The last few scraps of Fleming's Bond are far from essential reading. Nice to get the series finished, but nothing here adds much to Bond's character or story.

This was the worst book I’ve read in a long time. I don’t understand why this was made into a series of movies and why they are so much better than the source material.
With each of the stories you first get a kind of briefing of what is about to happen and each time you hope that there will be some kind of twist to make it more interesting. This never happens. Everything happens almost exactly as you would think after reading the first pages. This makes for a reading experience that would be boring if it were not incredibly frustrating.

The last Bond book to have anything to do with Ian Fleming, and it's a short story collection, the second in the series. The first one, 'For Your Eyes Only' was quite good, so I'd had some hopes for this one as well. And what do you know -- it doesn't disappoint.

'007 in New York': 2 stars. The worst story in the book, makes an impression of its being a beginning for a scrapped up novel, and a rather trite beginning at that. On its own it's just flat and pointless.

'Octopussy': 4 stars. A solid story about past vices of an old man. The only downside -- there isn't much Bond in it (although he is the cause for much of what is happening in the text), but it still makes a good story from the viewpoint of someone who's got into 007's crosshairs.

'The Living Daylights': 5 stars. The best story in the book, and it is the second story where Bond takes up a sniper mission. Unlike 'For Your Eyes Only', which is the other one, this text presents a coherent and believable spy plot, and even the hint of a love story is unintrusive.

'The Property of a Lady': 4 stars. The story doesn't have any violence in it, and shows some basic detective work done by Bond. Despite its rather anticlimactic ending, the text is refreshingly and pleasantly different from other Bond adventures, although it follows the same general pattern.

Overall: 4. The book offers a set of down-to-earth stories, which include the signs of solid and quiet intelligence work, and are devoid of excessive cheek-puffing, delusions of grandeur and heroics which tend to infest the novels. Good show.

So this is an odds and sods collection of leftover James Bond stories published after Ian Fleming died, and a few years into the movie series. It includes two stories that “became films” in the sense that their titles became titles of films. The story “The Living Daylights” forms part of the movie version, but “Octopussy” bears little resemblance to that movie.

“Octopussy” is a good short story in the same way that several of Agatha Christie novels are good. Rather than put James Bond front and center, he is a catalyst of the plot, but the focus is one another character. It’s a good way of using Bond’s familiarity without having to do much with him. In this story an old British officer is found living in Jamaica off of money he’s secured by selling stolen Nazi gold, for which he also murdered a Nazi officer in the war. He’s long retired and past his career, he’s a sea creature enthusiast and snorkeler/spear fisher, and he’s recently been visited by James Bond, who is investigating the murder of the Nazi official, who body recently was recovered as a glacier receded. The focus of the story is the British officer’s decision making in the final moments of his life.

The second story in this collection is about a Russian double agent working to inflate the auction price of a Faberge art piece.

And “The Living Daylights” is a short story about Bond being sent to assassinate an assassin in Berlin. As he’s there and waiting, he muses and falls for a woman who walks the street he’s patrolling.

This was an audiobook edition, all read by Tom Hiddleston, who does a very good job in general, and poor Tom Hiddleston is left reading the accent of a Chinese character written by an old British man in the 1960s, a task which no white man can don passably or without a cringe-worthy result.

This quick and dirty read features four James Bond short stories, each of them a nice bite-sized adventure unto themselves. Although the last one, "007 in New York," is tiny, the other three were, in my opinion, unexpectedly satisfying and entertaining for the most part. I'll go through them one by one.

"Octopussy"- this story bears little resemblance to the 1983 film of the same name. For starters, in the film, Octopussy is a female character played by the dazzling Maud Adams, while in the short story, Octopussy is...well, literally someone's pet octopus. I guess the wonderful writers of the Roger Moore-era Bond films just couldn't resist the risque temptation. Anyway. This short story is one of the few Bond stories told from the perspective of another character, in this case, a former British soldier and operative who has been implicated in the murder of someone important in James Bond's formative years. We are given the full story on what went down (literally), and how greed drove the central character to do what he did, and how he ended up with James Bond coming to tell him he'd been found out. And yes, his pet octopus is there for a reason. Not a bad story at all. 4/5

"The Property of a Lady"- this story DID make it into a film as one particular scene. James Bond attends an auction for a priceless item, which was bequeathed to a known double agent in the British Secret Service. I was a bit put off by a somewhat distasteful trope, namely the "villain girl is ugly" trope, which seemed like a useless bit of information. But anyway, this story hit me a bit differently from other Bond tales, namely because Bond is never in any real danger, and never really seems to be in danger of being thwarted. This, however, was quite welcoming. Throughout my reading of the Bond saga, I wished there would be at least one "Mission: Impossible" type story where Bond completes his mission without being caught, albeit with tension and a sense of danger. Instead, he usually gets caught by the villain, has a philosophical debate with him, is left to die, and escapes. This story, while not anything particularly special, was at least refreshing in that regard. 3/5

"The Living Daylights"- this was, in my opinion, the strongest of the four stories. Bond goes to (what will become) Checkpoint Charlie in Germany to help a KGB agent defect to the West. It's cleverly written, and has a more coherent atmosphere than many other Bond stories. Bond's surroundings, in the tense environment of divided Berlin, are clearly felt. At the risk of giving spoilers, this story actually inverted the trope in "Property of a Lady," featuring an attractive villain. It would have made a good half hour or 45-minute TV episode. I have to say, there isn't really anything to complain about. 5/5

"007 in New York"- this one is very short, has no dialogue, and is just Bond's internal musings about the city of New York. It does offer an interesting portrait of 1960s New York's primary attractions, but other than that, there's not a whole lot to it. For this one, actually, I don't think I'll rate it. It's just...there.

So, with all this, I have finally reached the end of all the Bond novels, an endeavor which took me way too long (nearly four years) to accomplish, mainly because of life getting in the way and almost losing interest. What's the verdict? I can safely say that compared to the films, the novels have much more substance and humanity to them; Bond is actually a cold, calculating, damaged yet efficient spy instead of the womanizing happy-go-lucky buffoon in many of the films from the Connery years even into the 90s with Brosnan. Not until Daniel Craig did we finally get a look at what Bond's true personality looks like as Fleming imagined it.

The novels themselves are a mixed bag as far as storytelling is concerned. One definitive thing I picked up on was that Fleming is clearly at his best when he is fully invoking his area of expertise- spycraft, intelligence, espionage, counter-espionage, etc. The more fantastical villains, such as those in "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger," are fun I suppose, but those stories simply don't measure up to ones like "From Russia with Love," in my opinion the strongest novel in the franchise. In that story, Bond is up against his true opposite numbers in Soviet intelligence networks, and in that sort of story, Fleming shines. The same can be said of "Thunderball" and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," which pit Bond against SPECTRE and its leader Blofeld.

The final point I'll make is that to enjoy these novels, you have to willing to look past the 1960s chauvinism and racist tendencies that are apparent in them. These tended to grate on my nerves, as the female characters were typically weak, submissive, and molded to whatever Fleming's notion of ideal womanhood was. And the non-white characters were of little substance, typically dumbed down and heavily stereotyped. But I decided that I would look at these novels for their literary value, to see just how good they are as adventure novels. At times, I found racism or sexism to be too much to handle, but I did manage to be entertained by Bond's adventures most of the time.

I'll give the overall series a 3.5/5. Some definite high points, and some pretty bad low points, but overall leans in the positive direction.

I know the bar is very low on a tiny, tiny collection of four stories put together and pumped out for content in the wake of Ian Fleming's death, but credit where it's due I actually really liked all four of them. "Property of a Lady", "The Living Daylights" and "007 in New York" are great little slice-of-life missions all with different tones and focuses, while "Octopussy" has barely any James Bond in it at all and is almost an entirely separate espionage tale. I like these little experimentations that feel more in line with more respectable forms spy fiction instead of the cartoonish tone of a what I think of as a typical Bond story -- maybe I just like Bond being refitted into a short fiction format to have a more interesting perspective of storytelling, I dunno.

OCTOPUSSY: Delivers another morsel of Bond's past, the link to Hannes Oberhauser. Interesting story with a bit of a twist, providing one of the occasional and treasured glimpses Fleming gives us to Bond's backstory.

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY: Adapted into the "Octopussy" film - the plight of the Faberge emerald sphere and how it aided M and Bond in uncovering a high-ranking Soviet presence in London.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS: To become the opening/backbone of the film of the same name - James Bond is after "Trigger" - a sharpshooting assassin - to protect one of MI6's own. Quite a twist.

007 IN NEW YORK: Mostly exists to show Bond's affinity for New York - the sights, the meals, the drinks and Solange, who appeared in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and the film, "Casino Royale." Brief, but anecdotal.

4 stars

James Bond isn't even really in the first story, but...Hiddleston.

Lfggg ily James.

Read this just so I could say octopussy.

This was another fun look at Bonds mind, and some quick stories. I wish Flemming had written more short stories for Bond.

Again a solid 3 stars for Fleming and the end of my intensive read-through of all 14 Fleming Bond books. This - the second posthumous publication - is, like For Your Eyes Only, a short story collection. However, as the original publcation only contained two stories and must have been about 120 pages of very large type, it's not really good value for money. Even adding "Property of a Lady" only brings it up to about 140 pages.

I think that the short form suited Fleming, because he could indulge his interest in description and tense single situations, and his lack of plot is less of a problem when you don't have to transit between different points. The three stories here are all good quality: Octopussy is like the story Quantum of Solace in FYEO, in that Bond is a spectator and the story really involves everyone but him who's only come to arrest a man - I enjoy these Bond stories, but I know many feel cheated by them; The Living Daylights is a quiet and tense tale of Bond on sniper duty in Berlin, it has a nice twist and because it has no plot whatsoever plays to Fleming's strengths; the last tale, Property of a Lady, added for the Penguin editions, is a nice coda, although the ending is a little too subdued to draw a line under Bond and might have been better being put in-between the other two.

So - Bond done, on to something else.