O, My Offence It Is...
I haven’t seen a ranking of James Bond novels lately, but you can easily find everything else Bond-related being ranked on a website or YouTube channel because of a convergence of anniversaries.
Last year was the 60th anniversary of the British premiere of Dr. No, the first film in the Bond series. This year is the 70th anniversary of the publication of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, but also marks 60 years since the American premiere of Dr. No. A Facebook post just reminded me that 40 summers ago we witnessed the one-two punch of Octopussy and Never Say Never Again.
Several content creators have seized this divisible-by-ten opportunity to take the measure of all 25 Bond films, sometimes even bumping the count up to 27 by including those so-called “unofficial” titles. In this case I believe the term in quotes simply refers to films whose theatrical release enriched no one named Broccoli. I would be more willing to sit through even Charles K. Feldman’s vaudevillian 007 pastiche than any of half a dozen titles I could name which bear the Eon imprint.
The idea of ranking the Bond films seems to presuppose the idea that they were all undertaken with a unified aim, that there is some golden standard which all of them aspired to reach, with some coming closer to the mark than others. The Bond thrillers written by Fleming, at least, are often wildly different from one another.
From Russia With Love is a twisted fairy tale. Goldfinger veers close to madcap comedy. Thunderball dips a toe into the waters of Greek tragedy. The Spy Who Loved Me is a modern Gothic novel. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service follows the blueprint for Arthurian Romance. You Only Live Twice eases into Greek Myth by way of Middle-English poetry.
Even James Bond himself varies from book to book. He tends to maintain the same likes and dislikes throughout the series, but his role in the story is subject to change. We usually see the plot unfold from his point of view, but not always. He even turns up surprisingly late in a couple of books. He sometimes wades in over his head, makes blunders, gets frightened, needs rescuing. On rare occasions he’s a complete swine, makes unforgivable choices, puts allies in peril, and winds up paying a terrible price for his conduct.
Of course, Fleming sometimes paid a price for venturing outside the boundaries of his readers’ expectations. At least one critic took the author to task because he hadn’t managed to work any high-stakes gambling into The Spy Who Loved Me. Trying something different was permissible, it just mustn’t be too different.
Fans of franchises have something in common with children who want a story read to them before bedtime. They know when someone’s trying to slip in new material, and they don’t like it. Connoisseurs of Bond films may permit a tad more leeway, but hard boundaries still remain. Bond must at some point slip into a tux, Vodka martinis must be invoked, and we had better by God peer down a gun barrel somewhere towards the start of the proceedings - especially if it’s an anniversary year.
On a personal level, 2023 marks the 60th year since I read my first Bond novel, Goldfinger, a book plucked from the Kansas Traveling Library by my Aunt Irene and handed to me, perhaps without realizing what it was. A few months later I was served a second course of Fleming, the recently-published On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and discovered to my delight that the author had adapted the plot of a TV Western for the coda of his latest thriller, thus planting the seed for this website. Six years and a college course in Medieval Literature later, I would amend my thinking on OHMSS to include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the main source material, but with definite notes of a 1960 episode of The Tall Man, especially towards the end.
Happy anniversary to us all! I may celebrate by comparing things, but I promise not to rank.