When he wrote From Russia With Love - increasingly looking like the real masterpiece on my Bond journey - Fleming experimented with the form by beginning the book from the Russian perspective to allow you to draw your conclusions about the similarities between the agents on both sides. He tries a similar experiment here, with James not even figuring in the narrative until he appears as a Deus ex Machina fifty pages from the end, and the whole story told from the archetypal Bond girl.

In principle this should be quite good but in practice it doesn’t quite work, the whole first 100 pages are very kitchen sinky Angry Young Man stuff, which format mesh with the Chandleresque back half when Bond shows up. Perhaps unsurprisingly Fleming is not quite convincing as a woman’s perspective either, with the announcement that all woman enjoy rape a bit and that a Central European character is a bit of a nazi.

While FRWL let you draw your own conclusions about the similarities between bond and his counterparts, Fleming wants to make the same point here too but it’s delivered as a lecturing final chapter clumsily mansplained to his protagonist.

If Fleming didn’t want to carry on writing Bond novels after the Thunderball fiasco, why didn’t he just write something else?