The Bond journey continues and finally hits its stride properly. It’s been intriguing seeing Fleming grapple with how to not just rewrite Casino Royale over and over but his experiments thus far have been completely hit and miss. Moonraker saw the absence of a Bond girl and a Bond not going abroad, Diamonds are Forever completely exiled the Cold War aspect. Here Fleming’s main experiment is that we don’t hear from Bond himself untill a hundred or so pages in, which serves to extenuate the Cold War aspect and give us the full details of a plot Bond is figuring out on the fly. It’s the longest of the books so far, but Fleming has settled into his sweeping just-one-more-chapter style that means you don’t feel the comparative length at all.

It’s also interesting to see the ending, in which Fleming Reichenbach falls his hero. His takes it back even more quickly than Doyle did but it’s fascinating that Fleming is clearly tiring of his iconic character already. Fascinating that he didn’t just write about an adjacent character in the same world but continued to try and fix the problem. This one fills me with hope that we’re going on a golden age run regardless