Moonraker

"No, the second James Bond book was Live and Let Die . Casino Royale was the first outing for James Bond, and over the course of the next three books, you can see Fleming finding his way, trying things out, sending Bond to different places. He was very canny, Fleming. He realized he’d come up with a really good, strong and interesting character, this new type of hero who has many negative qualities. He is an assassin, for a start. And he thought this could be really big, but he knew that two things needed to happen to cement his longevity. One, the books would need to be bestsellers in America. The first book, Casino Royale , became a bestseller in the UK. But he didn’t want it to be a parochial, English thing. It had to be big in America. He also had to get it on the screen. For Casino Royale , he managed to get CBS to buy it, and they did a live TV drama version of it, if you can imagine trying to fit a James Bond story into an hour of live TV drama! Luckily, it wasn’t a success, because actually James Bond, in the filmic version, was much better suited to the 60s—where you could explore a bit more of that cynical, amoral side of things. It could be sexier and glossier. But you could see in the second book he wrote , Live and Let Die , an attempt to get the book popular in America, with Bond getting sent to America and getting involved with criminal gangs out there. It was a slightly failed attempt, I think, at breaking the American market. Moonraker is the third book and the only one that’s set entirely within Britain. We’re starting to see some of the classic elements come into play—the relationship with M, the set-up at MI6. Interestingly, the woman he teams up with, Gala Brand, is a policewoman. And there are elements of Moonraker that feel more like a police investigative story than the classic James Bond international thriller. That’s one of the things I like about it. There are some great bits of descriptive writing in the book. Fleming was very good at writing about action, which actually is very difficult to write. There are some great action sequences, including a nighttime car chase through Kent which ends up with the villains releasing huge rolls of newsprint from the back of a lorry which come tumbling down the road and smash into James Bond’s car. It’s brilliantly described. It feels like what you get in the James Bond films. You can just imagine Fleming, newspaperman, seeing these lorries and thinking, ‘Wow! What would happen if one of those rolls fell off, and you were going at speed?’. You can see how his life experiences fed into his books. He was always thinking, ‘What could we do with this?’ There’s also a fantastic description of a card game. In a lot of the books, Bond is called in to see M, who says, ‘This is the villain, go and investigate him.’ And Bond then goes off to see the villain. In Moonraker , Hugo Drax is a member of M’s club who is cheating at cards. In the classic structure, James Bond has a mock combat with the villain quite early in the book as a way of meeting them and getting close—famously, the golf match in Goldfinger . But, in this book, it’s another card game. Bond plays cards with Drax, the card cheat, and it goes from there. There are some great parts of the book. Gala Brand is a really strong and interesting character. In the books, the women are quite tough, independent and athletic. To call them Bond girls demeans them. They’re not girly types, which Ian Fleming didn’t like. But they do often tend to be damaged in some way, and Bond sees that—he wants to put his arms around them and look after them. Yes, the things they’ve picked out from it are the villain’s name and the rockets. [SPOILER ALERT] In the book, Hugo Drax is supposedly working for the British building rockets to protect the country and Bond discovers that the first rocket is going to be aimed into the heart of London. So he has to stop it being launched. That aspect is kept in the film. Most of the rest of it isn’t because it is quite small-scale and domestic. For me, that makes it interesting. It’s a nice, taut little investigative story. But the film came out just after Star Wars . They decided, ‘Hey, we’re going to send Bond into space, and they’re all going to be wearing white.’ It becomes like a disco in space. It’s not the best James Bond film ever made, but it has a certain madcap entertainment value. It’s very vividly described. Fleming’s journalistic training meant he was very good at summing somewhere up quite quickly and putting you there."