Octopussy and the Living Daylights by ian fleming

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A slender collation of Bond short stories published in 1966, two years after Fleming had died. It comprises Octopussy, The Property of a Lady, The Living Daylights and 007 In New York. Viewers of the Bond movies will recognise two of the titles and a lot of the plot elements. The character of Hannes Oberhauser, an Austrian climbing and skiing instructor who acted like a father to Bond, is also introduced. Oberhauser features in the movie Spectre.

The stories themselves are enjoyable and are some of the better Bond tales. The plots are straightforward and the limited word count provides constraints around what Bond can get involved with. They are more like character studies. For example, Octopussy is a morality tale, with greed bringing repercussions years later to the main protagonist, Dexter Smythe (who seems to be modelled on Fleming himself).

In The Living Daylights Bond's thoughts on killing are examined once again, showing that although 007 did not like doing it, he considered that he must as part of his duty to complete an assignment. Once the mission is completed, with Bond deliberately not killing the assassin, there is an attitude of complacency and disobedience with Bond shrugging off his colleague's complaints about the incident.

So, a worthy final addition to the original Bond series. A quick, easy and recommended read.

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Sunther

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Decent short stories. (January entrance for the Buzzword Reading Challenge 2023, word in the title like 'life' or 'death')

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thesailingship

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The final book in the original Bond series consists of three short stories. These were uneven. The least interesting as a story was the one about Bond eyeing bidders in an auction. This reads like Fleming was doing a kind of product placement story highlighting the action and intrigue of a fine arts auction. In another review I read this was originally published in an auction house magazine, so there you go.

I enjoyed the other two stories more. In Octopussy, Bond really plays a bit role – he’s been asked to take care of some business while he’s on vacation, so he efficiently interviews his target and leaves. You realize he’s actually been judge and jury on this case and provides his target a choice. Quite interesting in that, and the Jamaican and maritime background and WWII backstory adds flavor. The final story, The Living Daylights, shows Bond doing 00- work, and here we see him cranky and human. This is quite refreshing; Bond acts as in some of the earlier novels but unlike all of the movies. I like a Bond who worries, gets pissed off, and blows off steam.

As this is the final Fleming Bond book in the series, and I’ve now read them all, I feel the need to reflect. When I was in Junior High, I wanted to read interesting and adult books, but the librarian (and fear of my Mom) would not allow me to check out Fleming’s books. Instead, I started on Agatha Christie mysteries and Perry Rhodan sci-fi serials and read dozens of them. I didn’t start reading Fleming until I was over 50. At this point, I can safely say that the most risqué parts of the books were, with few exceptions, the covers. Those early covers and the linkage to the movies with a continuously randy Bond were what my personal censors knew about the books. Much ado about not very much, I’m afraid. In their defense, I doubt I could have read those books with those covers in school without having them confiscated from the classroom, so I was being protected from that trip to the principal’s office. Also, I believe this is the first series of more than a few books I’ve completed in decades. Overall, I found the Bond books interesting in how they are not like the movies which are oh so familiar. And while at the movies were of a time, many of the books had a timeless quality where the action could have happened today.

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VinZentVanDough

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

✭✭½

“Octopussy” (1965) ✭✭½
“The Living Daylights” (1962) ✭✭✭½
“The Property of a Lady” (1963) ✭½
“007 in New York” (1963) ✭✭

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dbzakj

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I have really enjoyed both of Fleming's short story collections.
This set has three great short stories and one pointless, but inoffensive vignette.

"Octopussy" has shades of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of Four" (and perhaps one of these in turn influenced F. Paul Wilson's "The Tomb"?). It's a Bond-lite tail of an ex-secret service man living in retirement in Jamaica who Bond visits to call out on a dreadful sin from his past. (As I write this we've had the trailer, but still await the release of "Spectre" so the name "Hannes Oberhauser" in this story caused a bit of excitement!)

"The Property of A Lady" is a great little story, because it sees Bond undertaking a different kind of spy work, just a little detection at an auction house. I find I enjoy the Bond short stories because of these different sides of Bond. This story forms part of film "Octopussy".

"The Living Daylights" While action packed is mostly a character piece taking us into Bond's head as he does a difficult "dirty" job. This story does inspire a key scene in the film of the same name.

"007 in New York" is a little vignette where Fleming gives us some of his opinions of New York through James Bond. I feel this story would have been better placed at the start or middle of the collection, so the book could end with a bang rather than a whimper.
This story actually ends with Bond's recipe for scrambled eggs, which I suppose is sort of appropriate as Fleming/Bond has been obsessed with them through the whole series!

I've thoroughly enjoyed working my way through Fleming and now I shall move on to the continuation authors with cautiously high hopes.

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Breixlia

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

4 Stars. The story of a man possessed by a nasty secret for almost two decades. And the story of his pet octopus, a sea cat, the one he talks to. Now retired to Jamaica, Major Dexter Smythe had been in British Intelligence at the end of the war. For his service he had received an OBE, the Order of the British Empire. This one's an enjoyable novella - one of four shorts in the collection, "Octopussy and the Living Daylights" from 1966. Smythe's nasty secret had lead to "termites of sloth, self-indulgence, guilt over an ancient sin, and general disgust with himself." Because of his mother's ancestry, his German was fluent and he became an advanced interrogator for commando operations, part of the secret service's Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau. "Octopussy" might be the closest Ian Fleming came to describing his own WW2 experience. Just after the war, Smythe discovered a valuable cache hidden by the German top brass. Years later James Bond visits the Major's Caribbean estate, Wavelets, and asked him whether he can recall his service with MOB at the end of the war. Smythe decides to talk to Octopussy one more time. These original Bonds are good. (December 2020)

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Casual_Toast

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Like For Your Eyes Only, this rating is an average of all the short stories. This is the last book Fleming wrote, which I didn't realize until I was almost through it. So I'll have to go back to the previous one and end there. Octopussy (***) is a story I was familiar with because it's briefly recapped in that movie and is another story told from someone else's perspective with Bond a lesser character. I thought this worked a little better in The Spy Who Loved Me but it does work here as well. The Smythe character is well drawn and I like how Oberhauser comes up as I've been waiting for him since I saw Spectre. As a short story, it's solid but suffers as ever from Fleming's rambling tangents. Property Of A Lady (***) works a little better and shows Bond on a low stakes domestic mission that's a great time capsule of the Cold War. The use of an auction by the enemy is brilliant despite Fleming watering things down with too many snobbish details. This feels more like realistic intelligence work and it was refreshing. The Living Daylights (***) is the strongest of this quartet but again suffers from Fleming's pointless tangents. I get these books were travelogues 50 years ago so maybe it's less extraneous than badly aged. Bond's mission here is bleak and taut and the movie version of it is quite faithful. I liked that Bond saw this as a dirty business and resented it. When Fleming is focused, you can feel the grit and cold. 007 In New York (*) was printed in a magazine and is less than ten pages. So maybe it's not fair to be so harsh on it but this is the worst Fleming Bond and I'm now glad it's not my last. He sets up a mission that's as intriguingly low stakes as the other three but we never see it. Instead it's an Op-Ed about how much Ian Fleming hates New York. Seriously. The mission is summed up in two to three lines after the fact and the story ends so abruptly I thought pages were torn out. What the fuck? Three out of four is pretty good and the first three are very solid. The last one is filler and that's being generous.

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dubbernaught

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

James Bond started out as a literary character and soon turned into a movie franchise, becoming a “pop culture” icon in the process. I have watched a few Bond movies, discreetly enjoying them, without really becoming a fan. Perhaps that is why I was never really tempted to explore Fleming’s originals. I now realise that this slim volume of four posthumously published short stories are quite atypical of the Bond oeuvre and possibly not the best introduction to Fleming’s work. In “Octopussy”, Bond is almost a marginal presence, with the real protagonist being the “villian”, one Major Dexter Smythe. There is a good attempt at characterisation of Smythe, but I found the alternations between 1960s Jamaica and post-war Alps clunky, the ending contrived and the whole narrative style somewhat approximate. I liked the writing in “Property of a Lady” better, but this tale of an unusual auction (the only element from this whole collection reprised in the 1983 “Octopussy” movie) lacks the thrill and titillation one would associate with Bond. “007 in New York” is little more than a divertissement verging on self-parody, even includng a recipe for “Scrambled Eggs James Bond”. It was in The Living Daylights that I caught a glimpse of the author who has been described as “the best thriller writer since Buchan”. Nominally a description of a sniping assignment Bond undertakes on the East-West Berlin border, it involves days of waiting for the prey. It could easily have become a boring story but, instead, Fleming manages to ratchet up the tension, giving us a taste of what his character must have felt in his vigils in a blacked-out apartment. It also shows us a Bond who battles with his conscience and who, behind a cool exterior, can also be romantic and chivalric. In other words, The Living Daylight is a little gem, on the strength of which I’ll be happy to give Bond another chance. Any suggestions welcome.

This Vintage edition includes an introduction by Sam Leith, who not only explains what he owes to Bond (his life, no less) but also delves into what these short stories tell about who Bond is (and who or what he’s not).

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James Bond (Original Series) #14

Octopussy and the Living Daylights

ian fleming robert ryan

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