Review of Ian Fleming's Bond Short Stories

Good evening Mr Bond fans and welcome once again. So here we are, a year after starting my video review series of the Ian Fleming James Bond books, we are at the end. And if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm surprised it only took me a year to get through all of these books. I never really considered myself much of a reader beforehand, but these books have really changed that in me actually. Anyway, the final Fleming book is a collection of short stories. These were written and published at various times between 1962 and 1965. The Man with the Golden Gun was the last Bond story written by Fleming in the series chronology, so that is the final Fleming-Bond adventure, and the stories in this collection are set between some of the previous novels, all before the event of Bond getting married, and so they should be judged as taking place at a lighter time in Bond's life. I made the deliberate decision not to-not to read these stories in their technical, like, Bond timeline order, I just went by the publication dates of the books for just simplicity. Anyway, in this collection we have four short stories to get through. I'm gonna go threw them in the order that I experienced them in in my particular collection that I was reading. So let's begin with Octopussy. So I had some real flashbacks to two previous Bond short stories when I was reading this one. Quantum of Solace and the Hildebrandt. rarity. It's basically about Bond traveling to Jamaica to arrest a major Dexter Smythe who has been dealing in Nazi gold and murdered a man as part of his dastardly dealings. Bond is hardly in this story. He is basically just there at the beginning to find Smythe who is living a somewhat nothing life in Jamaica. He's in ill health, he has very few friends, and the highlight of his life is feeding this wild octopus that he has named Octopussy. The bulk of the story is Smythe telling Bond the tale of how he got involved in the illegal activities he did and more specifically the murder of a man named Oberhauser who was a mountain guide aiding Smythe on his mission to find the lost Nazi gold. Bond is on the case because he recognised that the dead Oberhaus as a figure from his past who taught him how to ski, and after hearing Smythe's quite pathetic story and how sad his life is, you know, his wife committed suicide, he's doing some bad deals, he's drinking himself into oblivion, Bonn's mission is to bring Smythe back to England, but instead he leaves him alone and gives him some time and says, you know what, I'll come back to collect you later, which is essentially leaving Smythe to do the honourable thing and kill himself. I really like that part of the story specifically because we have Smythe kind of, you know, ruminating on the idea of why Bond would allow him this honor and he's just kind of like, huh, maybe he really has taken pity on me and, you know, my story resonated in some way, but then he's also like, oh, maybe it just means that he'll have to do less paperwork if I kill myself. It's basically like saving a lot of hassle. Anyway, Smythe is left alone and as he's sort of like weighing up his options, He is stung by a scorpion fish, which is incredibly painful, and his whole body is suffering from the early effects of this poison, and he knows it's only going to get worse, and he's having a heart attack, and in his dying moments, he thinks, Ah, Octopussy. I'll go and feed Octopussy one last time. So he kind of, like, staggers into the water, and he finds the frigging octopus, and then the octopus starts to, like, pull him under the water and starts eating him, and then the report comes through to Bond as, you know, the death was, you know, accidental drowning. and Bond is classifying his death in, you know, an official capacity, and he reads it and he's like, yeah, we'll save the guy some face. I mean, he was a war hero after all, so, you know, he died in this gory and darkly hilarious way. People don't really need to know that. Accidental drowning approved. I mentioned Hildebrand and Quantum up front because, to me, Octopussy shares a lot of the same, like, darkly comedic themes of Hildebrand and, of course, the central character. falls foul to an aquatic-based creature. For Quantum, both stories are Bond being told a story by another character, and where Octopussy improves on this is that Bond actually has some personal involvement in the story that's being told to him, as well as just the story that's being told is a hell of a lot more interesting with, you know, high stakes and lots of intrigue. It's really hard to ignore that Fleming, an old man in ill health living in Jamaica, is writing a story about an old man in ill health living in in Jamaica and indeed there's a lot of bitterness and sadness to Smythe and it's impossible that Fleming wasn't aware of this. It's like he took all of his self-perceived negative traits and the Smythe character was born from those. Of course we never see this particular story Translated to screen, but it does crop up in dialogue in the film Octopussy, where Octopussy talks about her father and how Bond allowed him an honorable death. What they skip is the whole bit where Bond actually corrects Octopussy and says, Well, actually, he did die in an incredibly gory and darkly comedic way by being suffocated and then eaten by the very thing that he loved the most. Hey, he named you after that thing, didn't he? And obviously the whole Oberhauser thing comes back in Spectre, where Oberhauser is a man who adopts Bond, much to the chagrin of his biological son, Franz slash Blofeld, and the less said about that adaptation, the better. Much like the Hildebrand rarity, this is one of my very favourite Bond shorts. stories. It's a really compelling tale. Bond isn't featured all that much but he has an important role and affects the trajectory of the story and it just has a couple of really nice cool macabre twists that I just love. Up next we have The Property of a Lady, another story from which Octopussy the film drew some inspiration, specifically the auction scene which is lifted from here and the involvement of a Fabergé egg as a plot device. No circuses or nuclear weapons to be found here though. Things are much more... Basically, there's a Soviet double agent in London who has a Faberge egg and she's selling it at Sotheby's and Bond suspects that it is actually a plan to pay the agent for her services and another KGB agent will be at the auction in order to underbid for the egg to push up the price to a point where the double agent will be paid off by whatever is paid for the egg. We get a little bit of history about the eggs and everything and then Bond attends the auction and spots the KGB agent and then goes off to call for him to be deported. It's a very short, very basic story and the auctioning bit in Sotheby's is good but to be honest I was expecting more. The version that we get in the film is about as good as a Bond auctioning scene will ever- bee, I suppose, and I just could have done with a bit more something in this story. But then the story itself was essentially a promotional piece that Fleming was commissioned to do for Sotheby's. It was first published in their magazine and only later was it included in the collection here with Octopussy and the Living Daylights, and apparently Fleming wasn't that pleased with the story, so what are you gonna do? I'm glad that we have it here, but I would be very surprised if this was anyone's favourite bo- Bond story. Just as a bit of a sidebar, I do really love this title, Property of a Lady, and I think it's a shame that we have never had a movie with that title, and I don't think we ever will. I think it is just a little bit too flowery and evokes perhaps, you know, soppy romantic dramas, or at least that's what, you know, comes to my mind. I just, just this title, I can't imagine it on a film poster without, like, you know, circa 1990, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere looking into each other's eyes and grinning. Anyway, things improve next with The Living Daylights, a really great cracking Bond story that was basically adapted into the first chunk of the movie after the opening titles, The Living Daylights. Bond is put on sniper duty and is given the mission to help a British agent escape from East Berlin by taking out a specific KGB sniper assassin who they know is out to kill this agent who's trying to come across and Bond has a companion along with him for the mission and the pair stake out for a few days and have some nice bickering and stuff, it's odd couple, kind of, you know. The other guy is a Captain Spender, and he's a very by-the-book kind of guy, which obviously doesn't gel very well with Bond. What does gel well with Bond, though, is that every day they stake out, he sees an orchestra passing by, and he really falls for this cellist, who's a part of this orchestra, you know, passing by. And so if you've seen the film, you know what the twist is. As the agent starts to cross, Bond realizes that the enemy is going to be there, and he's sniper is in fact that cellist and instead of killing her, as per his instructions, he just shoots the rifle out of her hand. I mean, I say JUST shoots the rifle out of her hand, I mean she's still gonna have a broken arm and get into a lot of trouble with her superiors, as Bond, you know, ruminates on, and it's not as if he just gave her an easy ride or anything, but Spender certainly thinks so, but Bond just doesn't really care, he's above having the kind of discussion that Spender wants to have really, and- he feels that what he did was the right thing and he feels vindicated in that. Some of the best bits of this particular story are the bits where Bond is just kind of, you know, ruminating on the business of killing and how he doesn't like it but it's his business and he's at peace with that but his weak spot is always going to be pretty women. He's really quite bitter at the end of the story though, he's like, I don't even care if I get fired over this, uh, an aspect that carries over to the film version very well I think. and it was really hard to not imagine Dalton when reading the ...these passages. I mean, I think that Dalton translates what is on the page to screen really well. The Living Daylights is a really nice, tight little Bond piece. It's not one of my favorite short stories, but I'd say it's still essential re- when it comes to understanding Bond short stories. And so we come to the final story in this collection, 007 in New York, which is a very apt title, as 007 is indeed in New York in this story, and expresses many an opinion about about New York. And his mission though is to, he's there to warn a female MI6 worker that her boyfriend is an undercover KGB agent and he's there to warn her before the American authorities find out as they will have a much harsher way of dealing with her if they get to her before he does. Now that is an interesting setup but nothing is really done with it because the bulk of the story is just Bond talking about New York City and eggs and shopping and the whole story is very much just rambling. I mean, much like Quantum of Solace, I don't think this really has any business being a Bond story at all, and I don't think anyone is gonna stand up and account for this one as being amongst their favourite pieces of Bond writing. The mission itself accounts for a really tiny part of the story, and it ends very strangely with things sort of rumbled by the fact that the proposed rendezvous point that Bond was supposed to meet this female MI6 worker at doesn't actually exist, so Bond just... kind of fumbles around and doesn't really accomplish anything. The most interesting part of the story, and I mean this isn't even really a part of the story, but part of the piece, we get a recipe for scrambled eggs. And it's a good looking recipe and I will have to go into it in detail in another video sometime. And interestingly one of the characters in the story is named Solange, which is of course the name of a character from Casino Royale, and I guess you could say that the film was paying homage to this story. I mean it's a tenuous link and it doesn't really- really mean anything. It's a shame to be ending this Fleming review series on a bit of a downer, but I mean, hey, you know what? In this collection, two really good stories, two not so good stories. I'm happy enough. As a collection of stories published after the author's death, it's kind of difficult to judge the intent. Like, was anyone who wasn't, you know, subscribed to Sotheby's magazine? even supposed to get anything out of Property of a Lady, but I mean regardless of quality and intent, I'm grateful that we have these stories and they're readily available to all. The ones that make up the title of the book itself are by far the best. I mean if you have have limited capacity for reading, I'd stay focused on those and maybe skip the other two. I don't think you'd be missing out on much. So that's it! Not quite the bang of an ending I was hoping for, but with this we've covered every single James Bond, Ian Fleming story on this channel, and it's been quite a ride and I've been surprised at how varying and drastic the quality has been between certain instalments so I'm very excited to move on to a ranking video. next where I'll be going through all the Ian Fleming books from my personal ranking from worst to best and do join me then and in the meantime please do as always start a conversation in the comments below, it's really interesting to hear what you guys think about all of these Bond books and please do head over to my Facebook and Twitter pages if you haven't already, there's also my Patreon page if you want to head over there and find out more about it if you want to support this channel and until next time Bond fans so- So long for now.

These were written and published at various times between 1962 and 1965. The Man with the Golden Gun was the last Bond story written by Fleming in the series chronology, so that is the final Fleming-Bond adventure, and the stories in this collection are set between some of the previous novels, all before the event of Bond getting married, and so they should be judged as taking place at a lighter time in Bond's life. I made the deliberate decision not to-not to read these stories in their technical, like, Bond timeline order, I just went by the publication dates of the books for just simplicity. Anyway, in this collection we have four short stories to get through.

I'm gonna go threw them in the order that I experienced them in in my particular collection that I was reading. So let's begin with Octopussy. So I had some real flashbacks to two previous Bond short stories when I was reading this one. Quantum of Solace and the Hildebrandt.

rarity. It's basically about Bond traveling to Jamaica to arrest a major Dexter Smythe who has been dealing in Nazi gold and murdered a man as part of his dastardly dealings. Bond is hardly in this story. He is basically just there at the beginning to find Smythe who is living a somewhat nothing life in Jamaica.

He's in ill health, he has very few friends, and the highlight of his life is feeding this wild octopus that he has named Octopussy. The bulk of the story is Smythe telling Bond the tale of how he got involved in the illegal activities he did and more specifically the murder of a man named Oberhauser who was a mountain guide aiding Smythe on his mission to find the lost Nazi gold. Bond is on the case because he recognised that the dead Oberhaus as a figure from his past who taught him how to ski, and after hearing Smythe's quite pathetic story and how sad his life is, you know, his wife committed suicide, he's doing some bad deals, he's drinking himself into oblivion, Bonn's mission is to bring Smythe back to England, but instead he leaves him alone and gives him some time and says, you know what, I'll come back to collect you later, which is essentially leaving Smythe to do the honourable thing and kill himself.

I really like that part of the story specifically because we have Smythe kind of, you know, ruminating on the idea of why Bond would allow him this honor and he's just kind of like, huh, maybe he really has taken pity on me and, you know, my story resonated in some way, but then he's also like, oh, maybe it just means that he'll have to do less paperwork if I kill myself. It's basically like saving a lot of hassle. Anyway, Smythe is left alone and as he's sort of like weighing up his options, He is stung by a scorpion fish, which is incredibly painful, and his whole body is suffering from the early effects of this poison, and he knows it's only going to get worse, and he's having a heart attack, and in his dying moments, he thinks, Ah, Octopussy.

I'll go and feed Octopussy one last time. So he kind of, like, staggers into the water, and he finds the frigging octopus, and then the octopus starts to, like, pull him under the water and starts eating him, and then the report comes through to Bond as, you know, the death was, you know, accidental drowning. and Bond is classifying his death in, you know, an official capacity, and he reads it and he's like, yeah, we'll save the guy some face.

I mean, he was a war hero after all, so, you know, he died in this gory and darkly hilarious way. People don't really need to know that. Accidental drowning approved. I mentioned Hildebrand and Quantum up front because, to me, Octopussy shares a lot of the same, like, darkly comedic themes of Hildebrand and, of course, the central character. falls foul to an aquatic-based creature.

For Quantum, both stories are Bond being told a story by another character, and where Octopussy improves on this is that Bond actually has some personal involvement in the story that's being told to him, as well as just the story that's being told is a hell of a lot more interesting with, you know, high stakes and lots of intrigue. It's really hard to ignore that Fleming, an old man in ill health living in Jamaica, is writing a story about an old man in ill health living in in Jamaica and indeed there's a lot of bitterness and sadness to Smythe and it's impossible that Fleming wasn't aware of this. It's like he took all of his self-perceived negative traits and the Smythe character was born from those. Of course we never see this particular story Translated to screen, but it does crop up in dialogue in the film Octopussy, where Octopussy talks about her father and how Bond allowed him an honorable death. What they skip is the whole bit where Bond actually corrects Octopussy and says, Well, actually, he did die in an incredibly gory and darkly comedic way by being suffocated and then eaten by the very thing that he loved the most.

Hey, he named you after that thing, didn't he? And obviously the whole Oberhauser thing comes back in Spectre, where Oberhauser is a man who adopts Bond, much to the chagrin of his biological son, Franz slash Blofeld, and the less said about that adaptation, the better. Much like the Hildebrand rarity, this is one of my very favourite Bond shorts. stories.

It's a really compelling tale. Bond isn't featured all that much but he has an important role and affects the trajectory of the story and it just has a couple of really nice cool macabre twists that I just love. Up next we have The Property of a Lady, another story from which Octopussy the film drew some inspiration, specifically the auction scene which is lifted from here and the involvement of a Fabergé egg as a plot device. No circuses or nuclear weapons to be found here though. Things are much more...

Basically, there's a Soviet double agent in London who has a Faberge egg and she's selling it at Sotheby's and Bond suspects that it is actually a plan to pay the agent for her services and another KGB agent will be at the auction in order to underbid for the egg to push up the price to a point where the double agent will be paid off by whatever is paid for the egg. We get a little bit of history about the eggs and everything and then Bond attends the auction and spots the KGB agent and then goes off to call for him to be deported. It's a very short, very basic story and the auctioning bit in Sotheby's is good but to be honest I was expecting more.

The version that we get in the film is about as good as a Bond auctioning scene will ever- bee, I suppose, and I just could have done with a bit more something in this story. But then the story itself was essentially a promotional piece that Fleming was commissioned to do for Sotheby's. It was first published in their magazine and only later was it included in the collection here with Octopussy and the Living Daylights, and apparently Fleming wasn't that pleased with the story, so what are you gonna do?

I'm glad that we have it here, but I would be very surprised if this was anyone's favourite bo- Bond story. Just as a bit of a sidebar, I do really love this title, Property of a Lady, and I think it's a shame that we have never had a movie with that title, and I don't think we ever will. I think it is just a little bit too flowery and evokes perhaps, you know, soppy romantic dramas, or at least that's what, you know, comes to my mind.

I just, just this title, I can't imagine it on a film poster without, like, you know, circa 1990, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere looking into each other's eyes and grinning. Anyway, things improve next with The Living Daylights, a really great cracking Bond story that was basically adapted into the first chunk of the movie after the opening titles, The Living Daylights. Bond is put on sniper duty and is given the mission to help a British agent escape from East Berlin by taking out a specific KGB sniper assassin who they know is out to kill this agent who's trying to come across and Bond has a companion along with him for the mission and the pair stake out for a few days and have some nice bickering and stuff, it's odd couple, kind of, you know. The other guy is a Captain Spender, and he's a very by-the-book kind of guy, which obviously doesn't gel very well with Bond. What does gel well with Bond, though, is that every day they stake out, he sees an orchestra passing by, and he really falls for this cellist, who's a part of this orchestra, you know, passing by.

And so if you've seen the film, you know what the twist is. As the agent starts to cross, Bond realizes that the enemy is going to be there, and he's sniper is in fact that cellist and instead of killing her, as per his instructions, he just shoots the rifle out of her hand. I mean, I say JUST shoots the rifle out of her hand, I mean she's still gonna have a broken arm and get into a lot of trouble with her superiors, as Bond, you know, ruminates on, and it's not as if he just gave her an easy ride or anything, but Spender certainly thinks so, but Bond just doesn't really care, he's above having the kind of discussion that Spender wants to have really, and- he feels that what he did was the right thing and he feels vindicated in that. Some of the best bits of this particular story are the bits where Bond is just kind of, you know, ruminating on the business of killing and how he doesn't like it but it's his business and he's at peace with that but his weak spot is always going to be pretty women.

He's really quite bitter at the end of the story though, he's like, I don't even care if I get fired over this, uh, an aspect that carries over to the film version very well I think. and it was really hard to not imagine Dalton when reading the ...these passages. I mean, I think that Dalton translates what is on the page to screen really well.

The Living Daylights is a really nice, tight little Bond piece. It's not one of my favorite short stories, but I'd say it's still essential re- when it comes to understanding Bond short stories. And so we come to the final story in this collection, 007 in New York, which is a very apt title, as 007 is indeed in New York in this story, and expresses many an opinion about about New York.

And his mission though is to, he's there to warn a female MI6 worker that her boyfriend is an undercover KGB agent and he's there to warn her before the American authorities find out as they will have a much harsher way of dealing with her if they get to her before he does. Now that is an interesting setup but nothing is really done with it because the bulk of the story is just Bond talking about New York City and eggs and shopping and the whole story is very much just rambling. I mean, much like Quantum of Solace, I don't think this really has any business being a Bond story at all, and I don't think anyone is gonna stand up and account for this one as being amongst their favourite pieces of Bond writing. The mission itself accounts for a really tiny part of the story, and it ends very strangely with things sort of rumbled by the fact that the proposed rendezvous point that Bond was supposed to meet this female MI6 worker at doesn't actually exist, so Bond just...

kind of fumbles around and doesn't really accomplish anything. The most interesting part of the story, and I mean this isn't even really a part of the story, but part of the piece, we get a recipe for scrambled eggs. And it's a good looking recipe and I will have to go into it in detail in another video sometime. And interestingly one of the characters in the story is named Solange, which is of course the name of a character from Casino Royale, and I guess you could say that the film was paying homage to this story.

I mean it's a tenuous link and it doesn't really- really mean anything. It's a shame to be ending this Fleming review series on a bit of a downer, but I mean, hey, you know what? In this collection, two really good stories, two not so good stories. I'm happy enough.

As a collection of stories published after the author's death, it's kind of difficult to judge the intent. Like, was anyone who wasn't, you know, subscribed to Sotheby's magazine? even supposed to get anything out of Property of a Lady, but I mean regardless of quality and intent, I'm grateful that we have these stories and they're readily available to all.

The ones that make up the title of the book itself are by far the best. I mean if you have have limited capacity for reading, I'd stay focused on those and maybe skip the other two. I don't think you'd be missing out on much. So that's it! Not quite the bang of an ending I was hoping for, but with this we've covered every single James Bond, Ian Fleming story on this channel, and it's been quite a ride and I've been surprised at how varying and drastic the quality has been between certain instalments so I'm very excited to move on to a ranking video.

next where I'll be going through all the Ian Fleming books from my personal ranking from worst to best and do join me then and in the meantime please do as always start a conversation in the comments below, it's really interesting to hear what you guys think about all of these Bond books and please do head over to my Facebook and Twitter pages if you haven't already, there's also my Patreon page if you want to head over there and find out more about it if you want to support this channel and until next time Bond fans so- So long for now.

Transcript for:Review of Ian Fleming's Bond Short Stories

Transcript for:
Review of Ian Fleming's Bond Short Stories