James Bond by Ian Fleming

I inherited a Kindle, so I spend some time searching through the "store" to see what I can get for free. And I was fairly well surprised to find that there's actually quite a lot. There's also this subscription service, Kindle Unlimited. For $10 a month, you can read loads of stuff for free. Given what books cost, that's a pretty good deal if you read much, and I do. It starts with a month's free trial, so I've been indulging for the past few weeks.

One thing I started was re-reading the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. I read some of them when I was a teenager, but it occurred to me that I didn't really remember what any of them were like. It's interesting to see them from this distance in time. Basically, at this point they are period pieces. Supposedly, Bond joined the Secret Service in 1938, and the books are set after WWII, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I'm reading From Russia With Love at the moment, which contains a lot of descriptive stuff about the Russians and SMERSH. It sounds crazy, but there's an author's note that says that although it sounds ridiculous, SMERSH actually existed, their headquarters was really as described, and even the physical description of the top general was accurate.

I'm not sure what I think about the books, just yet. They don't grab me the way my favorite authors do, but on the other hand I keep reading them, which is a good sign. And James Bond himself is actually nothing like the movie character. I do remember a comment an English teacher made in school, discussing the books. He quoted some critic as saying that the books relied on snobbery and sadism for their popularity. There's quite a bit of truth in that, although it's a bit harsh.

I read a few Ian Flemings in my misspent yut. I mostly remember lots of extremely sexy situations!

Fleming himself was a British spy or something, wasn't he?

He did work in Naval Intelligence during WWII, and as a journalist after the war. That experience informs the books, which are apparently quite realistic (in terms of flavor, if not of detail). They seem almost tame, even quaint, compared to the blood and guts and multiple deaths of modern crime and spy fiction, but that may reflect more on the modern books than the old ones. For instance, at one point in one of the books, we're told that the 00 prefix means that Bond has had to kill during the course of a mission, and has standing authorization to do so again. We're also told that there are only two 00s in the whole Secret Service! (The other one is 008. We don't know what happened to 1 through 6.)