Pun Salad

This is the ninth book down in my James Bond reading mini-project. Technincally, it's mostly re-reading, as I gobbled them up as a 60s teenager. Until my mom read a few pages of The Spy Who Loved Me and forbade me from further exploits.

The novel has an interesting backstory that Wikipedia covers: it began as a screenplay by Fleming and four other writers, got dragged into a legal wrangle. Largely due to its unique legal status, it formed the basis for two movies, eighteen years apart, both with Sean Connery playing Bond.

The edition I read is one that's been sanitized for modern, easily offended readers. No idea what was changed.

The book is unevenly paced, with a beginning that's pretty hilarious: Bond is overindulging on booze, cigarettes, and rich food, and (unfortunately) his boss, M, is on a health food kick, and orders Bond to take the cure at a naturopathic clinic, "Shrublands". Despite the book being over sixty years old, it's amazing how much the folks he encounters sound so much like today's health nannies. But in a coincidence that Charles Dickens might deem "a little far-fetched", one of his fellow patients is Count Lippe, agent of Ernst Stavro Blofeld's criminal organization SPECTRE. Lippe piques Bond's curiousity, but Lippe notices and decides Bond must die! But Bond lives, and gets his revenge. And since this throws off the timing of Blofeld's fiendish plot, Blofeld puts a hit on Lippe.

All this takes up about the first 25% of the book.

But Blofeld's audacious scheme is to hijack a British bomber carrying two atomic bombs, fly it down to the Bahamas, ditch it in the ocean, extract the nukes, and hold the American and British governments for ransom. It's a pretty good plan, because the plot is being carried out by the equally devious Emilio Largo, owner of the hydrofoil yacht Disco Volante (Italian for "flying saucer"). His cover is that he and his fellow SPECTRE goons are diving for sunken pirate treasure. But Bond finds Largo's weak spot: his mistress, Domino Vitali.

Domino smokes a lot, and takes about four pages telling the story she made up about the sailor pictured on her favored brand, Players Navy Cut.

It all culminates in a ten-page final underwater battle between Largo and SPECTRE squaring off against Bond, Felix Leiter, and a bunch of US Navy guys. Guess who wins? (And who gets away.)