After reading through Ian Fleming’s James Bond books last year, I decided to take a stab at ranking the novels from worst to best. Admittedly, sifting through these books and organizing them into a coherent preferential order has proved to be surprisingly difficult –the top five or six novels are all wonderful pulpy adventure novels of relatively equal repute. I enjoyed each of them in their own unique way. However, the lesser Bond novels are readily apparent to me. It’s worth mentioning that Ian Fleming is not a writer for everyone. His books are filled with explicit bigotry, sneering condescension, sadistic sexual practices, blatant racism, and a rejection of the emerging post-colonial mid-20th century world. For Fleming, most people living outside the British Commonwealth were considered lazy, immoral, frivolous, one-dimensional, and desperately in need of sophisticated paternal guidance. But no country faces more scrutiny than the United States, a country which Fleming apparently held in very low regard (likewise James Bond is equally repulsed by America). In some ways, the character of James Bond can be interpreted as Fleming’s alter ego in this respect.
However, the true essence of James Bond remains surprisingly elusive throughout the books –he is sometimes embittered and curmudgeonly, while other times he is dapper and wide-eyed. He is at once a brutal, relentless assassin –a sadistic womanizer– who also occasionally fusses over the weather, tea, foreign food, and so on. He is less of a flawless, suave, Übermensch of the ilk we have come to expect in the James Bond films. Throughout the books, there is a recurring sentimental sub-plot concerning Bond’s personal life. He often longs to retire from his job and find true love –to settle down and escape from both the drudgery and the danger work in the Secret Service. But despite coming close to settling down in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and also in You Only Live Twice, Bond is never actually able to break free. He remains bound to his job as a secret agent in perpetuity. Had Ian Fleming lived only a few more years, perhaps we might have seen a different side of Bond.
At any rate, I decided to primarily rank Ian Fleming’s full novels below. I did not include the two short story collections (For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy and the Living Daylights) since these two collections are filled with wildly varying, unique, and occasionally experimental short stories. However, I did individually rank each of the individual short stories further below, just not alongside the full novels:
12. The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
A vulgar, miserable, gratuitous James Bond novel if there ever was one, The Spy Who Loved Me is mercifully one of the shortest in the series (almost the length of a novella). In it, Fleming presents the story from the perspective of a woman –a rarity in the Bond ouevre. Vivienne “Viv” Michel is a Canadian woman on a road trip in America. She is repeatedly and horridly brutalized by every single man she encounters throughout the novel –she is robbed, beaten, and sexually assaulted– until a mysterious British man, James Bond, suddenly arrives at her remote motel to rescue her. However, despite Bond arriving on the scene like a heroic Saint George, Fleming’s intention with The Spy Who Loved Me was actually to show readers that James Bond is not an admirable, heroic character, but rather an a-moral assassin who dwells in “a private jungle” of his own (after all, upon saving Viv from a group of very bad men, Bond simply abandons her in the end). Thus Bond is shown to be about as repulsive as anyone else in the story, especially when considering some of the ludicrous passages found in this book like the following: “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.” The Spy Who Loved Me was a book Fleming later discarded –he requested that it be pulled off shelves, and he lamented the book’s excessive sleaziness and violence. Perhaps that is for the best. The Spy Who Loved Me marks the low point of the Fleming Bond series in my view.
11. Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
Another “Bond in America” travelogue, Diamonds Are Forever is a somewhat wandering novel in which 007 seems listless, bored, and consumed with contempt for the United States. Diamonds Are Forever is less of a Cold War spy novel a la Casino Royale (in fact, the Soviets and SMERSH are wholly absent in this one) and more of a stand-alone mission as we follow a gang of diamond smugglers (The Spangled Mob) across America. To me, this is an enticing enough premise, however, much of the novel ping-pongs between being a fairly milquetoast adventure or else a total drag. At least an appearance by Felix Leiter offers a bit of levity to the story –particularly at the climax which takes place during a memorable Old West-themed train sequence which leads Bond through the Nevada desert, followed by a brief nautical coda aboard the Queen Elizabeth. The “Bond Girl” in this novel, Tiffany Case, serves as one of Bond better paramours in the series (even if her upbringing highlights many of Fleming’s outrageously gratuitous female character tropes). And let’s not forget about the bizarre henchmen in the novel: gay lovers Wint and Kidd, who are memorably portrayed as campy and ridiculous buffoons in the Eon film of the same name.
The second James Bond novel is a decidedly sophomoric effort. Live and Let Die takes us on an unusual adventure across America and onward toward Jamaica as Bond tracks a criminal named “Mr. Big,” a fearsome crime lord with ties to an underground voodoo cult and links to the notorious Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH. Broadly speaking, the “Bond in America” novels are lesser adventures for 007 and Live and Let Die is no exception. This adventure confronts us with an avalanche of Fleming’s trademark bigotry and racism, as well as his bitter revulsion for the United States, while the plot largely concerns the hunt for Jamaican pirate gold. Solitaire, a voodoo seer, serves as a decent enough romantic partner for Bond and the memorable shark-infested crescendo of the novel leaves Felix Leiter horribly mangled for the remainder of the series. But Live and Let Die is an underwhelming change of pace from Casino Royale in my view. From odd plot-threads involving zombies and voodoo cults, to eyebrow-raising, deeply uncomfortable racial tropes, and even a slightly warmer, more romantic Bond, Live and Let Die is simply not one of the better Fleming Bond novels.
Unlike the Eon film of the same name, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger is a fairly bland and mediocre outing (it is also the longest of Fleming’s Bond novels). In it, James Bond returns to the United States for a bit of espionage while a greedy businessman and gold smuggler named Auric Goldfinger, one of the more memorable villains in the Eon films, famously launches a heist at Fort Knox to steal a king’s ransom in gold. Unfortunately, the strange “Bond Girls” in this book are somewhat forgettable: Tilly Masterson and Pussy Galore (the latter of whom is the leader of a Lesbian acrobatic troupe). Goldfinger also gives Live and Let Die a run for its money when it comes to racist screeds and bigoted ramblings littered throughout the text –Bond can be found complaining about Chinese people, short people, Koreans, and he apparently believes the women’s rights movement caused women to become lesbians. All the while, he continues his open contempt for American culture and its “soft, easy living” (at one point, Bond even bemoans the low quality of American cars). And if that isn’t enough, Bond somehow compares Masculinity/Femininity to a Master/Slave dynamic. It’s true that nobody ever looks to James Bond for moral guidance –seeing as how these novels are merely fun, simplistic, wild, escapist, pulp fiction adventure stories– but Goldfinger is still a pretty outrageous novel. It seems Fleming decided to let loose with any lingering inhibitions he might have otherwise concealed with this one. Goldfinger also marks a turning point in the series as we see the end of SMERSH in the Bond novels (from here onward the chronological series focuses on SPECTRE instead of SMERSH).
8. The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)
Widely believed to have been unfinished upon Ian Fleming’s death in August 1964, The Man with the Golden Gun marks an abrupt and somewhat anticlimactic ending to the Fleming James Bond novels. This posthumously published short novel sees Bond return to Jamaica yet again where he trails Francisco (Paco) “Pistols” Scaramanga, a freelance assassin and vicious gunman believed to be under KGB control. It is fitting that Bond’s final adventure (and Ian Fleming’s last novel before his death) sees James Bond revisit Jamaica, a country of great importance to both Bond and Fleming, where so many of Bond’s past adventures transpired. Unfortunately, this being an unfinished manuscript, the ending to the previous novel You Only Live Twice would have served as a much better send-off for the character in my view. And the idea that Bond would begin The Man with the Golden Gun as a brainwashed Russian asset only to be speedily revived and sent back out into the field to hunt down a notorious gunman, and then end the novel with a possible knighthood from the Queen… is all completely divorced from the slightly more plausible tales in the series, like Casino Royale. Still, I enjoyed this novel far more than expected. We can only speculate as to how it might have changed had Fleming lived a little while longer.
The first book in Ian Fleming’s unofficial “Blofeld Trilogy” (followed by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice) Thunderball introduces the infamous Ernst Stavro Blofeld, leader of the international criminal syndicate known as SPECTRE and Bond’s chief nemesis. However, Blofeld mostly operates in the shadows in this book as SPECTRE hijacks nuclear weapons and Bond is dispatched to the Bahamas alongside Felix Leiter to investigate the activities of Emilio Largo and his mistress Dominetta “Domino” Vitali. All things considered, for being the first SPECTRE/Blofeld novel, I had some fun with this one. It’s mercifully not as bad as Diamonds Are Forever, but it cannot possibly hope to rise to the heights of From Russia, with Love. And of course, it’s worth mentioning that Thunderball was mired in legal bureaucracy for decades after its publication since it was originally conceived as a cinematic script jointly written by Fleming and several other writers, most notoriously Kevin McClory, who eventually retained the rights to the story, characters, and plot threads contained therein (including Blofeld and SPECTRE). The extensive legal battle caused great distress to Fleming in his later life. It was not fully settled with Eon until the release of the film Spectre (2015).
6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963)
Book two of Ian Fleming’s unofficial “Blofeld Trilogy” (Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice) is a tale of many firsts for James Bond. In it, Bond tries to quit the Secret Service, he finally confronts the elusive Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and he actually falls in love and gets married. In addition to being a welcome return to form after Fleming’s experimental departure in books like For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Love Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is also a charming wintry Christmas tale. Unlike earlier Bond novels like Live and Let Die, Dr. No, or Thunderball, all of which were set in sunny beachfront locales, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is very much ensconced in the cold, crisp alpine aesthetic of the Swiss Alps. It offers an all-around delightful Bond adventure. For the most part, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is another wonderful addition to the Bond literary canon –it is often a fan favorite with an entirely unique tale—and while I found myself instantly drawn to the snowy, mountain-top imagery in this novel (particularly scenes of Bond working undercover as Sir Hilary Bray), it is weighed down by some glaring plot-holes that arise (further details can be found in my review of the book). But above all, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service features a tragic, melancholic, and deeply personal ending for James Bond –a sorrowful twist of fate for his true love La Comtesse Teresa “Tracy” di Vicenzo. The rest of the book, however, presents a convivial, pulpy James Bond adventure with plenty of sharp, lyrical prose. It comes highly recommended for true fans, despite not being my personal favorite in the series.
The third and final installment in Ian Fleming’s informal “Blofeld trilogy” sees our famed Saint George-styled assassin mired in the midst of a difficult year following the tragedy he faced at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The Secret Service suddenly whisks him off to Japan where he becomes embroiled in a mysterious plot concerning his infamous arch-nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The aptly titled You Only Live Twice offers a second chance at life for James Bond –he is faced with both revenge and redemption. You Only Live Twice marks a rebirth for Bond since he was falling apart at the start of the novel only to be led through ninja training and undercover deep into a medieval castle filled with all manner of fetishized interpretations of Dante’s hell wherein he pursues a personal vendetta against his fiercest enemy, the man who murdered his wife. In the end, Bond emerges as a blank slate, a new man in search of his identity alongside his nascent love interest, Kissy Suzuki. You Only Live Twice marks a unique point of departure and growth for Bond. Overall, it’s a farcically ridiculous novel that is simply too much fun to ignore, but I really loved this one. You Only Live Twice typically ranks lower among fans, but I found it to be among my personal favorites.
Dr. No presents a larger-than-life pulp fiction tale complete with a megalomaniacal villain operating from deep within a secret lair burrowed into a private island. It is exactly the kind of fantastical tale we are more accustomed to seeing in the Eon films. In Dr. No, Bond returns to Jamaica where he reunites with Quarrel (the friendly local who first appeared in Live and Let Die) in order to investigate a mysterious operation led by the reclusive Dr. Julius No on the remote island of Crab Key. Flanked by one of Bond’s more memorable female companions, Honeychile “Honey” Rider, Bond encounters the truth about a local legend of a giant mechanical “dragon,” followed by a seemingly impossible obstacle course, and even a giant squid awaiting him in the end. Adventure abounds! I really enjoyed this survivalist novel which features a fantastical larger-than-life villain, regardless of whether or not it makes a great deal of sense –I mean, a man with pincers for hands, whose heart sits on the right side of his chest, situated on a private island covered in guano, seeking to sabotage American missile launches, and hoping to study the limits of human suffering… It’s all a bit ridiculous yet it unfolds like one of the classic pulp novels of yesteryear, and it sure packs a punch!
Ian Fleming’s debut James Bond novel Casino Royale introduces readers to the fictional French town of Royale-les-Eaux, a coastal enclave perched near the mouth of the Somme where a lavish casino sits. Here, Bond has been instructed to bankrupt a portly, revolting Soviet operative at the baccarat table who goes by the name Le Chiffre. Joined by agents from France (René Mathis of the Deuxième Bureau), the United States (Felix Leiter of the CIA), and a beautiful young woman sent from MI6 named Vesper Lynd, Casino Royale hearkens back to the paranoid shadowy age of Cold War espionage wherein SMERSH seemingly lurks around every corner. The publication of Casino Royale marks the first appearance of many classic James Bond motifs like the smoke-filled casino, the Bond girl with a dark past, and even Miss Moneypenny (though her name in Casino Royale is simply listed as “Miss ‘Petty’ Pettaval”). Casino Royale is easily among Fleming’s finest achievements and it comes highly recommended to fellow fans.
Whereas many 007 adventures take us across the world to exotic locales, Moonraker remains firmly grounded within England. It is a deeply patriotic novel, an homage to Fleming’s beloved homeland. In Moonraker, we return to the thrills of high-stakes card games (as found in Casino Royale), along with a troubling investigation that leads from the towering cliffs of Dover to central London for a high speed chase, only to conclude in a dangerous, highly-volatile rocket launch off the coast of England. Hugo Drax is an unforgettable villain in the literary Bond-verse (other villains featured in later books are slight knock-offs of him, like Auric Goldfinger). The “otherness” of Hugo Drax, aside from him being a secret Nazi, is embodied in his elitism and his deformed physical features. He is a large, lurching man with fiery red hair and bad teeth along with a horribly scarred face. And Drax’s rocket launch serves as the ultimate symbol of revenge on behalf of the Nazis –a reminder that, for some, the war has never actually ended. In this way, Moonraker is a cautionary tale about what happens when public trust is placed too confidently in the hands of one man, such as an Ayn Randian mega-rich magnate. And Bond’s love interest, the rocket scientist Gala Brand, stands out as one of his great romances. Moonraker is Ian Fleming at his best.
1. From Russia, with Love (1957)
Famously listed as one of President John F. Kennedy’s ten favorite books in a 1961 interview for LIFE Magazine, Ian Fleming’s fifth James Bond novel, From Russia, with Love, might well have been dubbed “A Tale of Two Spy Agencies.” It cleverly shows both sides of the chessboard –both the Soviet agency SMERSH as well as the British Secret Service– with each side attempting to outmaneuver the other in a world of secrets, seduction, and murder, all while pursuing a mysterious MacGuffin called a “Spektor” device, or a cipher decoding machine. From Russia, with Love features a tense climactic chase aboard the Orient Express, and an ominous villain named Red Grant (chief executioner of SMERSH) who chases after Bond, while the sadistic toadlike Soviet bureaucrat, Rosa Klebb, watches from afar. Bond’s compelling love interest, Tatiana “Tania” Romanova, joins the voyage along the way, in addition to allies like Bond’s French counterpart René Mathis (Felix Leiter of the CIA does not make an appearance in this one). Of course, From Russia, with Love, ends on a cliffhanger in which Fleming apparently considered killing off James Bond, but thankfully he was persuaded to continue the series. James Bond lived to fight another day!
Lastly, I also ranked each of Ian Fleming’s James Bond short stories which are featured in two collections For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy and the Living Daylights:
- “For Your Eyes Only”
- “From A View To A Kill”
- “Octopussy”
- “The Living Daylights”
- “The Hildebrand Rarity”
- “Risico”
- “The Property of a Lady”
- “007 in New York”
- “Quantum of Solace”
NOTE: If you plan on purchasing copies of the James Bond novels, please do NOT buy new editions. In 2023, Ian Fleming Publications made the ridiculous decision to hire a group of “sensitivity readers” who naturally censored many of Fleming’s original novels. Sadly, this practice of hiring anonymous “sensitivity readers” has become en vogue in recent years (see attempts by anonymous “sensitivity readers” to censor the works of Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl). For the James Bond books, these unnamed editors –who are supposedly experts on social mores– reportedly removed a variety racial epithets and other prejudicial commentary from the books. And while Fleming’s novels are assuredly oozing with all manner of these dated attitudes, in my view altering the works of a deceased author is simply never the answer. We, as readers, should be forced to confront uncomfortable ideas and judge for ourselves –it is perfectly acceptable to cringe at things you read. But apparently Ian Fleming Publications thinks modern readers are simply too delicate and infantile to handle reading offensive words. So, they pulled all the original Bond novels from circulation and released a feeble, low-effort collection instead, complete with the use of free online imagery for cover art. The result has been cartoonishly embarrassing and it deserves no ones money until or unless the Fleming estate comes to its senses and starts issuing Fleming’s original works as intended.
Thank you for sharing this list. With so much of James Bond to reflect on and indeed from a much broader perspective today, it’s good that fans can feel freer to make their opinions known on these WordPress sites.