On Her Majesty's Secret Service

"It is a great book. It’s got all the classic Bond elements in it. The film is very faithful to the book. In the book, the women are from around England, but in the film, they’re from around the world. [SPOILER ALERT] Blofeld brainwashes them by hypnotizing them to take back biological weapons that will destroy the agriculture when they go home. It’s got the famous hideout on the top of a mountain in Switzerland. Fleming wrote about what he was interested in and where he liked visiting. He loved skiing. This was an area of the Alps he knew really well. He was fascinated in genealogy, so he researched that properly, and he put all that into the book. His family has no earlobes. The Habsburg chin is a big thing. For some of them it was so bad, they could barely talk. It was the great line, so they could only marry other Habsburgs. So yes, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in the book. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a good, strong, tightly written book. The descriptions of the skiing are really well done, especially the sequence where Bond is escaping down the mountainside at night. Blofeld sets off these avalanches behind him and it’s fantastic. And Bond gets married. It goes back to Casino Royale , where he says it’s too dangerous to get married. Again, he says, ‘I’m going to leave the Secret Service, I’m going to get married.’ And we see why it’s not a good idea for Double-O agents to get married. Yes, because he’s constantly sending Bond to different parts of the world and there are new characters in all of them. Blofeld is the only recurring villain, and he’s not in as many of the books as he is the films. But they do all have a few basic elements: you have M, you have Moneypenny—although Moneypenny is not quite as significant in the books and James Bond’s secretary, Mary Goodnight, initially plays a bigger role. You’ve got the Double-Os and people giving Bond his gadgets and weapons. It’s Q division in the books—not a person. Then you have your Bond villain with a lair. Bond has an initial contact of a competitive nature, gets closer, gets captured and escapes and wreaks havoc. “It’s about psyching out your opponent” It’s quite clever that on the back of that structure, you can tell so many different stories in so many different ways. You’ve got that very strong and simple scaffolding underpinning it, around which you can build anything and tell any story you like."