'My Name's Bond ...' - an anthology from the fiction of Ian Fleming

by Ian Fleming

s/t: An Anthology from the Fiction of Ian Fleming
This book celebrates the greatest of all postwar British fictional icons. For too long the Bond films have overshadowed their literary source - the bizarre, baroque world of Ian Fleming.
Full rein is given in this anthology to Fleming's wonderful creations - the deranged villains, their horrifying associates and their surreal lairs; from Dr. No's guano island to Blofeld's Garden of Death. Full attention to is paid to the girls, cars, food, drink and cigarettes consumed by the books' brutal, resourceful hero.
From the first Bond novel, "Casino Royale" to the last to be fully finished, "You Only Live Twice", there is an extraordinary zest and ingenuity to Fleming's imagination and "My Name's Bond..." allows readers to see perhaps as never before the author's remarkable abilities. He was, above all, a creator of great set pieces and it is these that are surely at the root of the films' great and lasting success.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units: 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. He drew from his wartime service and his career as a journalist for much of the background, detail, and depth of his James Bond novels.
Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, at age 44. It was a success, and three print runs were commissioned to meet the demand. Eleven Bond novels and two collections of short stories followed between 1953 and 1966. The novels centre around James Bond, an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. Bond is also known by his code number, 007, and was a commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. The Bond stories rank among the best-selling series of fictional books of all time, having sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and two works of non-fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked Fleming 14th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Fleming was married to Ann Fleming. She had divorced her husband, the 2nd Viscount Rothermere, because of her affair with the author. Fleming and Ann had a son, Caspar. Fleming was a heavy smoker and drinker for most of his life and succumbed to heart disease in 1964 at the age of 56. Two of his James Bond books were published posthumously; other writers have since produced Bond novels. Fleming's creation has appeared in film twenty-seven times, portrayed by six actors in the official film series.

Reviews

[Christoph John · Rating 1 out of 5]

A celebration of Ian Fleming’s descriptive prowess as a novelist, My Name is Bond, James Bond doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Fleming or about Bond.

It’s an interesting compilation of scenes taken from across the spectrum of the novels and not always from the places we would expect them to come from. In his preface, Simon Winder painfully points out that he doesn’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment by revealing details of a novel’s narrative, in particular their conclusions. This rather reduces the material available to him, but he does a fair job of assessing and categorising Fleming’s work.

He’s split it into sixteen sections with heading such as The Man, Foreign Travel, Sex or Eating. It was strange to read these passages out of context. Some of them didn’t sit well at all. Many of the quotes from The Spy Who Loved Me are horrible in their misunderstanding [or perhaps a misrepresentation?] of women’s emotions. The stuffiness of the atmosphere and pretentions of Blades in Moonraker comes across as terribly dated and pompous. Other extracts amused me with the author’s almost childlike prose. Several excerpts from Goldfinger do not come across well at all.

I was more surprised by the sections Winder left out. He reproduces in full three long scenes: the centipede menacing Bond from Dr No, Bond in the Garden of Death from You Only Live Twice, Tatiana meeting Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love) and Bond meeting Oddjob from Goldfinger. While each of these scenes have merit, I can’t fathom why we don’t have: Bond’s midnight scuba swim to the Disco Volante from Thunderball, the opening scene and sentence of Casino Royale, the death of the Mexican from Goldfinger, Bond’s seduction of Tatiana (From Russia With Love), or the final paragraphs from You Only Live Twice. These surely reveal Fleming’s abilities as a descriptive and intuitive writer far more than the extended passages chosen – or even the shorter ones which abound the full 140+ pages.

Simply letting the extracts sit without explanation or analysis feels like a missed opportunity. Winder should have studied Fleming’s craft and examined why some scenes, characters and situations work so well and others do not. Now that would be a book worth reading. This celebration is rather aimless.

[Eyehavenofilter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to re-read this to review it properly... What with the James Bond craze at it's peak AGAIN.
This was the thought that fertilized the embryo, that gave birth, to the toddler, that became the child, then preteen, to testosterone filled teen, to non boarding school graduate, to minor military career of James Bond. snatched up by the " Her Majesty's Secret Service " in a moment of male weakness, he was ripe for the picking never really fitting in...somehow... As he never had fit in before... And they fit him in, like hand in glove to a double "ought" life of girls, guns, and garrotes.
This is Flemings love letter to Bond, how he created him and coddled him, rocked him when he was colicky, fed him when he was hungry, clothed him, educated him, and taught him to kill, ever so efficiently, then... shaped him out of the clay of paper and ink, into the " Bond...James Bond. " we have all come to know.
No one really loved James Bond as much as Fleming did, although most women wanted to have a " go" at him,
( especially what with Daniel Craig portraying Bond...OMG)
But, no one knew him as well as his creator.
It must have been great fun being God to James Bond!

[Book Him Danno · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry wrong book.

[Steve Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains all of the choicest lines from Fleming’s Bond novels but makes a poor substitute for actually reading the novels.