Bond, also, sleeps with any woman he can he uses women, and he even sleeps with Domino when he should tell her about her brother’s death. So you see what Fleming is doing? The ‘good guy’ smokes and drinks copious amounts, and the ‘bad guys’ abstain. Bond smokes, and SPECTRE agents are instructed to never smoke for enjoyment they’re only to smoke in public as part of their cover smoking itself is frowned upon by SPECTRE.

What Fleming does is pretty genius, I think.

Now, what stood out to me in all of this (continuing on with the theme of the previous paragraph), is how Fleming contrasts Bond with the views of SPECTRE. The main bad guy is treasure hunter Emilio Largo and the Bond girl this time around is Domino, both memorable characters. It’s the first introduction to SPECTRE which, in the words of Felix Leiter is “a bunch of really big-time hoodlums – ex operators of SMERSH, the Mafia, the Gestapo – all the big outfits.” It’s also the first time we meet Ernst Blofeld and although we get a lot of description from his point of view, Bond doesn’t actually meet or interact with him in this novel. This novel will largely be remembered for several things in the larger Bond universe. Key characters and plot elements do tie in with the rest of the novel however but I still wonder if that part might have originally been meant for a short story and Fleming simply worked it into this larger novel. This part reads almost like a complete and isolated short story, much like in the previous volume, For Your Eyes Only which bundled five short stories together. However, the first four chapters are devoted to Bond’s mandatory sentence to a health spa on the orders of ‘M’ who is concerned about Bond’s recent downward trend on his medical report, likely due in large part to smoking 60 cigarettes a day and the consumption of large quantities of alcohol. The ninth James Bond book is one of the longer novels in Ian Fleming’s series.

As part of Operation Thunderball, James Bond is tapped to gather intelligence in the Bahamas where the plane might have gone down. A new group calling itself SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) steals a plane carrying two nuclear bombs and tries to extort £100m from the major superpowers or else the weapons will be detonated in unknown cities.

James bond thunderball book