the sorry misadventures of an upper-class tramp, told in dreary detail" Writing in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, Maurice Richardson described the tale as "a new and regrettable if not altogether unreadable variation", going on to lament: "I hope this doesn't spell the total eclipse of Bond in a blaze of cornography". Richardson ended his piece by berating Fleming, asking: "why can't this cunning author write up a bit instead of down?" The critic for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
was not dismissive of Bond, who they describe as "less a person than a cult" who is "ruthlessly, fashionably efficient in both love and war". Rather the critic dismisses the experiment, writing that "the novel lacks Mr. Fleming's usual careful construction and must be written off as a disappointment." John Fletcher thought that it was "as if Mickey Spillane had tried to gatecrash his way into the Romantic Novelists' Association"
Philip Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
considered the novel to be "a morbid version of that of Beauty and the Beast". The review noted that once Bond arrives on the scene to find Michel threatened by the two thugs, he "solves [the problem] in his usual way. A great quantity of ammunition is expended, the zip-fastener is kept busy and the customary sexual consummation is associated with the kill." Stead also considered that with the words of the police captain "Mr. Fleming seems to have summarized in this character's remarks some of the recent strictures on James Bond's activities." Vernon Scannell
Vernon Scannell
Vernon Scannell was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.-Personal life:Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire...
, as critic for The Listener considered The Spy Who Loved Me to be "as silly as it is unpleasant". What aggrieved him most however was that "the worst thing about it is that it really is so unremittingly, so grindingly boring."
The critic for Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
lamented the fact that "unaccountably lacking in The Spy Who Loved Me are the High-Stake Gambling Scene, the Meal-Ordering Scene, the Torture Scene, the battleship-grey Bentley, and Blades Club." The critic also bemoaned the fact that "among the shocks and disappointments 1962 still has in store…is the discovery that the cruel, handsome, scarred face of James Bond does not turn up until more than halfway through Ian Fleming's latest book. Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher was an American science fiction editor and author of mystery novels and short stories. He was particularly influential as an editor. Between 1942 and 1947 he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle...
meanwhile wrote that the "author has reached an unprecedented low".
Adaptations
Comic Strip (1967-1968)Fleming's original novel was adapted as a daily comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
which was published in the British Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
newspaper and syndicated around the world. The adaptation ran from 18 December 1967 to 3 October 1968. The adaptation was written by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Yaroslav Horak
Yaroslav Horak
Yaroslav Horak is a Russian born, Australian based illustrator and comics artist, best known for his work on the newspaper comic strip, James Bond.-Biography:...
. It was the last Ian Fleming work to be adapted as a comic strip. The strip was reprinted by Titan Books
Titan Books
Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981. It is based at offices in London, England's Bankside area. The Books Division has two main areas of publishing: film & TV tie-ins/cinema reference books; and graphic novels and comics reference/art titles. The...
in The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 2, published in 2011.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
In 1977 the title was used for the tenth film
The Spy Who Loved Me (film)
The Spy Who Loved Me is a spy film, the tenth film in the James Bond series, and the third to star Roger Moore as the fictional secret agent James Bond. It was directed by Lewis Gilbert and the screenplay was written by Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum...
in the Eon Productions
EON Productions
Eon Productions is a film production company known for producing the James Bond film series. The company is based in London's Piccadilly and also operates from Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom...
series. It was the third to star Roger Moore
Roger Moore
Sir Roger George Moore KBE , is an English actor, perhaps best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in seven films from 1973 to 1985. He also portrayed Simon Templar in the long-running British television series The Saint.-Early life:Moore was born in Stockwell, London...
as British Secret Service agent, Commander James Bond. The only elements from the novel that are used in the film are the character of James Bond (along with his MI6 associates) and the title. Although Fleming had insisted that no film should contain anything of the plot of the novel, the steel-toothed character of Horror was included, although under the name Jaws.
External links
- Ian Fleming Bibliography of James Bond 1st Editions
See also
- James Bond novels
- Differences between James Bond novels and filmsDifferences between James Bond novels and filmsThe James Bond novels, written by English author, journalist and World War II intelligence officer Ian Fleming, and the later James Bond films, often differ in tone and detail, a trend which increased with each new movie production. The James Bond novels, written mainly in the 1950s and early...