Bond. James Bond. Is there a name more synonymous with spying, tuxedos, and shaken cocktails than the British secret agent? Join me as I read all of the James Bond books in 007 Case Files, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s potential spoilers ahead.
Short, sharp, and punchy, this is the kind of Bond story that fans of the films will enjoy. Not for nothing: THUNDERBALL is technically (and legally speaking) “based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and the Author.” Indeed, the story behind this novel is full of (almost) as much intrigue as one of Bond’s own adventures.
In 1958, Fleming began discussing the idea of a James Bond film. (That’d never work!) Long story short, Fleming teamed up with Irish writer and director, Kevin McClory, who was at that stage best known for the 1957 film The Boy and the Bridge. When the film failed to set critics alight, Fleming withdrew from the project, and McClory brought in screenwriter Jack Whittingham, previous a contract writer for Ealing Studios.
The resulting script – which went through name changes from SPECTRE, to James Bond of the Secret Service and finally, Longitude 78 West – was approved by Fleming, and with a final change to THUNDERBALL he agreed he would deliver the script to MCA with McClory. Short afterwards, Fleming adapted the screenplay into a novel, was sued for plagiarism by McClory, suffered a heart attack during the trial, and eventually settled with the complainants.
Even with the outside involvement, or perhaps because of it, the core story remains one of the better Bond outings. Bond is sent to a remote Alps health spa after M tells him to lay off the smokes and booze and get into shape, but naturally it all gets wrapped up in a race to stop some stolen nukes. The opening sequences in the spa resort are fun, showcasing a more playful tone, while the action is straightforward, and the nuclear disarmament plot is a thrilling one.
This book also introduces the ultimate Bond villain: Ernest Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. The adversaries schemes would form a loose trilogy with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice, albeit with a brief break of The Spy Who Loved Me in between. It’s a marked shift for Bond’s foes, moving away from the SMERSH operatives in a post-Goldfinger world. Some have suggested that this is due to a temporary cooling of the hostilities with the Soviets. It might have also been Fleming toying with a stateless form of evil and building on the research he did into megalomania for Moonraker. Whatever the case, the SPECTRE brand carried at least until 2015, when the 24th film adopted the name and main villain.
The Bond/Felix Leiter team-up game is strong, following the latter’s return from the injuries he sustained in Live and Let Die. Unfortunately, this book is once again saddled with a ‘broken’ Bond Girl: Domino has one leg shorter than the other resulting in a noticeable limp. Nevertheless, it is Domino who has the ultimate victory in the climax, a gripping underwater action sequence that is one of Fleming’s best and most cinematic pieces of writing up until this point. Of course, there’s a reason for that.
THUNDERBALL did make it to the screen in 1965, a year after Fleming’s death in 1964, and was the fourth of seven original films to star Sean Connery as 007. Thanks to McClory and Whittingham retaining some rights, it was again adapted to the screen in 1983 as an independent production starring Connery, returning to the role after a twelve-year absence. McClory even had plans to do it all again in the 1990s, adapting it as Warhead 2000 AD and planning Timothy Dalton or Liam Neeson as the lead. McClory died in 2003, and his estate finally settled with MGM in 2013.
THUNDERBALL wasn’t just the start of a new era for Bond, but the tentpole for a legacy that has continued for over half a century. Even amidst the legal wranglings that followed, it was crafted with the intent of being a blockbuster film, and the twin legacies of Fleming and the Eon Productions have evolved on print and screen together ever since. This was marked in 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the first adaptation, when Spectre restored the organisation and its leader to the Bond universe.
