In an interview by Sathnam Sanghera for the Times Magazine in September, William Boyd said that he thought his James Bond book, Solo, “might be the longest Bond novel at 336 pages” ('...pretending he doesn't know this for a fact', Sathnam Sanghera commented). Boyd admitted at the 'Boyd on Bond' event at the Southbank that he hadn't read any continuation Bond novels except Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun and Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care, and so we can excuse the inaccuracy. In fact, the longest Bond novel is Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, which at 432 pages is almost 100 pages longer than Solo.
Boyd's claim notwithstanding, his comment perhaps reflects a wider view that, certainly by modern standards, Ian Fleming's novels are rather on the short side, possibly even too short to be taken very seriously. Indeed, in his preview of the Designing Bond exhibition in London in July 2012, design critic Stephen Bayley, writing in the Times (2nd July 2012), dismissed the original novels as novellas. But is this fair? Are Fleming's books really so short? Are Bond books increasing in length over time? Let's have a look at some numbers.
I collected data for all of Fleming's books, except Octopussy (a statistical outlier), and all continuation novels, except the novelisations of Pierce Brosnan's Bond films. I chose to ignore several variables that might affect book length, such as font size, pages size, margins and spacing, simply taking instead the number of the last page in the UK first edition hardback. This gave me a dataset of 39 books.
Here are some basic statistics. As stated, the longest Bond book is Carte Blanche. The shortest is John Gardner's Nobody Lives Forever (1986), which is 192 pages long. In fairness to William Boyd, Solo is the second longest book (actually 322 pages). The longest Fleming novel is Goldfinger (1959) at 318 pages, only four fewer than Solo. The shortest Fleming novel is Casino Royale (1953) at 218 pages. Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (2008) is within the top quarter with 294 pages, while Kingsley Amis' effort (1968) is roughly in the middle with 255 pages. Raymond Benson's novels are generally on the higher end, his longest being The Man with the Red Tattoo (2002), Doubleshot (2000) and Never Dream of Dying (2001), all being 320 pages in length. The longest Gardner novel is The Man from Barborossa (1991) at 303 pages. The overall mean across the dataset is 262 pages.
The sequence of books produced by Fleming, Gardner and Benson allows some interesting comparison. The mean length of Fleming's novels is 253 pages. This is slightly more than the mean for Gardner's books (241 pages) but somewhat smaller than the value (301 pages) for Raymond Benson's novels. The standard deviations for the books of Fleming and Gardner are also quite similar (27 and 29 pages respectively), but more than that for Benson (25 pages). This suggests that Benson's novels are more consistent in terms of page length, while the books of Fleming and Gardner varied rather more. This is confirmed by the overall range (that of Fleming is 100 pages, compared with 61 for Benson), and the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by mean), which standardises groups of data of different size. That for Fleming and Gardner is 0.12, while that for Benson is 0.08.
These values suggested to me that Gardner's novels are practically the same sort of length as Ian Fleming's, but that Raymond Benson's are different; judging by the means, Benson's books are consistently longer. I tested this by first combining into a single list Fleming's and Gardner's books and ranking the books in size order. I could see that the novels were fairly evenly mixed. There was a Gardner, then a Fleming, then two Gardners, followed by two Flemings, four Gardners then a single Fleming, and so on, as if randomly intermixed. When I compared Fleming and Benson, again combining the lists and ranking the books by page length, most of Benson's books were at high end of the list. There were eleven Flemings (out of 13) ranked below the shortest Benson. Evidently Benson's books were generally longer than Fleming's (and no doubt Gardner's too), and a Mann-Whitney test confirmed there there was a significant statistical difference between the lengths of Fleming's and Benson's books.
So while there has been no steady rise during the time that Fleming and Gardner were writing (1953-1996) (it could even be suggested that Gardner deliberately copied the length of the original novels for greater authenticity – his Herbie Kruger novels, for example, are much longer than his Bonds), the continuation novels of Raymond Benson and subsequent authors have been generally longer than earlier novels.
Much of the explanation for this is likely to be cultural, with authors (Gardner excepted) matching, to some extent unwittingly, the length of their Bond books with that of their other works or other contemporary fiction. It is probably true to say that when Fleming was writing, contemporary novels were the same sort of length as his own. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books averaged about 250 pages per book. William Boyd's novels are more consistently over 300 pages long. In other words, book length has been driven upwards over time, and authors conform to that trend. Nevertheless, does it really matter? After all, it's not the size of the book that counts, but what's inside it.
Showing posts with label jeffery deaver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jeffery deaver. Show all posts
Monday, 25 November 2013
Sunday, 13 October 2013
Newspaper reviews of Solo: some observations
After I finished reading William Boyd's Solo, I caught up with some of the newspaper reviews of the book, which I had been avoiding. The reviews were the usual mixed bag – some were positive towards Solo, others negative, some I enjoyed, and felt offended (as a Bond fan) by others – but as I read them, I noted a few points of interest that made me think about the relationship between the film and book Bonds.
Let's start with basics confusions between Fleming's Bond and the Bond of the cinema. To my knowledge, the worst culprit was Robert Crampton, who wrote a review for The Times. The headline of his piece, “Neither shaken nor stirred”, summed up his opinion of the book, but perhaps he would have been better disposed to the book had he not expected it to be a novelisation of a Bond film. Crampton bemoaned the absence of 'sexual banter' between Bond and Moneypenny, and thought Bond's falling in love with 'one of his conquests' (doesn't Bond want to marry his companion at the end of practically every adventure?) and his feelings of ambiguity towards his mission (you mean, as expressed in Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice?) were a sop to modern values. In fairness, Crampton hasn't been the only one to complain that the villain, Kobus Breed, is more of a henchman than a Bond villain, but hollowed-out volcanoes, death rays and minions in pyjamas, the sort of things which Crampton would have liked to have seen, are hardly a staple of Fleming's novels. And Crampton also spoke of the 'regulation two shags', which also owes more to the films than the books.
But Robert Crampton hasn't been the only reviewer confuse the books and the films. Sarah Warwick's review of Solo in The Northern Echo mentions that Q is “present and predictable” (but not in Fleming, of course), and Jon Stock, writing in The Telegraph, lists Bond's meeting with Q as one of the standard Bondian tropes that would “satisfy Bond aficionados”. (Mind you, it has to be said that Boyd's Quentin Dale of Q Branch – and for that matter, John Gardner's Ann Reilly – would probably not have existed had there not been a Q character in the films.)
Something else I noticed was that if Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the last continuation novel before Boyd's effort, was mentioned at all in the reviews of Solo, it was usually mentioned in neutral or negative terms. This is surprising, because a trawl through the reviews of Carte Blanche in the main UK newspapers reminded me that Deaver's novel was generally received positively, more so, it seems, than Solo has been. But I wonder whether this reflects uncertainty about what reviewers (and perhaps other readers) expect from a continuation novel. Should it be modern-set and updated like the films, or a period piece to follow on from Fleming's last novel? The consensus appears to change with each new continuation novel. Deaver's novel was widely lauded on publication, then dismissed as an oddity after the publication of Solo. But then reviewers of Solo have criticised Bond as a character out of place and out of date, who should be resurrected no more. Continuation authors can't win. As David Leigh says, the authors have a thankless task.
One other observation concerned the use of images to accompany the reviews. Most reviews of Solo that I read were illustrated by an image of the cover, or were not illustrated at all. Where images of Bond actors were used, however, these were either of Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I thought newspapers missed a trick by not using images of George Lazenby, whose tenure as Bond dates to the same period in which Solo is set, but evidently there was a trend for selecting images of the first and current Bond actors. The reasons are obvious enough. Connery's Bond – or at least certain traits or memes associated with him – is so firmly embedded in popular culture that he has become a fixed point of reference. Daniel Craig's Bond also has cultural prominence, but the absence of previous Bond actors suggests that this will decline; any review of a continuation novel published during the tenure of Craig's successor is likely to feature images of that actor along with those of Connery.
The reviews of Solo have been entertaining, and occasionally annoying (just like the book itself, perhaps), but they have revealed that the literary Bond cannot be completely isolated from the cinematic Bond, and with the use of film series memes in the continuation novels themselves, the Bond of those novels has to some extent become a hybrid of the two Bondian traditions or species. The reviews have also suggested that Sean Connery's Bond continues to loom very large in the popular perception of the character.
Let's start with basics confusions between Fleming's Bond and the Bond of the cinema. To my knowledge, the worst culprit was Robert Crampton, who wrote a review for The Times. The headline of his piece, “Neither shaken nor stirred”, summed up his opinion of the book, but perhaps he would have been better disposed to the book had he not expected it to be a novelisation of a Bond film. Crampton bemoaned the absence of 'sexual banter' between Bond and Moneypenny, and thought Bond's falling in love with 'one of his conquests' (doesn't Bond want to marry his companion at the end of practically every adventure?) and his feelings of ambiguity towards his mission (you mean, as expressed in Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice?) were a sop to modern values. In fairness, Crampton hasn't been the only one to complain that the villain, Kobus Breed, is more of a henchman than a Bond villain, but hollowed-out volcanoes, death rays and minions in pyjamas, the sort of things which Crampton would have liked to have seen, are hardly a staple of Fleming's novels. And Crampton also spoke of the 'regulation two shags', which also owes more to the films than the books.
But Robert Crampton hasn't been the only reviewer confuse the books and the films. Sarah Warwick's review of Solo in The Northern Echo mentions that Q is “present and predictable” (but not in Fleming, of course), and Jon Stock, writing in The Telegraph, lists Bond's meeting with Q as one of the standard Bondian tropes that would “satisfy Bond aficionados”. (Mind you, it has to be said that Boyd's Quentin Dale of Q Branch – and for that matter, John Gardner's Ann Reilly – would probably not have existed had there not been a Q character in the films.)
Something else I noticed was that if Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the last continuation novel before Boyd's effort, was mentioned at all in the reviews of Solo, it was usually mentioned in neutral or negative terms. This is surprising, because a trawl through the reviews of Carte Blanche in the main UK newspapers reminded me that Deaver's novel was generally received positively, more so, it seems, than Solo has been. But I wonder whether this reflects uncertainty about what reviewers (and perhaps other readers) expect from a continuation novel. Should it be modern-set and updated like the films, or a period piece to follow on from Fleming's last novel? The consensus appears to change with each new continuation novel. Deaver's novel was widely lauded on publication, then dismissed as an oddity after the publication of Solo. But then reviewers of Solo have criticised Bond as a character out of place and out of date, who should be resurrected no more. Continuation authors can't win. As David Leigh says, the authors have a thankless task.
One other observation concerned the use of images to accompany the reviews. Most reviews of Solo that I read were illustrated by an image of the cover, or were not illustrated at all. Where images of Bond actors were used, however, these were either of Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I thought newspapers missed a trick by not using images of George Lazenby, whose tenure as Bond dates to the same period in which Solo is set, but evidently there was a trend for selecting images of the first and current Bond actors. The reasons are obvious enough. Connery's Bond – or at least certain traits or memes associated with him – is so firmly embedded in popular culture that he has become a fixed point of reference. Daniel Craig's Bond also has cultural prominence, but the absence of previous Bond actors suggests that this will decline; any review of a continuation novel published during the tenure of Craig's successor is likely to feature images of that actor along with those of Connery.
The reviews of Solo have been entertaining, and occasionally annoying (just like the book itself, perhaps), but they have revealed that the literary Bond cannot be completely isolated from the cinematic Bond, and with the use of film series memes in the continuation novels themselves, the Bond of those novels has to some extent become a hybrid of the two Bondian traditions or species. The reviews have also suggested that Sean Connery's Bond continues to loom very large in the popular perception of the character.
Monday, 6 June 2011
Carte Blanche - a review
Times have changed. During the tenure of continuation authors John Gardner and Raymond Benson, James Bond adventures were published with short print-runs and to little fanfare (good news for those who purchased the first editions, which are now worth a lot of money). Now the publication of a Bond novel is an international media event. Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (2008) had the works, and so too has Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche. Its launch was accompanied by a glamorous Bond girl, a straight-from-the-factory Bentley, and a team of abseiling marines. Sebastian Faulks seemed somewhat embarrassed by the publicity surrounding his book launch, but Deaver had no such feelings, and by all accounts, he was as excited at the end of the project as he was the moment he was commissioned to write the book. And it shows in the writing, for Carte Blanche is a novel written by a master of the thriller, and now a master of all things Bondian.
Like most of Ian Fleming's adventures, Carte Blanche opens in the thick of the action, in Serbia. Bond, a veteran of Afghanistan and now working for M and the Overseas Development Group, an ultra-secret government outfit that sits a fraction outside the law, is trying to stop a train loaded with extremely hazardous materials from being derailed. This is, of course, just small part of something much bigger. Bond is chasing down a lead in a plot to detonate an unknown device at an unknown location and at an unknown time. The trail takes Bond to South Africa via Dubai and to the villain with the curious name of Severan Hydt, who, when not planning world terrorism, runs a global waste processing and recycling operation.
Jeffery Deaver is not writing as Ian Fleming – descriptions of dead people would not be out of place in his more usual CSI-style crime novels – but he recalls enough aspects of Fleming's works to give the novel an authentic tone. The villain, for instance, is reminiscent of Hugo Drax or Dr No, and he devises a scheme that might have Goldfinger on to his lawyers about breach of copyright. James Bond routinely takes a hot shower, followed by a cold one, and, as in Casino Royale, takes 'ridiculous pleasure' in food and drink. Such details are finely woven into the story and Deaver avoids turning the book into a checklist of Bondian clichés. Just one duff note: Bond shows too much interest in team sports. Very uncharacteristic.
As Fleming was wont to do, Deaver peppers Carte Blanche with technical detail, snippets of interesting, but not strictly relevant, information, and references to popular culture. Some of these will seem in a few decades time as incomprehensible as Bond's 'Golden K' in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but that is perhaps no bad thing. Most of the cultural references, though, will be incomprehensible now to anyone outside Britain. Deaver squeezes in references to London Olympic mascots Mandeville and Wenlock, Asda supermarket, and even the Two Ronnies. Deaver has certainly done his research. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler reviewing Diamonds are Forever, the remarkable thing about this book is that it is written by an American.
Like all thrillers, the book relies on coincidences bordering on implausibility in order to move the plot along. Meetings are engineered and alliances are made with few problems, while Bond's state-of-the-art phone, packed with apps to enable him to eavesdrop on the villains, or track their movements, makes his job seem, well, a little too easy. Nevertheless, Deaver smooths over such concerns with the rapid pace of his story telling and sustains tension throughout.
Jeffery Deaver has said that his Bond is Fleming's Bond. That is true enough, but Carte Blanche is dated ACR – after Casino Royale (2008). If the novel was ever brought to the screen (and, admittedly, that is unlikely), Daniel Craig has his name stamped all over it.
Like most of Ian Fleming's adventures, Carte Blanche opens in the thick of the action, in Serbia. Bond, a veteran of Afghanistan and now working for M and the Overseas Development Group, an ultra-secret government outfit that sits a fraction outside the law, is trying to stop a train loaded with extremely hazardous materials from being derailed. This is, of course, just small part of something much bigger. Bond is chasing down a lead in a plot to detonate an unknown device at an unknown location and at an unknown time. The trail takes Bond to South Africa via Dubai and to the villain with the curious name of Severan Hydt, who, when not planning world terrorism, runs a global waste processing and recycling operation.
Jeffery Deaver is not writing as Ian Fleming – descriptions of dead people would not be out of place in his more usual CSI-style crime novels – but he recalls enough aspects of Fleming's works to give the novel an authentic tone. The villain, for instance, is reminiscent of Hugo Drax or Dr No, and he devises a scheme that might have Goldfinger on to his lawyers about breach of copyright. James Bond routinely takes a hot shower, followed by a cold one, and, as in Casino Royale, takes 'ridiculous pleasure' in food and drink. Such details are finely woven into the story and Deaver avoids turning the book into a checklist of Bondian clichés. Just one duff note: Bond shows too much interest in team sports. Very uncharacteristic.
As Fleming was wont to do, Deaver peppers Carte Blanche with technical detail, snippets of interesting, but not strictly relevant, information, and references to popular culture. Some of these will seem in a few decades time as incomprehensible as Bond's 'Golden K' in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but that is perhaps no bad thing. Most of the cultural references, though, will be incomprehensible now to anyone outside Britain. Deaver squeezes in references to London Olympic mascots Mandeville and Wenlock, Asda supermarket, and even the Two Ronnies. Deaver has certainly done his research. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler reviewing Diamonds are Forever, the remarkable thing about this book is that it is written by an American.
Like all thrillers, the book relies on coincidences bordering on implausibility in order to move the plot along. Meetings are engineered and alliances are made with few problems, while Bond's state-of-the-art phone, packed with apps to enable him to eavesdrop on the villains, or track their movements, makes his job seem, well, a little too easy. Nevertheless, Deaver smooths over such concerns with the rapid pace of his story telling and sustains tension throughout.
Jeffery Deaver has said that his Bond is Fleming's Bond. That is true enough, but Carte Blanche is dated ACR – after Casino Royale (2008). If the novel was ever brought to the screen (and, admittedly, that is unlikely), Daniel Craig has his name stamped all over it.
Sunday, 29 May 2011
How to write a James Bond novel
I’m ten chapters in to the new James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver, Carte Blanche. Mind you, that’s not saying much – the chapters are very short (not quite As I Lay Dying short, but if I kept to my ‘a chapter before bed’ rule, it would take me the best part of two and a half months to read). So far the book is shaping up well. I’ll present a book review and an examination of the Bond memes replicated in the novel soon, but today I thought I’d explain why I think Carte Blanche will be a better Bond adventure than Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care.
In 1962, Ian Fleming published a short piece, entitled, ‘How to write a thriller’. We learn here that it took Fleming six weeks to write a Bond novel. This he did by writing 2000 words for four hours each day during his annual two-month stay in his Jamaican home, Goldeneye. Six weeks may seem inadequate, but it followed months of research, and years of experience hewn from his wartime and journalistic careers.
Sebastian Faulks copied Ian Fleming’s recipe for writing, in that he blocked out six weeks of his diary and wrote the book. Faulks does not specify how long he took to research the story before then, but in his piece on writing Devil May Care, he merely says that he found an idea for the villain’s scheme, and took Bond to a location Bond had not been before. And Faulks admits that whereas his well-known pastiches incorporate 125% of the original authors’ characteristics, Devil May Care contained 75%. I would agree. Parts of his novel were not too different in style to his deliberate pastiche, published in his collection of parodies, Pistache.
We know more certainly how much research went into Carte Blanche: six months. In On Writing Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver notes that this time was spent researching Bond, plot details, and aspects of modern intelligence, resulting in 3,000 pages of research and a story outline of 130 pages. And, like Fleming, who said that he rarely wrote about places he had not seen, Deaver has visited all the places described in the book. Carte Blanche took Deaver three months to write after the research.
Fleming wrote that ‘each word must tell and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on’. Judging by the research, and from those ten chapters, Deaver will also succeed in this aim. I’ll let you know!
References:
Deaver, J, 2011 Writing Carte Blanche, Hodder and Stoughton
Faulks, S, 2009a Sebastian Faulks on writing Devil May Care, in Faulks 2009b
Faulks, S, 2009b Devil May Care, Penguin
Fleming, I, 2009 Ian Fleming on writing thrillers, in Faulks 2009b
In 1962, Ian Fleming published a short piece, entitled, ‘How to write a thriller’. We learn here that it took Fleming six weeks to write a Bond novel. This he did by writing 2000 words for four hours each day during his annual two-month stay in his Jamaican home, Goldeneye. Six weeks may seem inadequate, but it followed months of research, and years of experience hewn from his wartime and journalistic careers.
Sebastian Faulks copied Ian Fleming’s recipe for writing, in that he blocked out six weeks of his diary and wrote the book. Faulks does not specify how long he took to research the story before then, but in his piece on writing Devil May Care, he merely says that he found an idea for the villain’s scheme, and took Bond to a location Bond had not been before. And Faulks admits that whereas his well-known pastiches incorporate 125% of the original authors’ characteristics, Devil May Care contained 75%. I would agree. Parts of his novel were not too different in style to his deliberate pastiche, published in his collection of parodies, Pistache.
We know more certainly how much research went into Carte Blanche: six months. In On Writing Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver notes that this time was spent researching Bond, plot details, and aspects of modern intelligence, resulting in 3,000 pages of research and a story outline of 130 pages. And, like Fleming, who said that he rarely wrote about places he had not seen, Deaver has visited all the places described in the book. Carte Blanche took Deaver three months to write after the research.
Fleming wrote that ‘each word must tell and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on’. Judging by the research, and from those ten chapters, Deaver will also succeed in this aim. I’ll let you know!
References:
Deaver, J, 2011 Writing Carte Blanche, Hodder and Stoughton
Faulks, S, 2009a Sebastian Faulks on writing Devil May Care, in Faulks 2009b
Faulks, S, 2009b Devil May Care, Penguin
Fleming, I, 2009 Ian Fleming on writing thrillers, in Faulks 2009b
Monday, 18 April 2011
How many James Bond book titles are there?
Or, to rephrase the question, how many types of titles did Ian Fleming use? To give an example, Live and Let Die is what I will call a phrase variant, deriving obviously from the well-known saying, ‘live and let live’. Other phrase variants are Diamonds are Forever, a mutation of the de Beers’ advertising slogan, ‘A diamond is forever’, From Russia, with Love, which is a play on oft-used sentimental expressions, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is taken from the standard phrase used on government communications, and You Only Live Twice, a derivation of the saying, ‘you only live once’.
Then there are film/book title variants. The Man with the Golden Gun appears to fall into this category, with its inspiration probably coming from The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra. Another title type is personal name – Goldfinger and Dr No – with other names forming a fourth category. Moonraker, the name of Drax’s rocket, Thunderball, the name given to the mushroom cloud resulting from an atomic explosion, and Octopussy, the pet name of an octopus, belong to this group. (We should note, however, that Fleming didn’t actually choose the Octopussy short story title as the main title of the volume, as it was published posthumously.)
Of the remaining titles, For Your Eyes Only is presumably an original phrase, which Fleming came across and used during his wartime career in the Navel Intelligence Division, although I must confess I can’t put my finger on evidence to support this. It may in fact be a phrase variant, being similar, but not identical, to a form of words used in espionage. The origin of The Spy Who Loved Me is also uncertain, but is also provisionally placed in the original phrase category.
So we have a tentative list of five title types. Fleming’s titles in turn inspired the authors charged with writing continuation Bond novels, who tended to use the same basic title types. Phrase variants include John Gardner’s Win, Lose or Die, and Raymond Benson’s The Facts of Death. Personal names are evident in Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis) and Scorpius by John Gardner. Curiously, neither Raymond Benson, nor Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series, use personal names for titles. Of the film/book title variants employed by the continuation authors, all examples, such as Licence Renewed (John Gardner) and The Man with the Red Tattoo (Raymond Benson), have their origin in Fleming’s phrases or titles. The fifth type, original phrase, is interesting in that the continuation authors have turned to the category proportionately more than Fleming. There is, for example, Gardner’s Role of Honour, Benson’s Zero Minus Ten, and Higson’s By Royal Command. Recent authors have also used original phrases; Sebastian Faulks had Devil May Care, while Jeffery Deaver’s forthcoming novel will be called Carte Blanche.
Another aspect to consider is the association of certain words or concepts with the world of James Bond. The most frequently used are death (or variants of, such as die), forever, the man who or from, and negative words, such as never and nobody. Fleming used these sorts of words sparingly, but they increased their frequency among continuation authors to the point of over-use. Half of Raymond Benson’s Bond novels have the word death (or similar) in the title, while almost a quarter of John Gardner’s titles use a negative. In contrast, only 8% of Fleming’s titles use a form of death, and none uses negatives. Despite this, these words and concepts have become so strongly associated with Bond that continuation authors regularly turn to them. Their use has also spread to films – Licence to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day – and no doubt anyone invited to generate a Bondian title is likely to consider words like these. Oddly enough, no title generator has used the word that Fleming used twice and is just as Bondian: love.
Then there are film/book title variants. The Man with the Golden Gun appears to fall into this category, with its inspiration probably coming from The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra. Another title type is personal name – Goldfinger and Dr No – with other names forming a fourth category. Moonraker, the name of Drax’s rocket, Thunderball, the name given to the mushroom cloud resulting from an atomic explosion, and Octopussy, the pet name of an octopus, belong to this group. (We should note, however, that Fleming didn’t actually choose the Octopussy short story title as the main title of the volume, as it was published posthumously.)
Of the remaining titles, For Your Eyes Only is presumably an original phrase, which Fleming came across and used during his wartime career in the Navel Intelligence Division, although I must confess I can’t put my finger on evidence to support this. It may in fact be a phrase variant, being similar, but not identical, to a form of words used in espionage. The origin of The Spy Who Loved Me is also uncertain, but is also provisionally placed in the original phrase category.
So we have a tentative list of five title types. Fleming’s titles in turn inspired the authors charged with writing continuation Bond novels, who tended to use the same basic title types. Phrase variants include John Gardner’s Win, Lose or Die, and Raymond Benson’s The Facts of Death. Personal names are evident in Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis) and Scorpius by John Gardner. Curiously, neither Raymond Benson, nor Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series, use personal names for titles. Of the film/book title variants employed by the continuation authors, all examples, such as Licence Renewed (John Gardner) and The Man with the Red Tattoo (Raymond Benson), have their origin in Fleming’s phrases or titles. The fifth type, original phrase, is interesting in that the continuation authors have turned to the category proportionately more than Fleming. There is, for example, Gardner’s Role of Honour, Benson’s Zero Minus Ten, and Higson’s By Royal Command. Recent authors have also used original phrases; Sebastian Faulks had Devil May Care, while Jeffery Deaver’s forthcoming novel will be called Carte Blanche.
Another aspect to consider is the association of certain words or concepts with the world of James Bond. The most frequently used are death (or variants of, such as die), forever, the man who or from, and negative words, such as never and nobody. Fleming used these sorts of words sparingly, but they increased their frequency among continuation authors to the point of over-use. Half of Raymond Benson’s Bond novels have the word death (or similar) in the title, while almost a quarter of John Gardner’s titles use a negative. In contrast, only 8% of Fleming’s titles use a form of death, and none uses negatives. Despite this, these words and concepts have become so strongly associated with Bond that continuation authors regularly turn to them. Their use has also spread to films – Licence to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day – and no doubt anyone invited to generate a Bondian title is likely to consider words like these. Oddly enough, no title generator has used the word that Fleming used twice and is just as Bondian: love.
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