The World of James Bond: The Lives and Times of 007

218 Pages·2017·18.94 MB·English

by  Jeremy Black

THE WORLD OF JAMES BOND

THE WORLD OF JAMES BOND
The Lives and Times of 007
Jeremy Black
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Names:Black,JeremyM.,1955–author.
Title:TheworldofJamesBond/JeremyBlack.
Description:Lanham:Rowman&Littlefield,2017.|Includesindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2017011420(print)|LCCN2017027136(ebook)|ISBN
9781442276123(electronic)|ISBN9781442276116(cloth:alk.paper)
Subjects:LCSH:JamesBondfilms—Historyandcriticism.|Fleming,Ian,
1908–1964—Characters—JamesBond.|Bond,James(Fictitiouscharacter)
Classification:LCCPN1995.9.J3(ebook)|LCCPN1995.9.J3B532017(print)
|DDC791.43/75—dc23
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TMThepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstheminimumrequirements
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PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
For Greg Clark

CONTENTS
Preface ix
1 PoliticalBackground 1
2 ChangingValues 27
3 TheLaterNovels 59
4 BondHitstheScreen 87
5 MooreandAmericanization 115
6 TheDaltonGlasnostYears 133
7 TheBrosnanEra 141
8 TheAgeofCraig 153
9 TowardaBondWorld 163
Index 177
vii

PREFACE
F
ictional characters take on the world. Let us start with one of
thegreatest,andnot,forthemoment,JamesBond.Hewillstride
in soon enough. In the mid-twentieth century, Sherlock Holmes,
a consummate puzzle solver and small-scale adventure hero, was
translated afresh to the screen by a revolver-armed Basil Rath-
bone. The corpus was brought up to date as, from 1938 to 1946,
Holmes,stillindeerstalker, was taken from the London streetsto
new destinations—Canada, the United States, and Algiers—and
givencontemporaryconcernsandfoes,inparticular,butnotonly,
theNazis.InSherlockHolmesandtheVoiceofTerror(1942),the
bestofthisfilmseriesandonethatuseselementsfromtheConan
Doyle story “His Last Bow,” Holmes is on home ground and
thwarts a Nazi program of sabotage and an attempted German
invasion whose mastermind is none other than the head of the
BritishIntelligenceCoordinationCommittee,SirEvanBarham.
As a reminder of the usual rule of detective fiction—that the
detective intervenes to restore a harmony disrupted by the hu-
bristic evil of crime—Barham is not really the Home Counties
gent he appears to be, but a German agent who took his place
when the real Barham was shot by the Germans in cold blood
while a prisoner in World War I. Like most fictional villains, Bar-
ix