Rank the Ian Fleming novels

Books Ian Fleming
1

A new year brings a new ranking topic. This week’s topic: rank the Ian Fleming novels.

Here’s my ranking:

  1. FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE – Memorable characters abound in this story highlighted by Tatiana Romanova, Donovan “Red” Grant, Rosa Klebb, and the best ally of the series in Darko Kerim. The best scene is James Bond’s tense confrontation and fight with Grant on the Orient Express. Fleming’s fifth novel is his masterpiece. The well-plotted story finds Bond as a pawn in chess grandmaster Kronsteen’s diabolical SMERSH scheme. Throughout the story, 007 is in their crosshairs and yet he still manages to come out on top. Checkmate.

  2. THUNDERBALL – As the film’s tagline says: “Here comes the biggest Bond of all!” Fleming’s biggest plot features the debut of SPECTRE which steals two atomic bombs and uses them to blackmail the western powers. Memorable characters are Domino Vitali–the best girl of the series–Emilio Largo, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The highlight scene is the final confrontation between Bond and Largo. Understandably, considering the story’s origins, it’s the most cinematic of Fleming’s novels.

  3. ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE – I like Thunderball better, but OHMSS is probably Fleming’s second best novel. A masterpiece in its own right, OHMSS puts Bond in a unique position–in love–and shows the ramifications of that to a shocking degree. In the meantime, he tracks down SPECTRE and its leader and learns he must stop them from unleashing bacteriological warfare. Memorable characters are Marc-Ange Draco, Tracy di Vicenzo, Irma Bunt, and Blofeld. The highlight scene is, what else?, the final one that closes out the story with the most dramatic of endings.

  4. DOCTOR NO – Bond gets his signature handgun in this novel, the Walther PPK, before going off on a “routine” investigatory mission in Jamaica to look into a missing agent. But things are not what they seem as he learns he must stop Dr. Julius No from toppling American missiles. Memorable characters are Quarrel, Honey Ryder, and No. The highlight scene features Bond squaring off against a giant squid. The most sci-fi of all Fleming’s novels but still a lot of fun.

  5. LIVE AND LET DIE – Bond must stop a gold coin smuggling operation that sees him square off against the most powerful African-American criminal in the world. Memorable characters are Simone “Solitaire” Latrelle, The Robber, Tee-Hee Johnson, and Buonaparte Igance Gallia aka Mr. Big. The highlight of the novel is the keelhauling scene involving Bond and Solitaire. Much of the prose is of its time but beyond that is an entertaining story.

  6. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – Bond works his way up a diamond smuggling pipeline to shut it down once and for all. Along the way he meets memorable characters such as Ernie Cureo, Tiffany Case, “Windy” Wint, and “Boofy” Kidd. The highlight scene sees Bond rescuing Tiffany from the clutches of Wint and Kidd aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship. Another good scene takes place at a mud bath spa where Wint and Kidd’s cruelty is revealed in all its “glory” on the unfortunate Tingaling Bell.

  7. GOLDFINGER – Bond goes up against the series’ best henchman and best villain as they attempt to rob Fort Knox. 007 gets his first Aston Martin–this time a DB3. The book is entertaining, but the film improved on the details and is the clearly the better story. Memorable characters are Pussy Galore, Oddjob, and Auric Goldfinger. The highlight scene finds Bond getting Oddjob off an in-flight plane and his ensuing fight with Goldfinger.

  8. MOONRAKER – Bond starts out doing a favor for M by uncovering a cheat at Blades only to then investigate a death that’s closely tied to an important British missile launch. 007 soon learns that a much bigger nefarious plot is afoot–one that involves a deadly attack on London. Memorable characters are Ronnie Vallance, Gala Brand, and Hugo “Hugger” Drax. The highlight scene finds Bond out-cheating the cheater Drax in a game of Bridge. Not a lot of action, but a good detective story.

  9. CASINO ROYALE – The one that started it all. “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” A classic first line of the novel that couldn’t be more Fleming if it tried. Fleming wrote it to create the spy story to end all spy stories and came away with the best and most recognizable hero of the 20th century. Memorable characters include Rene Mathis, Felix Leiter, Vesper Lynd, and Le Chiffre. The highlight scene features a naked Bond strapped to a seatless chair being tortured by a carpet beater to the groin wielded by Le Chiffre. Again, not a lot of action, but the story perfectly sets up Bond and the series for all the stories to come.

  10. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE – A favorite for many Bond fans, but it’s lower tier 007 adventure for me. Too much travelogue and not enough action for me. Still, it is very atmospheric especially when Bond reaches Dr. Guntram Shatterhand’s lair and the Garden Of Death. Spiraling after his wife’s death, Bond is sent to Japan by M to try to obtain the story’s MacGuffin–a codebreaking device called Magic 44. Memorable characters are Tiger Tanaka, Kissy Suzuki, Bunt and Blofeld. The highlight scene sees Bond go Mano a Mano in a sword fight with Blofeld to get his revenge on his arch-nemesis.

  11. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN – Fleming’s final novel opens with a brainwashed Bond trying to assassinate M and ends up with 007 earning his spurs back by assassinating the world’s most dangerous assassin. Not a lot goes on here but there are great scenes to be had. Memorable characters are Mary Goodnight and Francisco “Pistol” Scaramanga. The highlight scene is the aforementioned attempted assassination of M.

  12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME – Fleming tried something different with this one, much of which is either unneeded or didn’t work, by focusing the story from the Bond girl’s point of view. But there are some things to like and this novel does give a different look/viewpoint of Bond. Bond suffers a flat tire in a thunderstorm and makes it to an empty motel whereupon he has to save a young woman from a couple of thugs. Memorable characters are Sol “Horror” Horowitz and “Sluggsy” Morant. The highlight scene is Bond’s “bedtime story” told to Vivienne Michel in which he prevents SPECTRE from carrying out an assassination on a Russian defector.

  13. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY – A collection of five short stories. I’ll talk about them in a later ranking.

  14. OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS – A collection of four short stories. Again, I’ll mention them in a later ranking.

5 Likes
2

Great idea! Have to think about my choices. Will get back to you.

3 Likes
3

Back already, having some minutes of unexpected spare time.

  1. DN

Surprising myself, yet I enjoy the pure adventure following the detective story beginnings.

  1. FRWL

Fleming‘s best spy story, although it takes time to get Bond involved.

  1. GF

Just highly entertaining to follow Bond into captivity, with his personality instantly depicted so well.

  1. OHMSS

Again a potent mix of spy story and adventure, elevated by the personal aspect. Since I am such a sap, the tragedy is what knocks it down a few notches (I prefer the happier endings, life is sad enough already).

  1. MR

Great villain, good setpieces, solid.

  1. LALD

Pretty straight forward and gritty, violence is hard and shocking, plotting is a bit uneven. The racism remains disgusting.

  1. CR
    Atmosphere is off the charts, but it mostly feels like a novella, not a novel. Should have been expanded with Parcours chases.

  2. TSWLM

What? Yes, it is not a really good book, nor a good Bond story. Still, I enjoy that it tries something else, and the atmosphere in that hotel is gripping.

  1. TMWTGG

Great premise, losing the tension a bit, but somehow I always enjoyed this.

  1. TB

It’s fine enough. Decent. Not thrilling. But nice.

  1. YOLT

The garden of death sequence is fun. The rest is not for me.

  1. DAF

My least favourite Bond novel. Mobsters are not as exciting as crazy megalomaniacs. Even if these days wannabes want to behave like both.

The short story collections have some good moments, but they remain under-read (is that a word?) by me.

3 Likes
4

I can elaborate reasonings later. Here’s my list:

  1. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
  2. ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE
  3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
  4. CASINO ROYALE
  5. DR. NO
  6. THUNDERBALL
  7. MOONRAKER
  8. GOLDFINGER
  9. LIVE AND LET DIE
  10. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
  11. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
  12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
  13. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
  14. OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
4 Likes
5

Been awhile since I ranked them. But based off of my last re-readings: (I’ll add explanations later)

  1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  2. Moonraker
  3. From Russia with Love
  4. Doctor No
  5. Casino Royale
  6. Goldfinger
  7. You Only Live Twice
  8. Thunderball
  9. Live and Let Die
  10. Octopussy and The Living Daylights
  11. For Your Eyes Only
  12. The Spy Who Loved Me
  13. The Man with the Golden Gun
  14. Diamonds are Forever
5 Likes
6

YOLT appeals to me because of the character arc and atmosphere. It’s a story that works best as literature rather than film. Bond is down and out and finds purpose again through the knowledge of Blofeld and Bunt’s location. They’re the ultimate Bond villains and the garden of death is Fleming’s best lair, alongside Crab Key. The alies - Dikko, Tiger and Kissy, feel like they genuinely care for Bond.

Eveything I like about the OHMSS film is essentially contained in the book. It’s a strong blend of action and heart with a fantastic location, leading in to that final confrontation in YOLT.

FRWL is a perfectly paced thriller. CR contains a lot of what I like about Bond with the casino and the character’s humanity front and centre. Essential Bond adventures.

DN is the book to show anyone who disputes the fantastical foundation of the franchise. It’s simple but very entertaining, while not losing sight it’s still a detective story at heart.

The two film adaptions push this vibe, but TB feels like the standard classical Bond adventure and for that I enjoy it a lot. Nuclear ransom, good Bond girls, cool locations and set pieces.

Like the best of Fleming, MR has a great atmosphere and the closer relationship with M at Blades is the standout. Overall a solid Bond story and influential. The same applies to GF, really. An iconic set of characters and scenarios but I agree the film improved things.

I think LALD is the best of the remaining books on my list in terms of being a standard Bond adventure. It doesn’t excite me in the same way as the others, but there’s enough to get it across the line.

DAF has potential with the ideas but it’s something I’ve never really connected with. TMWTGG has a good opening segment that should be used in a film, but the product itself feels underdone, partly due to Fleming’s health.

I don’t hate TSWLM actually and find the concept pretty interesting. But alas, I still place it down here with the short stories I lump together.

4 Likes
7

As usual I’ll just give my three favourites - and I’m even hard pressed to pick among them.

When I left cinema in 1977 after TSWLM there was this burning need to learn everything about this fantastic hero. A popular cinephile magazine had just taken off and ran a huge title story with pictures and numerous pages of background. So this James Bond came from the pen of one Ian Fleming and his books were to be found literally everywhere back then, airports, train stations, department stores.

The Bond craze of ten years previously had calmed down by 1977, but these novels were still close to our political reality, extremely topical. Hardly a year passed without an espionage scandal and the theme of the Cold War pervaded much of that era throughout Europe, east and west. This you’ve got to be aware of to understand how a not yet 10 year old got his hands on Fleming’s books. The same day I watched THE SPY WHO LOVED ME I acquired Moonraker and From Russia, with Love from my pocket money and started gobbling them up.

Moonraker was my first Bond novel and to this day ranks amongst my favourite. The Bond I met in these pages was extremely different from the one I had just seen on the screen. The book opens with the echo of two .38s ringing, a blank and a real one. This excited me enormously, a hero who spends his days at the shooting range! Soon enough though the action shifts to files and paperwork. But even that was told in an exciting manner, with the promise of chases and gunfights just around the corner. By the time Bond is given the task to spot a card cheat I was already hooked; even more so when Drax tells Bond to spend the money quickly. As a nine year old I knew what that meant. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on the Moonraker yet!

To this day the novel invokes the smell of tobacco, fuel and gunpowder when I read it. The German edition I first read was heavily truncated, all mention of Nazi war crimes gone or toned down because a fair part of the German readership back then had actually witnessed the war or even taken part - not on the side of the guys with the white hats…

Drax, Krebs and Walter were still recognisably German - but maybe so was Gala Brand, with her name and speaking German? The whole novel breathes the atmosphere of WW2 that had ended only a decade before it was written, even down to references of Peenemünde and its rocket technology legacy (that was by then long since exploited and developed thousands of miles away from the old V2 site). It was for long years Fleming’s most fantastic and politically naïve work - that nonetheless today is extraordinarily topical for Moscow’s open and covert warfare against liberal democracy in lockstep with right wing radicals, freaks and miscreants of every denomination. Fleming has the last laugh - although it would be a bitter one looking at our time.

From Russia, with Love, the second Bond novel I read (still not 10 years of age yet), threw me in at the deep end. For the first third Bond only appears as Smersh/MGB file. Instead, we meet the personnel of Smersh: a weirdly muscular, statuesque agent that’s being treated by a masseuse. She knows he is a creature of Russia’s vast apparatus of terror and oppression because those apparatchiks hired her to care for this man. She’s just giving massages of the professional kind (though she might have been asked to throw in the other sort, too, with no hope of refusing the apparat). And she feels curious about her lack of attraction to this guy with the Greek statue build. We soon enough learn why that should be.

Red Grant is a monstrous killer, asexual but with a need to sate his murderous episodes monthly, possibly in sync to the phases of the moon. When he was still a kid he tortured cats and dogs; later he moved to people. And when he deserted to Russia they had an inexhaustible supply of prisoners to keep him entertained when not on a mission in the field.

We meet Grant’s masters General G, Kronsteen, Rosa Klebb - as well as a somewhat naïve Tatiana Romanova whose role as cypher clerk is mainly to provide a veneer of unlikely but not impossible scenario for the Secret Service to get a Russian cypher machine. The whole affair is so fascinating, so compellingly written, that I didn’t even notice I’d read a 100 pages without Bond. And once things get going in earnest in Istanbul it only gets more thrilling. Still one of the best thrillers period.

For long decades On Her Majesty’s used to occupy the top spot in my ranking. Even today as I look at it a bit more closely and with a critical eye it’s easily one of Fleming’s best works. But these days I tend to prefer You Only Live Twice. It’s nowhere near as much a thriller as On Her Majesty’s, Bond does very little for very long stretches of the book. And what he does is medium grade civil servant networking, as per his brief. But it all happens before a strange and unfamiliar backdrop, a bizarre world we don’t understand any better than Blofeld’s perfidious scheme. It’s at least in part fantasy-Bond and there’s a part of me that feels Bond deserved being left alone on that island, unburdened by memories of his past. You Only Live Twice should have been Bond’s last adventure.

However, I’ll throw in the short story that I consider to be Bond’s last assignment as 007: The Living Daylights (although that’s of course not the case as it’s set before the building of the Berlin Wall). The tone and atmosphere of this Berlin is closer to le Carré than Fleming and Bond clearly is considered the unsavoury helper with limited skills to the ‘regular’ intelligencer Captain Sender. It’s easy seeing Bond as one of the Circus’ scalphunters in this vignette. And hard to imagine him in the 00 section after it.

5 Likes
8

Here are the results from the four people who ranked the Ian Fleming novels:

  1. FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE – with a cumulative score of 9 points for a 2.3 average.

  2. ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE – with a 10 score for a 2.5 avg.

  3. DOCTOR NO – with a 14 score for a 3.5 avg.

  4. MOONRAKER – with a 22 score for a 5.5 avg.

  5. GOLDFINGER – with a 24 score for 6.0 avg.

  6. CASINO ROYALE – with a 25 score for a 6.3 avg.

  7. THUNDERBALL – with a 26 score for a 6.5 avg.

t8. LIVE AND LET DIE – with a 29 score for a 7.3 avg.

t8. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE – with a 29 score for a 7.3 avg.

  1. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – with a 42 score for a 10.5 avg.

  2. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN – with a 44 score for an 11.0 avg.

  3. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME – with a 45 score for an 11.3 avg.

  4. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY – (with only three responses) with a 37 score for a 12.3 avg.

  5. OCTOPUSSY & THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS – (with only three responses) with a 38 score for a 12.7 avg.

3 Likes
9

There seems to be a greater consensus on novel rankings than on film rankings.

5 Likes
10

True, although admittedly, it is a small sample size. But I do think that is probably right in general.

2 Likes
11

I actually went and looked up the last time I posted a novel ranking (from 6 or 7 years ago) and I think the list was mostly unchanged.

2 Likes
12

Am always surprised how well Goldfinger is ranked as a novel; strikes me as a bored pastiche of what he could get away with. Probably the least creative output of the lot.

2 Likes
13

I really like the preposterousness of Goldfinger. It’s one of the 2 novels that I would use (the other being Dr. No) to easily dispel the notion of Fleming’s novels being super gritty and dark. It’s like, they clearly haven’t read them.

7 Likes