Thunderball

"There's a man who leads a life of danger.

To everyone he meets he stays a stranger.

With every move he makes, another chance he takes.

Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow."

Lyric to Secret Agent Man

Published in 1961, this novel came out just as the Bond phenomenon was beginning to take off.  This was Fleming's ninth Bond book and he was finally starting to get some real attention.  Fleming had been publishing stories in Playboy magazine since 1960 and the first Bond film, Dr. No, would be coming out in 1962.   In a press conference, a reporter asked President Kennedy what type of books he liked to read. He said his favorite books were the James Bond series, by Ian Fleming and the books soon rose to the best-selling list.  An icon of the sixties was born as America became fascinated with the idea of the professional spy, a man who lives behind a mask.

This story is an action-adventure set mostly in the Bahamas, where London's man in Havana introduces himself to the beautiful Domino with the now famous line; "My name is Bond, James Bond".  This story also introduced the super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of SPECTER, who steals an atomic bomb to extort money from Western governments.  Thunderball was originally written as the first episode of a proposed James Bond television series, or possibly as a film.  Fleming collaborated with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham on the storyline and screenplay.  However, the series fell through, so Fleming novelized it into his ninth James Bond novel.  The real attraction of the book is the playboy lifestyle that Bond lived.  Gambling, women, alcohol and benzedrine.  This guy knew how to have a good time.  Fleming liked to use detail and brand-names to identify his characters and lend a sense of place and reality to his otherwise pretty wild fictional world.  He tried to appeal to all the senses in his writing.  In an article in 1962 Fleming said:

My contribution to the art of thriller-writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds.

It is surely more stimulating to the reader's senses if, instead of writing 'He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour - excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle', you write 'Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.' The following points should be noted: first, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man's meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.

He did not try to write great literature, which he said was aimed at the head or heart, but that the target of his books:

...lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh.

The hero, James Bond, is at times unsure about his decisions, but he always exudes confidence in his relationships with women.  The heroine, Domino, is no feminist, but she is no damsel in distress, she is strong and independent.  In the end it is she who saves Bond from the stranglehold of SPECTER's Emilio Largo by putting a spear through his neck.  The villains, Blofeld and Largo, are huge villains, fascinating for their hang-ups and obsessions.  Blofeld is described as a man who, "didn't smoke or drink and he had never been known to sleep with a member of either sex", and Largo as, "the epitome of the gentleman crook - a man of the world, a great womanizer, a high liver".  All in all, quite a cast of characters.

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