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.

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

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.

✭✭½

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

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.

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)

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.

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).

Meh, it was OK. There are 4 short stories in this book. The first one Octopussy hardly featured James Bond at all. Instead it was a story about a retired WWII British Military man who does some bad things and ends up in Jamaica where James Bond is sent to question him. A very detailed and interesting story even if James Bond had a small part.

The second story, Property of a Lady, was about identifing a Russian secret agent in the British government. Not a bad story but somewhat anticlimatic. The set up was good but the ending was blah, basically yay, it's that guy.

The third story, The Living Daylights, was about James Bond trying to asassinate another contract killer. A British spy with some valuable information is trying to make it from West Berlin over to East Berlin, the catch is that he only has a window of 3 days, and the other side knows the time and location. Bond's job is to make sure the spy makes it to their side by killing the man who has been hired to kill the spy. This was a good story. I found the reaction of his fellow worker interesting.

The last story, 007 in New York, was pretty bad. It started out with James Bond trying to get through Customs & Immigration in New York and thinking about what he plans to do during the trip. Then it ends with a paragraph of him complaining about how everything went wrong. Not sure what the point of this story even was or why anyone would even bother to put it down on paper.

This was going to be dirty work and Bond, because he belonged to the Double-0 Section, had been chosen for it. Perversely, Bond wanted to force M to put it in black and white. This was going to be bad news, dirty news, and he didn't want to hear it from one of the Section officers, or even from the Chief of Staff. This was to be murder. All right. Let M bloody well say so.

Four Bond short stories. None are very interesting.

1.) OCTOPUSSY
This is a short story about a man, living in Jamaica, who stole some Nazi gold during the war. Now, decades later, Bond has come to collect. What the man has done is even worse, because in stealing the Nazi gold he murdered a man who "was like a father" to Bond. It is called "Octopussy" because the man has a rather tame octopus named Octopussy (or just Pussy). Told from the Major's point of view, it is interesting to get another view on Bond and see another aspect of his life and job. I thought that this was the strongest story, although there is very little Bond in it.

2.) THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
A woman who is working for MI6 (but is really an agent from the KGB) receives her payment in a Faberge worth over 100,000 pounds. Nothing really happens in this story. Again, we are confronted by Fleming's belief that ugly people are prone to turn to evil because they feel slighted and inadequate.

3.) THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
Bond travels to Berlin in order to murder a sniper who is planning to kill a British agent. This is very rough for Bond because Bond is not an assassin. Actually, he has a huge problem with killing people in cold blood. Bond also shows mercy on a woman in this story.

4.) 007 IN NEW YORK
Bond travels to New York in order to warn a British woman that her boyfriend is KGB. This story is pointless and, by the way, Bond hates NYC. The only thing worth mentioning is that it includes a recipe for Bond's scrambled eggs.

SCRAMBLED EGGS 'JAMES BOND'
For four individualists:

12 fresh eggs
Salt and pepper
5-6 ounces of fresh butter

Break the eggs into a bowl. Beat thoroughly with a fork and season well. In a small copper (or heavy-bottomed saucepan) melt four ounces of the butter. When melted, pour in the eggs and cook over a very low heat, whisking continuously with a small egg whisk.

While the eggs are slightly more moist than you would wish for eating, remove pan from heat, add rest of butter and continue whisking for half a minute, adding the while finely chopped chives or fine herbs. Serve on hot buttered toast in individual copper dishes (for appearance only) with pink champagne (Taittainger) and low music.

A very fun collection, probably some of my favourite Bond shorts so far. I'm especially grateful for - in The Living Daylights - the confirmation of my deeply held belief that Bond would never go back into a dangerous situation just to fetch a put out woman's cello, no matter how many weapons it would later prove to contain. (Sure, if he'd known in advance about the weapons, that would be another matter. Otherwise, he would have told her to shut up and gotten them to safety.) This doesn't happen in the book, which just shows it's all silly Hollywood butchery of the character ;)

Also... The audio was rather splendidly read by Tom Hiddleston.

“Octopussy and The Living Daylights” is the final published Ian Fleming-written James Bond book, and is a collection of short stories that he had written, for the likes of the Sunday Times and the New York Herald Tribune, that had not previously been published as a book. There are four stories in total. Being short they are more like snippets of James Bond's life than anything else.

The first story is “Octopussy” and tells the tale of Major Dexter Smythe, "a Melancholic who had slid into a drooling fantasy woven around the birds and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of [his Jamaican villa] Wavelets". In the story he has a friend wild octopus that he calls Octopussy that he feeds regularly but who is to prove less than friendly at the end (after Bond has paid the Major a flying visit).

The second story is “The Property of a Lady” which was originally published by Sotheby's (in an annual called “The Ivory Hammer”). This story helped form part of the plot of the Octopussy movie (no dressing up as clowns for James Bond here though). It tells the story of Miss Freudenstein, a double agent working for the British and the Soviets. She is suddenly to inherit a Fabergé egg from abroad which she is to auction via Sotheby's. "It would be an ingenious method of greatly rewarding the beneficiary without the danger of paying large sums into his or her bank account." James Bond is to attend the auction to see if he can spot the KGB bidder so that they can be deported.

The third story is “The Living Daylights”. It is about a lady sniper cello player who Bond scares "the living daylights out of" (and which forms part of the plot of the Living Daylights move).

The fourth story is “007 in New York”. This is the shortest at 9 pages long and sees James Bond in New York thinking that New York has everything but by the end realising it doesn’t as his best laid plans get ruined because of something New York doesn’t have.

All-in-all these are interesting reads. Ian Fleming’s writing still shines through in these short stories, but there is less meat to them than the full length novels as they are shorter.

James Bond will return.