If you thought Daniel Craig shouldn't play 007... have you changed your mind?

[Baron_Greenback]

@Stranger On A Train

(you can’t actually get Kina Lillet anymore)
Stranger

The film has provided the makers of Kina Lillet with a nice wee boost in their sales

The Times & The Sunday Times

[carnivorousplant]

@Stranger On A Train

In the novels, Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident while he was young (tweens, I think) and he attends Cambridge (and Eton?) “on scholarship”,

Is that Fleming or the other guy?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@straun

The film has provided the makers of Kina Lillet with a nice wee boost in their sales

But Lillet doesn’t make Kina any more. They do make Blanc, which is similar.

@carnivorousplant

Is that Fleming or the other guy?

Fleming writes briefly (I think it may have been On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) about Bond’s parents’ deaths and ophancy. I seem to recall him writing of Bond’s education in one of the stories (maybe “Risico” or “From A View To A Kill”) but I can’t place it offhand.

The Gardner novels are noncanonical (and mostly awful) in my opinion, and I haven’t read any of the Benson stories or the “Young James Bond” books, so I can’t speak to them. (Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun is pretty decent and has clearly been ripped off by EON for elements of a number of Bond films.) The literary Bond is intelligent and educated (and capable of introspection), but not elegant or refined by nature. I think Craig’s characterization captured this nicely.

Stranger

[carnivorousplant]

@Stranger On A Train

The Gardner novels are noncanonical (and mostly awful) in my opinion, and I haven’t read any of the Benson stories or the “Young James Bond” books, so I can’t speak to them.

Thanks, Stranger. I read the first Gardner years ago. “License Renewed”? But recently only the Fleming again.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Stranger On A Train

Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun is pretty decent and has clearly been ripped off by EON for elements of a number of Bond films.

Have to agree, there. It was Bond creeping toward the end of his 00 career, as I recall (i.e. getting close to the mandatory 45 retirement) which fit with him being a young intel officer at the end of the war. Icebreaker was dreck by comparison… or by any standard, really.

[Talon_Karrde]

@Stranger On A Train

I really like the quiet interludes and verbal sparing between Bond and Vesper; it takes the film out of generic action-spy flick and into classic Golden Age drama/Hitchcock thriller territory, putting Vesper on intellectual par with Bond. “I’m the money.” “Every penny of it.”

To me that exchange sounded like they were using code phrases to identify each other. Did anyone else think so?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Bryan Ekers

Icebreaker was dreck by comparison… or by any standard, really.

Actually I thought that Icebreaker was one of Gardner’s stronger novels–not that this is saying much; I was in a Bond phase when he started cranking them out, and having demolished everything by Fleming (and having worked through the entire ouerve of Leslie Charteris, plus a few other, lesser known contemporaries and imitators) I must have read five or six Gardner novels before becoming disgusted (or having outgrown) his tiresome prose and unlikely plotting. Fleming was no literary genius, to be certain (though I’d hold him up against some of the lesser noir writers–certainly better than Mickey Spillane–and much more enjoyable to read than Hemingway) but damned if he couldn’t tell stories.

How are the Benson novels? Passable?

@Talon Karrde

To me that exchange sounded like they were using code phrases to identify each other. Did anyone else think so?

Nah, not convoluted enough; besides, such tradecraft is too cliche. It was just a flirtatious exchange, showing Bond to have a rough charm and Vesper to have this brittle resistance to such advances.

Stranger