Are they short stories he rewrote to include Bond? There’s a definite note of Robert E. Howard who edited his pirate stories for the popular Conan.
I’d never heard that, and I’m not aware of their existence in any other format. Of course, that’s just my (limited) experience.
They are kind of strange, and different from the usual Bond stories, but then they are short stories. And Fleming did some experimentation, even within the usual 007 format: From Russia, With Love and the whole On Her Majesty’s Secrety Service and You Only Live Twice series, and the first bit of Man With the Golden Gun (alas, the second part was back to formula, and not very good at that.)
Robert E. Howard was dead in his grave for decades before the very first Bond story was written, or even contemplated.
They are unconnected.
Reading comprehension much? He’s comparing Howard’s practice of rewriting his unconnected stories to include Conan’s to a potential that Fleming is doing the same thing to his own unconnected stories.
Two of the short stories in For Your Eyes Only were first published in the following venues:
http://www.007magazine.co.uk/factfiles_novels.htm
Both were well after Fleming was deep into the Bond series. I haven’t found any evidence that they were in different form in the original publications. The other three stories appear to have been first published in the book.
Many authors conflated pulp short stories to later novel form, though. Raymond Chandler did his earliest pulp mysteries about a variety of detectives but changed the names to Marlowe when he put them together into The Big Sleep and other novels.
I just don’t know of any evidence that Fleming did this.
Don’t be a meanie. It wasn’t the clearest or most graceful sentence construction.
Chitty Chitty Bang, You’re Dead?
Further, I think at least “The Living Daylights” (from the collection entitled “Octopussy”) had also earlier appeared in a magazine (there entitled something like “Berlin Kill”).
Sir Rhosis
I’ve spent my entire sleepless night hiding from tornados in my basement.
So putting things together is not what I’m good at right now.
Bosda, glad you came through the storms ok… but your sig line. Isn’t that from Goldfinger, not Blofeld?
Well, on one hand, James Bond plays such a tiny, insignificant role in “A Quantum of Solace” that it’s easy to imagine the story existing without him.
On the other hand, it’s precisely BECAUSE Bond plays such a tiny role in the story that I doubt Fleming added him in at the last minute. I mean, if Fleming were just trying to made the story more commercially viable by adding James Bond as a character, why not give Bond more to do than just listen to someone else tell a story of a minor diplomat and his adulterous wife?
I think that Bond’s presence adds something to the story, even if Bond doesn’t do much in it. The whole idea is that Bond is an international adventurer, a man who leads an exciting life, who normally wouldn’t see anything remotely interesting in the life of a minor diplomat’s wife. After hearing the story, Bond comes to the realization that even ordinary, seemingly dull people have their passions and their own stories to tell.
That’s an insight and a lesson that means more coming rom James Bond than from an ordinary person.
CORRECT!
Darn it!
I took the first thing Google turned up, & see where it got me! :smack:
There!
All better.
Yes. Check the link I gave for a complete list.
Yes, but you could be, like, polite?
Thanks all, my HD failed and I just got Windows reinstalled.
That’s the reason I thought he was “turning Pirate stories into Conan”.
If you had a word processor in 1960 and your protagonist was Rudy Day, you could do search and replace for Rudy James and Day Bond and you have a story the Bond fans would read.
Anyway, the general consenus seems to be they were written about Bond in the first place.
Thanks again.
Another interesting fact - Thunderball started as a script, and became a novel from the script.
As for Howard, many of the stories set for other characters were rewritten to be Conan stories by others. For instance, The Flame Knife in Conan the Wanderer was originally set in Afghanistan. That’s the first example I found browsing through my Lancer Conans.
Lin Carter may have been guilty of that.
I’ve considered starting a thread about Fleming being a racist and a sexist.
Black people are lazy, Asians inscrutable and evil, Englishmen (note the “men”) superior in all things.
It’s okay to beat women with the barbed, posionous tail of a stingray.
Goldfinger must be a Jew because he’s odd looking. But no, the club at which he cheats at cards is restricted.
Fleming was an upper crust Englishman born in 1908. To say that he was racist and sexist is pretty much redundant.