Octopussy & The Living Daylights: Discover two of the most beloved James Bond stories (James Bond 007, 14)

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He is disinterested in this almost mundane job that he has been assigned and he cannot wait to get done with it. What we have here is a fairly dark tale that shows Bond's taste for a little revenge when the job gets too close to home.

Here, Bond is given a particularly nasty assignment by his superior, M: to kill the sniper who will be attempting to shoot a British agent; an agent who will soon be making a dash across the no-man's-land between East and West Berlin; the zone soon to be known as "Checkpoint Charlie.

It is this last story, then, "The Living Daylights" that is the finest story in this worthy ensemble and that also lent its tightly wound plot of suspense, paranoia and even professional nonchalance to the opening scene of the eponymous film starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond.

On the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack; [7] eight months later, The Man with the Golden Gun was published. Octopussy" - In this story, James Bond investigates the mysterious death of Major Dexter Smythe, a former World War II comrade who has amassed a treasure trove of stolen jewels. This was going to be dirty work and Bond, because he belonged to the Double-0 Section, had been chosen for it. A woman who is working for MI6 (but is really an agent from the KGB) receives her payment in a Faberge worth over 100,000 pounds.Back in the summer of 2018, I found myself trapped in a humdrum job in a company that underwrote insurance policies. In the title story, "Octopussy," which initially appeared serially in the "Daily Express" paper in October '65, Bond himself is largely absent. This reads like Fleming was doing a kind of product placement story highlighting the action and intrigue of a fine arts auction. The final story, The Living Daylights, shows Bond doing 00- work, and here we see him cranky and human. Much comment has been made over Smythe's resemblance to the author, who of course also lived on the north shore of Jamaica (the island was the setting for not only "Octopussy," but also "Live and Let Die," "Doctor No," "For Your Eyes Only" and "The Man With the Golden Gun"), smoked and drank too much, was fond of snorkeling and bird-watching, and was roughly the same age as the major.

The critic for The Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book was "slight and predictable, and usual sex and violence yield to a plausible use of ballistics and marine biology". Firstly, because it's 142 pages long (which is short) and contains three short stories and a thing (we'll come back to the thing a bit later). First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decorative endpapers; 95pp.This works as a good excuse to have him serve as an audience surrogate and have a world rarely seen explained to us without seeming condescending. K. Le Mesurier, secretary of the National Rifle Association at Bisley for information and to correct some of the more specialist areas of knowledge required for sniper shooting. Those early covers and the linkage to the movies with a continuously randy Bond were what my personal censors knew about the books. A very good copy, dust jacket spine head and tail rubbed, prelims and final few leaves a little age toned and spotted.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights is the last book of the James Bond 007 books written by Ian Fleming. Major Dexter Smythe feels like one of the guilt-ridden and melancholic sinners from the latter's novels and his crime, unfolding in Austria just after the war, again reeks of "The Third Man" in its portrait of a moral duplicity on the side of the Allies rather than the former Axis powers, proving that war corrupts all innocence and idealism, irrespective of allegiances or loyalties. Agent 007 appears briefly in this story, which is told mostly in flashback and from the point of view of Major Dexter Smythe, the villain.In addition, Fleming's final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, referred to the events of "The Property of a Lady", despite the story only having had limited release prior to the novel's publication. Fleming's brand name-dropping account of the high life is on full display here, and I very much enjoy tidbits like these for the sort of snapshot of a time they provide.