Bond. James Bond. In the 007 Case Files, join me as I read all of the James Bond books, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.
“All men know the facts of life, but you know just as much about the facts of death!”
Raymond Benson’s third full Bond outing, following Zero Minus Ten and the Tomorrow Never Dies novelisation, really starts to get into the groove of the writer’s Bond sensibilities. It’s a combination of Ian Fleming’s old world charm and something more sharply modern. Or at least modern from the perspective of 1998.
In a scenario that feels a little bit too real for a post-pandemic reader, THE FACTS OF DEATH opens with a series of deaths from a mysterious disease. After an encounter with enemy agents in Cyprus, Bond is rescued by female Greek agent Niki Mirakos. No prizes for guessing who becomes the love interest in this book.
As the plot plays out, it’s a winding affair across the US and Europe that hits some familiar marks. Even Felix Leiter turns up, an impressive feat given his various states of life and death across various media, there’s a bad Bond girl and a mathematically inclined organisation called Decada. In a very informative 2007 interview, Benson remarked “I think THE FACTS OF DEATH is my most EON-like novel,” referring to the British film production company. “I purposefully set out to write something that felt like a Bond movie with that one. As far as restrictions go, there was surprisingly little.”
Released at the height of Pierce Brosnan’s run of films, immediately following Tomorrow Never Dies a year earlier, Benson originally wanted to call this book The World Is Not Enough. As fans will no doubt know, this is an allusion to the Bond family motto/crest first mentioned in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Gildrose (which changed its name to Ian Fleming Publications in 1999) reportedly kiboshed the idea for not being “Bondian” enough. A year after this book came out, that title was used for the third Brosnan film. Coincidence? Yeah, probably actually.
One of the other ways in which this book anticipated the film franchise is in the expansion of M as a character. One of Bond’s investigations involves the boyfriend of the (then) current M, giving us a little insight into this iteration of the character and providing a more personal touch to the narrative. It’s a side of M we never got to see in the films until the tail end of the Daniel Craig era, gloriously played by Dame Judy Dench, and this insight is clearly one the the strengths of Benson’s approach.
At it’s core, THE FACTS OF DEATH is a solid globetrotting thriller. Like Benson’s previous outings, there’s a really strong sense of place, taking Bond and Niki from Cyprus, to the USA and back to Greece and the surrounding islands. Indeed, the scenes set in Benson’s native Texas go into great detail describing a Tex-Mex restaurant that reportedly exists! (I have to admit to getting a little peckish for an enchilada during this sequence). On the other hand, Benson’s sense of the erotic is still questionable. At least two scenes talk about Bond’s attempts to gain “access” – to “erogenous zones” and “her breasts” respectively – as if he’s not trying to make love so much as hack their mainframes.
In many ways, this feels like Benson was simply holding space until he could tell a bigger story. Even Decada feels like a distant echo of criminal organisations we’ve seen before. In fact, the novel that follows this (A High Time to Kill) began Benson’s Union Trilogy, finally creating a worthy successor to the likes of the SPECTRE group.
James Bond will return…in A Midsummer Night’s Doom.
Header image: Phil Hale’s illustration commissioned by Playboy magazine in 1999. Source: Illustrated 007
