In the fourteenth and final James Bond book by Ian Fleming, we revisit the chronological narrative arc that was established prior to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, and The Man with the Golden Gun. If you read the books in order, The Man with the Golden Gun still remains the final Fleming Bond story. Octopussy and The Living Daylights (posthumously published nearly two years after Fleming’s death) features a collection of various short stories published between 1962-1965. Initially, this collection featured only the short stories “Octopussy” and “the Living Daylights,” however in 1967 a third story, “The Property of a Lady” was added to the paperback edition, and in 2002 a fourth story “007 in New York” was also included.
“Octopussy”
“My name’s Bond. James Bond. I’m from the Ministry of Defence.”
Similar to other Ian Fleming James Bond short stories, such as “The Hildebrand Rarity” and “Quantum of Solace,” “Octopussy” is, in part, an experimental bit of Cold War espionage literature. Fleming wrote it at his Goldeneye estate in 1962 and it was later published posthumously as a serial in the Daily Express in October 1965.
In the story, Major Dexter Smythe, O.B.E., Royal Marines is a melancholic retired fifty-four-year-old who lives in Jamaica. He spends his days diving, smoking, and drinking heavily. He is also a widower. Like Fleming at the time, Smythe is ailing and fascinated by the birds, insects, and fish of Jamaica. When he ventures out diving each day, he visits all the familiar creatures in the lagoon, he calls them “people.” He has named them, especially a wild octopus he feeds and calls “Octopussy.”
However, his indulgent lifestyle is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a government official calling himself James Bond. What is going on here? Smythe seems to be hiding a long dead secret. He privately admits that he will be lucky to get away with merely a sentence of life imprisonment… From here, we learn about Smythe’s dark backstory, a tale which leads back to the end of World War II. During the war, it was discovered that Smythe spoke a bit of German (his mother’s family was from Heidelberg) and this fact earned him the unenviable position of being an advanced interrogator in his unit. Toward the end of the war, he was reassigned to the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau (MOB) which was tasked with cleaning up lingering Gestapo and Abwehr hideouts amidst the collapse of Germany. He was dispatched to Tyrol in a place called Ober Aurach about a mile east of Kitzbuhel. He was the number 2 ranking member in his unit, and his CO was an American in Patton’s army. Smythe tracked down a man named Hannes Oberhauser with whom he made a deal in exchange for a mountainous hike up to the secret location of hidden Nazi gold. But upon arrival, Smythe murdered Oberhauser and quietly stole a huge collection of gold bars.
In time, he married a girl and relocated to Jamaica where he met the Foo brothers who conduct their business activities through Hong Kong and Macau (Tangier and Macao are described as two of the only ports in the world not subject to the Bretton Woods rules). Smythe then created an elaborate smuggling scheme for his gold bars along with the Foo brothers. However, his indulgent lifestyle grew out of hand at the same time, and his wife regularly bickered with him, pleading for him to stop all the drinking and smoking. Thus, she turned to sleeping pills to send a message to Smythe, but in a failed attempt to do so, she accidentally overdosed and committed suicide. Since then, he has been drinking himself to death.
When Smythe finally confesses his whole story, Bond shares that Oberhauser was a friend who taught him how to ski. When the body of Oberhauser emerged from where it had fallen and was buried by Smythe many years earlier, Bond requested to be assigned to track down Smythe in Jamaica. Bond decides to leave Smythe, claiming it will be about a week until someone is sent out to bring him home. The implication is that Smythe has been granted a week to consider if he would like to honorably end his life, rather than face the music back in England.
As Smythe contemplates his future, and even considers returning to England to accept an imagined book deal and possibly a celebrity status from behind bars, he goes out swimming in the lagoon again where he quickly faces off with a fearsome scorpion fish. In the course of their confrontation, the scorpion fish quickly poisons Smythe in the stomach –“You got me, you bastard! By God, you got me!” While the poison starts to take effect, and with no time to save himself, Smythe decides to swims out with the speared scorpion fish to feed it to his beloved “Octopussy.” But while Smythe is losing consciousness, the octopus actually grabs at Smythe with its tentacles and drags him underwater, where he devours Smythe’s body. It is a darkly funny ending –“bizarre and pathetic”– as Smythe is killed in a most gruesome manner by the very creature he once loved.
Smythe’s body is later found and is presumed drowned (and published in the press to avoid scaring tourists about a human-eating octopus). Bond echoes the same assessment in his paperwork at headquarters.
I found this to be a wonderfully macabre tale, albeit one which features Bond at a distance. The story has almost nothing in common with the Eon James Bond film of the same name, except for the title and the character “Octopussy” whose father was someone Bondd allowed to commit suicide in the past. Also the name “Oberhauser” was used in the Eon James Bond film Spectre (2015).
Film Review: Octopussy (1983)
“The Property of a Lady”
“In the grim chess game that is Secret Service work, the Russians would have lost a queen” (60).
It is a hot, yawning day at headquarters (Bond’s secretary Mary Goodnight makes a reappearance), before Bond is suddenly summoned to M’s office to meet with Dr. Fanshawe, a middle-aged neo-Edwardian intellectual, a “noted authority on antique jewelry.” He has been referred by MI5 in connection with Miss Freudenstein (her name was written as “Miss Maria Freudenstadt” in The Man with the Golden Gun as a then Soviet-brainwashed Bond was seeking to re-enter the Secret Service in order to assassinate M). She is a secret agent who has infiltrated the Soviet Union, working as a double agent, and she is supposed to send regular top secret dispatches via a Purple Cipher through the CIA six times per day (lengthy “SITREPS”).
Anyway, the matter at hand concerns an upcoming auction for a Fabergé egg and the hunt for the local Soviet chief running this operation. Bond’s mission concerns a priceless Emerald Sphere, an egg crafted by Peter Carl Fabergé, which was inherited by Ms. Freudenstein from her grandfather but is up for auction at Sotheby’s as “the property of a lady.” The Secret Service suspects the bidding will be artificially inflated by the Soviets, thus Bond is sent to Mr. Kenneth Snowman at Wartski for expert guidance on the auction, and after the intense bidding sequence, Bond eventually catches the mystery man as they both leave the auction wearing sunglasses –the man turns out to be Peter Malinowski, a physically deformed Soviet Embassy staff member of the Agricultural Attache.
Fleming apparently thought this story was mediocre and thus he refused payment for it. I would humbly disagree –I am delighted by the Bond tales which offer we, the readers, a glimpse behind the curtain of the Secret Service. Written in 1963, “The Property of a Lady” was published in Sotheby’s The Iron Hammer in 1963 and later in Playboy. Elements of this story were of course incorporated into the Eon James Bond film Octopussy (1983).
Film Review: Octopussy (1983)
“The Living Daylights”
“James Bond lay at the five-hundred-yard firing point of the famous Century Range at Bisley” (61).
Originally titled “Trigger Finger,” this short story first appeared in the color supplement of The Sunday Times in 1962 (it was also titled “Berlin Escape”).
In it, James Bond is performing target practice under the observance of the Chief Range Officer, before he is summoned by M and dispatched to Berlin to help agent 272 escape from Russia. 272 is loaded with information about betrayal, including weapons and technology, and he has made it as far as East Berlin but the whole KGB is on his tail. He is presently set to return to the west but his courier has been identified as a double agent, and the KGB plans to snipe him from afar using their best sniper –a Russian codenamed “Trigger” (the plan in Russia is called “Extase”).
As an aside, I loved Fleming’s depiction of M in this story: “M’s head was sunk into his stiff turned-down collar in a Churchillian pose of gloomy reflection, and there was a droop of bitterness at the corners of his lips” (65).
Anyway, Bond arrives in West Berlin and is joined by Tanqueray’s Number 2, a lean, tense man in his early forties named Captain Paul Sender. He is a stiff, obedient bureaucrat –naturally, Bond does not take a shine to him. As with every Fleming piece of fiction, there is a travelogue aspect to this short story as Bond reflects on Berlin: “James Bond had always found Berlin a glum, inimical city varnished on the Western side with a brittle veneer of gimcrack polish, rather like the chromium trim on American motorcars” (73).
“Yes, he had got the picture – the picture of a flicker of movement among the shadowy ruins on the other side of the gleaming river of light, a pause then the wild zigzagging sprint of a man in the full glare of the arcs, the crash of gunfire, and either a crumpled, sprawling heap in the middle of the wide street or the noise of his onward dash through the weeds and rubble of the Western Sector – sudden death or a home run. The true gauntlet!” (72).
Bond spends several days on night-watch carefully examining the area of no man’s land between East and West Berlin, gazing through the decaying wasteland in search of where the enemy sniper might be located. Among the many sights and sounds, Bond spots a beautiful, tall blonde cellist in a nearby women’s orchestra, and he fantasizes about her. He calls it a “long range, one-sided romance.” But when the tense moment of truth arrives, agent 272 begins a night run and climb over the barrier (this story takes place prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall), and with sweat dripping down his forehead, Bond spots a black-gloved hand emerge from a dark window with a gun –but in a twist, “Trigger” turns out to be the same blonde female cellist from the orchestra on the street! Rather than assassinating her, as Bond was instructed to do, he simply shoots her gun out of her arms, brutally injuring her left hand –an act which likely “scared the living daylights out of her.”
“Had she carried her weapon to and fro every day in that ‘cello case? Was the whole orchestra composed of K.G.B. women? Had other instrument case contained only equipment – the big drum perhaps the searchlight – while the real instruments were available in the concert hall? Too elaborate? Too fantastic?” (83).
By the end of this fantastic short story, Captain Paul Sender busies himself with filing official documents, explaining to Bond his need to explain why Bond failed to kill “Trigger.” But Bond simply shrugs it off, hoping for his own demotion –”with any luck it will cost me my Double-0 number.”
Film Review: The Living Daylights (1987)
“007 in New York”
Written in 1959 while Fleming traveled to New York on behalf of The Sunday Times to write a series of travel articles which were later collected in his books Thrilling Cities, Fleming wrote “007 in New York” as if to describe the city from James Bond’s point-of-view. While decidedly not the best Bond adventure, this shorty story does contain a recipe for scrambled eggs which came from May Maxwell, housekeeper of Bond’s friend, Ivar Bryce, whose name was the basis for Bon’s own housekeeper in the stories (May). It was first published in The New York Herald Tribune in October 1963 as “Agent 007 in New York,” but was subsequently renamed “007 in New York” for the 1964 American editions of Thrilling Cities.
James Bond flies from London to New York under the identity of “David Barlow, Merchant.” He is hoping to only spend about 24 hours in the city and remain anonymous, in order to warn a “nice girl” who once worked for the Secret Service –an English girl named Solange whom Bon once knew intimately. She now earns her living in New York, but has been found to be cohabitating with an undercover Soviet KGB agent. Bond has been sent to secretly warn her because if the FBI and CIA find her, they will surely treat her far worse.
This brief travelogue story is rife with Fleming’s characteristic contempt for the United States which is replete throughout the James Bond novels. Bond observes all the “hideous” souvenir shops and neon signs, here in the “guts” of New York, or the “living entrails.” All the beautiful old Victorian quarters are now gone or in a state of disrepair: Washington Square, the Battery, Harlem, The Savoy Ballroom, the Ritz Carlton, the St. Regis, and even food has gotten more expensive with worse quality. Unsurprisingly, Bond is disgruntled at almost everything he finds in New York, though he does describe a recipe for scrambled eggs at The Edwardian Room at the Plaza (Felix Leiter, who knew the head waiter, instructed them how to make it). There is a wistful, reminiscent tone to this tale as Bond revisits culinary establishments for old times sake. But he also wonders if America is becoming too unhygienic and filled with bugs. Needless to say, the mission goes awry, as we are later told on the plane, and Bond blames it on New York. “New York has not got everything.”
“007 in New York” is an experimental short story in the vein of the earlier short story “Quantum of Solace.” I cannot say this is anything close to my favorite Fleming James Bond tale, yet it somehow seems like a fitting place to end the series.
My ranking of these stories would be as follows:
- “Octopussy”
- “The Living Daylights”
- “The Property of a Lady”
- “007 in New York”
Thus concludes my year-long escapade through the complete literary works of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Fleming, Ian. Octopussy and The Living Daylights. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1966 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.
Macabre ending seems fitting for a greedy murderer. I’m a huge Bond film fan but have only read one of Fleming’s books, sorry to say. Will need to give them a try again.