JAMES BOND

He is the Granddaddy of them all! I understand and appreciate that there were many before him but my statement remains. He is the Granddaddy.

There are many spies in fiction which many might claim are better than Bond. George Smiley is certainly smarter. Quiller is more adaptive. Sam Durell is more resilient. And so on.

No one, however, can ever take the place of Bond.

I'll be the first to admit that Bond stands at the pinnacle that he does because of the movies. Certainly, no other spy character has anywhere as many movies as Bond. Helm had three, Flint had two, Quiller had one, Smiley had five (and two awesome mini-series), and so one. Bond has 25 (or 28 depending on how you look at them).

But the fact remains that when you think of a spy, you think of James Bond. Pick any ten people off the street in any city in the world, ask about what spy they know best, and nine will say James Bond!

You have to wonder how Ian Fleming would have felt about the overwhelming dominance his creation enjoys. Forty years after his death, his character is still being written about and still being represented in film.

That's a helluva legacy!

After Fleming passed away, other authors were hired to continue the sage of 007. They include:

A friend of Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis was selected to start a new series of James Bond books four years after Fleming's death. An accomplished author, Amis brought to the series years of quality writing experience. It had been planned that a progression of various authors would continue to produce Bond novels but then that plan fell apart.

When the 10th movie was being planned, the director, Lewis Gilbert, brought in Christopher Wood in to help write the screenplay. His work was so well received that he was given the opportunity to write the next one as well. With the script duty came the opportunity to write these book tie-ins. His two semi-original works were given names similar to the originals to show they were close but not the same books.

Except for Wood's almost pastiches, there was nothing new on the Bond shelves from 1968 until 1981.

Back in 1961, John Gardner had such disparaging attitudes towards the character of James Bond that he went so far as to create one heckuva spoof character, the wonderful Boysie Oakes, who was everything that Bond was not. Twenty years later, Gardner is chosen to bring Bond back to life in a new series. Apparently his attitude changed. He brought the agent somewhat uptodate and though he aged the man a tad and explained his absence by indicating the Double-O section had been discontinued. Bond came across as older and wiser and not so ready to leap before looking.

Gardner produced more original Bond works than Fleming did, coming up with 14 original adventures and two novelizations of movies.

The gap between the Gardner era and the next was just one year, riding on the fresh popularity to Bond that Pierce Brosnan's protrayal was producing.

Raymond Benson is without a doubt a James Bond fan, something one could never really suspect John Gardner of being. He was a director of the Ian Fleming Foundation and was, for several years, a vice-president of the American James Bond 007 Fan Club. Best of all, he wrote the James Bond Beside Companion which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award and is considered by many as a definitive guide to the Secret Agent.

Even more important was the fact that Mr. Benson was a pretty impressive author and his version of the character was, again IMHO, very well done. He brought back an edge to the spy and made him a man you did not want to anger. His tales were sharp and crisp and felt fresh. Though he did not write quite as many as Gardner, he did come up with 6 originals and 3 novelizations.

After the Benson years, a half decade passed before the next iteration of Bond. This was what amounted to a one-shot work by Sebastian Faulks.

Acclaimed mystery/suspense writer Jeffrey Deaver was then asked to try his hand at Bond and he came up with one book as well.

2013 saw William Boyd try his hand at a Bond adventure.

In 1959 an author named J. M. Harwood (Johanna Harwood) wrote a short story of a young James Bond that was published in the UK magazine Nursery World on September 3rd 1959. It was reprinted in the UK magazines Now & Then in 1960 and Cinema Retro in 2012. Johanna Harwood is better known as one of the screenwriters for the first 2 Bond movies. Sources say that this story is unauthorized, but I've found that Ian Fleming himself gave his consent and blessing. In my view and opinion, that makes it an official and authorized story. But, you can judge for yourself. It is parody of sorts anyway.

As was common back then with lots of magazines printing fiction as well as articles, many of the short stories shown below and later packaged in collections first saw the light in such publications. Wherever known I have attributed which periodical had what.

An incredibly gifted and imaginative fellow named Stuart Basinger took it upon himself to come up with some terrific covers for many of these stories and used the style of British publisher Pan to imagine some covers all on their own. I do not know how to contact him to get permission and I will certainly remove them if he wishes but for now, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

While much has been said over the years, including by myself, about how President Kennedy's naming of a James Bond book as one of his favorites putting the Ian Fleming series on the map, it was the terrific splash made by Dr. No that made "Bond, James Bond" a household name that 50 years later can still bring hundreds of millions of dollars to a study with a new release.

Along the way an army of naysayers have attacked the agent for a myriad of offenses. Mysoginistic. Egotistical. Machismo. Violent. Deadly. Lots and lots of adjectives, many of them damning. Many of them quite true though the degree can be open to debate. But through all that, the old adage about such larger-than-life characters, "Women want to know him. Men want to be him", remains true.

The face of Bond has changed over the years as the people playing him have come and gone. Sean Connery, the archetype, was ruggedly handsome and almost brutal in his approach to everything but he had such a magnitism it was impossible to get away. George Lazenby was, well, a one-timer. Roger Moore gave Bond a playfulness at times that no one had expected from the character and it was fun for a while (this IMHO). Timothy Dalton was earnest when, unfortunately, no one apparently wanted earnest. I really liked this version but he was too severe and not enough "let's enjoy life while we risk ours". Pierce Brosnan brought back the tad more devil-may-care interpretation and held my interest for the first couple of movies then lost it in the fourth with an invisible car. Then after a half decade wait, Daniel Craig brings a new and fantastic take on the character that hooked me good.

Whichever actor and representation fits your fancy, Bond is definitely here to stay.

You will notice an odd numbering to the movies shown below. There are 26 movies listed. When the latest, as of this writing, came out, Skyfall, it was billed as the 23rd Bond movie and Bond purists will hold anyone to that number and rightly so.

The number refers to those coming from Eon Productions, the company run for many years by Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. That outfit acquired the rights and came out with the first Sean Connery movie in 1962 and has been the power behind the cellulod juggernaut ever since. The company came into existance largely just to create the Bond films because Broccoli's former partner, Irving Allen, had no interest in them. Though both gentleman would eventually pass away, the legacy of their vision remains and the company still produces exciting action dramas every couple of years.

The remaining three entries are the outcasts.

Shortly after creating Bond, Ian Fleming sold the video rights to the first book, Casino Royale. Before the phrase made-for-television movie became common, the practice was well established. Numerous shows were ..... [in progress]

Several runs were made at dramatizing the novels.

The first was shortly after the books were published. It was presented by South African Radio (SBR).

Three decades would go before another of the books was adapted, this time by the BBC and starred Michael Jayston, a man who played a major character in the first George Smiley mini-series and was Quiller in the one season television series.

Nearly two more decades pass and the BBC bring out several more adaptations with Toby Stephens playing Bond. Stephens had also played Gustav Graves, the alter ego of the villain Colonel Moon in the Bond movie Die Another Day.

Five years after he created James Bond, Ian Fleming was approached by the publisher of the Daily Express regarding doing a daily strip about the spy. According to several sources, the author was reluctant but eventually agreed and an impressive run began.

At first the stories were strip renditions of the books, and stories, that Fleming penned. Four different writers were involved with Anthony Hern doing the first story, Henry Gammidge doing 11, Peter O'Donnell (later of Modesty Blaise fame) did 1, and Jim Lawrence did 5. One story from the For Your Eyes Only collection, Quantum of Solace, did not get the treatment, probably because it was not really a Bond story, just a story that Bond listened to and one without any action. Two stories from the Octopussy collection, 007 In New York and The Property of a Lady, also did not get made, likely because they were more or less throwaway stories with no real action or plot (IMHO).

Once the Fleming stories were exhausted, in 1968, the desire for daily looks into Bond's escapades continued. Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun was just getting published. It fell to the current writer, Jim Lawrence, to come up with his own story arcs. He did two before Colonel Sun was available for his treatment. After that, Lawrence was on his own. John Gardner would not get hired to write new books for another decade. Lawrence was the sole writer of Bond adventures.

In total, Jim Lawrence originated 33 unique adventures, most of them worthy of their own books which no one ever did for some unknown reason. This makes him, of all the people to write Bond tales, the most prolific.

The Daily Express did not run the strips without end. A clash with Fleming caused the publication to stop Thunderball in the middle. Other publications were around, though, to pick up the series and continue.

In 1978 after the Shark Bait story arc was completed, work was started on War Cloud but only a dozen strips were made and none of those were printed before the James Bond strip came to an end, at least for a few years. When it resumed, Jim Lawrence was brought back to do the writing but a new artist was drawing things and the return was marked by a new storyline.

Other sites have more extensive coverage of the comic strip and should be checked for.

It comes as no surprise that the most famous spy series would have games associated with it but, wow! I had no idea there were so many. Thank you, Wikipedia, for providing so much information about them. And a special thank-you to a very loyal contributor to this site who provided a grunch of data.

The quality of the games range, of course, even considering for the era of its creation. By that I mean a game from 1997 should not be compared alongside a game from 2010. Technology has advanced so much that what would never be attempted in the former is relatively easy to do in the latter. The games, when rated by experts, have to be considered for the state of the art at the time. In that regard, some of the games fell short but most did not. And a few, especially now, really rate high.

I have not played any from the past decade because, getting as old as I have, I am less than adequate. However, in its time (and mine), GoldenEye for the N64 was one of the very best games ever done and I was actually not too bad at it. I loved it!