Features

Writing a Bond novel must be pretty tough. After all, many have tried to take on the heavy yoke of expectation that surrounds anything even loosely associated with Britain’s cold war master spy, James Bond, 007. In 2012, Sam Mendes’ latest cinematic effort, Skyfall seemed to suggest that Daniel Craig et al were just getting […]

Today sees the release of the new James Bond novel – Solo – by William Boyd. It is a special year for Bond books, as 2013 is the 60th Anniversary of the original publication of Casino Royale in 1953. I got the chance to go along to The Dorchester for the launch yesterday to hear […]

A number of years ago I bought a copy of Gary Giblin’s “James Bond’s London” on Amazon. The book takes a pretty exhaustive look at the London locations from the books and films up until The World Is Not Enough, as well as locations related to Ian Fleming; in fact it was from Giblin that I […]

Depending on your point of view the Kindle is either a miracle device, or the work of the Devil. While some people like their device – or love the ability to read Amazon’s Kindle ebooks on an iPad or other device – many see the move towards putting books into an electronic format as destroying […]

On Monday it was announced that the next James Bond novel, written by William Boyd, was to be called Solo. Boyd explained the title: saying “events conspire to make Bond go off on a self-appointed mission of his own, unannounced and without any authorization” and “as soon as I wrote down Solo on a sheet […]

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, on April 13th 1953. Ian Fleming had written the book in 1952 while spending the winter at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, and just 4,728 copies were printed. The initial printing quickly sold out and today copies complete with original […]

Just a few days prior to the publication of Thunderball Ian Fleming received the shock news that Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham sought an injunction preventing publication. McClory had read an advance copy of the novel in March 1961 and was infuriated to see that Fleming had based the story on a screenplay written by […]

Last week I saw that James Bond Memes blogger, Edward Biddulph, was selling his first edition of Casino Royale, which he announced on Twitter. I’ve been in contact with Edward soon after buying his book, Licence To Cook, after which he contributed a number of articles to this website and I later met him in London […]

Some time ago I was thinking about why it is that so many fans of James Bond dislike the continuation novels. While the Bond community seems to look forward to their release, they always seem to meet with a tepid reception and, sometimes, outright hostility. What brought this to mind was that I was re-reading […]

Kingsley Amis was a big fan of Ian Fleming’s 007 books and sat down in 1964 with the aim of writing a 5,000 word article about the Bond phenomenon, which at the time was based mainly around the books. The author soon found that his modest idea had morphed into something far larger because, as […]