| " He brought out a rubber stamp and a red ink pad. M. opened the pad, tapped the rubber stamp on it, and then carefully pressed it down on the grey cover. He turned the docket round and pushed it gently across the desk to Bond. The red Sans-serif letters, still damp, said, ‘For Your Eyes Only.' " — Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only |
James Bond's eighth mission is actually five in one. Breaking from the novel-length adventures he had penned for Double-O from his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's collection of lunch-break-sized spy tales are delicious. Each one enriches Bond's world and inner life with some of his most powerful, visual language yet:
In the title short story, For Your Eyes Only, Bond goes on a personal vendetta mission for M into the remote wilderness of New England and Northeast Canada. 45 pages. 45 minute read time.
From a View To Kill is set amidst the "great oak trees [that] held the theatrical enchantment of the royal forests of Versailles and St. Germain," in which 007 tracks an assassin by impersonating a helpless victim. 30 pages. 30 minute read time.
Perhaps the most unique, and my favorite is Quantum of Solace, in which Bond learns the backstory of "a dull woman at a dull dinner party" that opens "...for him the book of real violence—of the Comedie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments." 30 pages. 30 minute read time.
In Risico, 007 infiltrates the Italian mafia to save an innocent girl imprisoned by a powerful opiate mogul. 40 pages. 40 minute read time.
And lastly, The Hildebrand Rarity finds Bond at the dark intersection of domestic violence, like in Quantum of Solace, and a deadly Caribbean cruise with a poisonous, camouflaged psychopath. It has some of my favorite descriptions of the whole collection, exploring nature's exoticism and how animals, landscapes, and humans mirror one another. 35 pages. 35 minute read time.
As someone who's not generally a fan of short stories, For Your Eyes Only was fantastic in its brevity, visual descriptions, and deeply enriched of Bond and his world. From Russia With Love is still my favorite Bond novel, but this collection is a close second or third. I closed its cover wanting more. [JG]
In the title short story, For Your Eyes Only, Bond goes on a personal vendetta mission for M into the remote wilderness of New England and Northeast Canada. 45 pages. 45 minute read time.
From a View To Kill is set amidst the "great oak trees [that] held the theatrical enchantment of the royal forests of Versailles and St. Germain," in which 007 tracks an assassin by impersonating a helpless victim. 30 pages. 30 minute read time.
Perhaps the most unique, and my favorite is Quantum of Solace, in which Bond learns the backstory of "a dull woman at a dull dinner party" that opens "...for him the book of real violence—of the Comedie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments." 30 pages. 30 minute read time.
In Risico, 007 infiltrates the Italian mafia to save an innocent girl imprisoned by a powerful opiate mogul. 40 pages. 40 minute read time.
And lastly, The Hildebrand Rarity finds Bond at the dark intersection of domestic violence, like in Quantum of Solace, and a deadly Caribbean cruise with a poisonous, camouflaged psychopath. It has some of my favorite descriptions of the whole collection, exploring nature's exoticism and how animals, landscapes, and humans mirror one another. 35 pages. 35 minute read time.
As someone who's not generally a fan of short stories, For Your Eyes Only was fantastic in its brevity, visual descriptions, and deeply enriched of Bond and his world. From Russia With Love is still my favorite Bond novel, but this collection is a close second or third. I closed its cover wanting more. [JG]
Ian Fleming with Sean Connery on the set of From Russia With Love (Book 5 // Movie 2)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
| Ian Fleming (1908-64) served as Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during World War II, a key player in English and Allied espionage efforts. His travels, interests, and wartime experiences birthed his first novel, Casino Royale, which he penned from "Goldeneye," his home in Jamaica in '52. The first printing sold out in the first month. Fleming went on to write twelve James Bond novels in twelve years, with sales skyrocketing four years later, after President Kennedy named Fleming's fifth, From Russia With Love, one of his favorite books of all time. Since then, sixty-five years later, over one hundred million copies of Bond's adventures have been sold. |
FAVORITE QUOTES
3. "When the waiter had gone, Kristatos sat and chewed on a wooden toothpick. His face gradually became dark and glum as if bad weather had come to his mind. The black, hard eyes that glanced restlessly at everything in the restaurant except Bond, glittered." — Risico
2. Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence—of the Comedie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments." — Quantum of Solace
1. Major Gonzalez bent down and verified where the bullets had hit. Then the three small men walked quickly back through the rose and white drawing room and across the dark curved mahogany hall and cut through the elegant front door. They climbed unhurriedly into a black Ford Consul Sedan with Jamaican number plates and, with Major Gonzalez driving and the two gunmen sitting upright in the back seat, they drove off at an easy pace down the long avenue of Royal Palms. At the junction of the drive and the road to Port Antonio the cut telephone wires hung down through the trees like bright lianas. Major Gonzalez slalomed the car carefully and expertly down the parochial road until he was on the metaled strip near the coast. Then he put on speed. Twenty minutes after the killling he came to the outer sprawl of the little banana port. There he ran the stolen car on to the grass verge beside the road and the three men got out and walked the quarter of a mile through the sparsely lit main street to the banana wharfs. The speed boat was waiting, its exhaust bubbling. The three men got in and the boat zoomed off across the still waters of what an American poetess has called the most beautiful harbor in the world." — For Your Eyes Only
2. Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence—of the Comedie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments." — Quantum of Solace
1. Major Gonzalez bent down and verified where the bullets had hit. Then the three small men walked quickly back through the rose and white drawing room and across the dark curved mahogany hall and cut through the elegant front door. They climbed unhurriedly into a black Ford Consul Sedan with Jamaican number plates and, with Major Gonzalez driving and the two gunmen sitting upright in the back seat, they drove off at an easy pace down the long avenue of Royal Palms. At the junction of the drive and the road to Port Antonio the cut telephone wires hung down through the trees like bright lianas. Major Gonzalez slalomed the car carefully and expertly down the parochial road until he was on the metaled strip near the coast. Then he put on speed. Twenty minutes after the killling he came to the outer sprawl of the little banana port. There he ran the stolen car on to the grass verge beside the road and the three men got out and walked the quarter of a mile through the sparsely lit main street to the banana wharfs. The speed boat was waiting, its exhaust bubbling. The three men got in and the boat zoomed off across the still waters of what an American poetess has called the most beautiful harbor in the world." — For Your Eyes Only
| " The commissioner opened the [car] door and the light from the street turned her eyes into stars. " —Ian Fleming, Risico |
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