Thread by @Sigdrifr

We’re back! Bond and Solitaire on the Phantom to FL. Pullman Porter ally, voodoo threat slipped under door means Mr Big has a mook on board. B&S slip off train in wee hours in Jacksonville, disgusting roadside breakfast, rent car, meet a surprised Leiter in St Pete.

First major setbacks. No spoilers, but “He disagreed with something that ate him”, even if Eon didn’t use it until License to Kill film. Bond gets some revenge, learns more about pirate gold operation, alone, flies to Jamaica.

Jamaica scene-painting (Fleming wrote the Bond books on a manual typewriter at his house in Jamaica, called Goldeneye). Enter Quarrel, the Cayman Island ally, a superb Caribbean seaman. Bond goes into training for next op at Beau Desert.

Bond underwater operations. Bloody Morgan’s cave: gold horde and hideaway. Barracuda attack. Capture by Mr Big. Reunion with Solitaire. B&S undergo the final ordeal. Truly harrowing.

Passionate Leave is the chapter heading for the happy ending with loose ends tied up and strong martinis before a Caribbean feast and sex offstage.

James Bond will be back in Moonraker (not the movie!)

TBH, Moonraker is my favorite Fleming Bond novel. Except for a few stolen tropes and the Big Bad’s name, it bears no resemblance to the 1979 film, which riffed off Star Wars. Another clever op-art cover.

Unlike the international shenanigans so familiar from the films, the novel confines its mise en scene to London and Kent (Dover). Nevertheless, the stakes are terrifyingly high, the suspense grueling, the ordeal one of the grimmest.

M asks Bond to dine at his club and apply his cardsharp skills discreetly. Again, a high-stakes game introduces the Big Bad as a rotter (cheats at Bridge!). Bond foils him in a suspenseful sequence that sets up ongoing antagonism.

Blades is fictional, an idealized distillation of the exclusive English private men’s club, lushly described. We discover M is a retired Admiral. Incredible sensual details around the dinner and drinks. Also Benzedrine!

Like Le Chiffre and Mr Big, Drax is another grotesque with weird hair, bad teeth, a murky WWII past, cheating at a very long game (not just Bridge), surrounded by a pack of matching mustachioed mooks.

Bond is hungover, endures a long exposition about rocket science, and forges an alliance with M’s peer at Scotland Yard to coordinate the operation. More Bentley porn. On to Dover.

The Girl, Gala Brand, is an undercover Scotland Yard cop. Smart (languages and math smart!) and tough, Bond saves her twice, but she saves them both and the day. After separate and shared Ordeals.

Fleming loved Kent and London, and lavishes much scene-building on the locations, including the White Cliffs, setting up intense emotional effects later in the story.

After the harrowing separate and shared ordeals, the ending has its satisfactions (Drax and mooks hoist and then some with their own petard) and its dissatisfaction (which you will have to read to discover).

James Bond will return in Diamonds Are Forever.
Not the worst novel, but likely the worst of the films.
There's just something about Las Vegas.

There's a wonderful scene where Bond persuades her to go swimming with him off the White Cliffs. We get her point of view: she thinks all the Foreign Service agents are sex maniacs.

Name and politics if that's not a spoiler

a word about the theme song for the film. It was the third and final for Shirley Bassey, the only singer to sing more than one Bond song. John Barry and Hal David wrote it, and Barry was desperate to fond a singer when he ran into Bassey in Hollywood,

@lilchiva

@lilchiva stay tuned for Diamonds Are Forever.

@lilchiva First, Diamonds Are Forever, the song. 2nd of 3 Bassey songs by Barry with an 8-note motif evoking a cut diamond, & Blofeld’s cat in a diamond collar! Adamas longus, vita (or at least sexual allure) brevis.

@lilchiva Barry and Black instructed Bassey to sing as if the diamond were a penis. It was a bit much for Harry Saltzman, but Broccoli was ok with the innuendo, and her performance is sexy. Notice how all of her songs evoke jewels: Goldfinger, Moonstone and Diamonds.

@lilchiva While most would agree Diamonds Are Forever is the worst Bond film, it’s not the worst of the novels, but it is the most sordid. Blood diamond smuggling, vicious American gangsters, soiled American dove, gay assassins, 1950s Las Vegas!

@lilchiva The scorpion that opens the novel is referenced in Skyfall. I never noticed this before. As often with Fleming, the cinematic cold open is a synecdoche of the story.

@lilchiva IMO, the diamond jewelry trade is bullshit: Cartelized, brutal, hyped (engagement rings even my hippie friends insist on), sparkling colorless carbon crystals. I’d rather have emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, even granite.

@lilchiva There’s nobody much to like. The Good Guys are trying to break the smuggling that their slave labor & cartels make inevitable. The smugglers are scum, except for poor Tiffany Case (ha ha), born in an SF cathouse & gang-banged by the Mob at 16.

@lilchiva Bond goes undercover as a diamond smuggler. Miss Case is his contact. Best thing about the book is the gradual romance between the two of them. Here’s his first impression:

@lilchiva The record she plays is real, if somewhat blurred by artistic license. The memory is that La Vie en Rose played in the lounge where Bond and Vesper meet after his Baccarat victory and before her kidnapping.

@lilchiva Diamonds secreted in golf balls, Bond makes it safely through customs, Case keeping an eye on him while two others keep an eye on her. Unusually for the novels, the reader is made aware of this ongoing menace while Bond and Tiff are not. Bond underestimates the Mob throughout.

@lilchiva From London to Dublin by plane and on to New York, where he picks up an old friend, then to Saratoga by train (for a money laundering horse race and a gruesome scene in a mud bath), and by plane to Las Vegas. More later,

@lilchiva Ooopsie, I forgot Tiffany and James’ first date. He broke through her misandrist reserve back at their first meeting by simply asking her out to dinner in a polite, low-key English manner.

@lilchiva Dinner at 21 Club. Usual Fleming attention to details of food and drinks: shaken-not-stirred vodka Martinis with twist (nice touch, Bond twists the lemon peels himself), Veuve Cliquot pink (!) champagne, Crème de Menthe Stingers (ugh) for dessert.

@lilchiva She’s upfront about no sex (Bond and we found out over lunch with US ally that she grew up in SF cathouse, gang-raped by Mob at 16, punishment for her ma (the madam) not keeping up protection payments.) So Bond doesn’t push it, not that he ever does.

@lilchiva But she’s attracted (“I don’t often get to have dinner with a good-looking Englishman.”). He concludes he has all the time in the world (!) to bed her. Back outside her hotel room, it’s sealed with a single fierce kiss (another IF trope).

@lilchiva Off to Saratoga with FL, who fixes the fix that’s supposed to pay Bond, with unfortunate consequences for the jockey in a gruesome mudbath scene where Wint and Kidd appear again. FL knows them, tells Bond that homo thugs are the worst.

@lilchiva Bond flies to Vegas (Tiff told him at dinner that she’s taking the train cross country, too bad we don’t get to see her opinion of trains!), on a flight I’ve taken many times from LA. However, I’m usually reminded of Fear and Loathing, not 007!

@lilchiva Bond hates Vegas. As we know, he loves to gamble and is an accomplished cardshark himself, so he finds the mechanical fleecing of the gullible, especially the slots, to be blasphemous. But the food is good.

@lilchiva He finally collects his diamond smuggling payoff, with Tiff herself the crooked croupier at the Blackjack table. Bond finds Blackjack jejune, but IMO, it’s just Baccarat without the ancient regime snobbery.

@lilchiva Bond is bored of playing the junior wannabe hood, and defying his orders, wins heavily at Roulette, which flushes out Saraffino Spang his badass self. Other than the inevitable en brosse haircut that signifies the Bond Villain, he’s not physically grotesque.

@lilchiva Unlike the usual SPECTRE villain, Spang has no world conquest goals, he's merely a vicelord who happens to smuggle diamonds. What does he spend his money on? He owns a ghost town and a restored antique locomotive upon which to ride there from Vegas.

@lilchiva Bond flies to Vegas (Tiff told him at dinner that she’s taking the train cross country, too bad we don’t get to see her opinion of trains!), on a flight I’ve taken many times from LA. However, I’m usually reminded of Fear and Loathing, not 007!

@lilchiva And guess what the name of the ghost town is?
Spectreville!

@lilchiva On to the car chase. Bond in a cab, followed in a red Jaguar, and front tailed by a big Cadillac. The cabbie's a Pinkerton man, but despite his best efforts, including hiding out in a drive-in, Bond is captured.

@lilchiva In Spectreville (I'm still laughing), Bond wins a bar fight in the saloon, but loses to Wint & Kidd and Spang in front of Tiff.

@lilchiva Here comes the train porn! And golly Miss Molly, it's quite a train.

@lilchiva The Ordeal happens offstage between chapters. The gay assassins (great punk band name there) put on football shoes and kick Bond into unconsciousness.

@lilchiva Tiffany rescues him in the next chapter. Sidecar vs locomotive chase. Explosions. Tiff leads Bond to the highway, but he's about done in. Then, the cavalry arrives in a Studillac for a reverse Fear and Loathing drive back to Los Angeles. No bats, though.

@lilchiva A short stay in Hollywood, a transcon to La Guardia and then on board the Queen Elizabeth. But Wint and Kidd slip in too and the romantic dinner is shadowed by the threat. The film makes light of all this, but not the novel.

@lilchiva Tiffany has to be rescued and Bond needs to tidy up the loose ends on board, and eventually in S Africa. He has a new respect for the Mob. We end with the scorpion.

@lilchiva James Bond will return in From Russia With Love.
Prolly the best of the novels, an Eric Ambler homage, Soviet SMERSH villains including an odious lesbian and of course, the beautiful Tatiana Romanov.

@lilchiva From Russia With Love is likely the best of Fleming’s Bond novels, and a critical consensus considers it the best of the films, which strives to follow the novel more closely than any of the films we have mentioned so far.

@lilchiva Each novel has recurring, archetypal imagery. Casino: gambling, a metaphor for spycraft. L&LD: pirate gold & Voodoo. Moonraker's phallic rocket. DAF, duh, it’s diamonds. In Goldfinger, as we shall see, it’s gold and pussy.

@lilchiva In FRWL it’s roses. Only one of the covers gets this. Roses, with their lovely sexual organs & vicious thorns, are indigenous to the Caucasus and were cultivated in antiquity all across the steppes north of the Black Sea.

@lilchiva although the Op-Art cover suggests a thicket of roses.

@lilchiva L&LD has SMERSH well offstage, Moonraker turns on an offstage neoNazi-Soviet plot, DAF ignores the Cold War for US Mobsters. FRWL is a return to the universe of Casino Royale, that is, to the Europe of Eric Ambler.

@lilchiva Fleming was an Eric Ambler fan. While out of fashion, he’s still fun to read, especially his early novels written before WWII, when no one knew how bad it was going to be, although the teams were already clear. Ambler’s shtick is accidental heroes…

@lilchiva …ordinary men who land in trouble due to their own folly & learn to survive in a world of international intrigue. I might do a thread, especially on Cause for Alarm, with 3 of my favorite characters in spy fiction—all Soviet spies!

@lilchiva Fleming was a professional spy & the Soviets always the Bad Guys. FRWL opens with a sensual (with roses!) description of the antagonist assassin by the pool of a Crimean dacha, from the PoV of a masseuse (a scene not in the film).

@lilchiva Red Grant is beautifully built but repulsive: English native, asexual psychopath with killer urges every full moon (!), defector to the USSR because he believes (rightly) that his proclivities make him a perfect fit as a Soviet assassin.

@lilchiva But Grant is merely a tool, a blunt instrument like 007, in this case of SMERSH, still smarting from Bond’s successful defeat of Le Chiffre 3 books ago. We finally see the workings of SMERSH directly…

@lilchiva After 3 chapters of Red Grant’s training (and roses!), and 3 of meticulous exposition on Russian secret operations, grounded in real (and then recent) history. @PalimpsestMan The Death of Stalin is helpful background here.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan See also tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.…

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 anyone else who's following this endless thread. We are back with more From Russia With Love.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 The Soviet senior spy staff meeting is a clever mix of history (all defectors named were real) and fictional characters. It shows how the socialist system, totalitarian-world-conquest variant, inevitably produces vicious, amoral strongmen.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 See also Vladimir (great ancient Rus name) Putin, a product of the Soviet secret service apparatus. Far more entertaining than the Road to Serfdom or The God That Failed, but makes the same points about the inherent nature of socialism.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 James Bond is finally mentioned as a potential target at the end of Chapter 5! SMERSH nurses a grudge for the defeat of Le Chiffre and the failure of his assassin to off Bond (a weakness of the strict hierarchy approach).

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Generals G & K look back. “Then there was this Negro of ours in Harlem. A great man…with a great network. There was some business with a treasure in the Caribbean. I forget the details.” Also Hugo Drax and his rocket.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 The Soviet 007 dossier is a hoot. Bond is described with the same detached precision as the Bond Girls. And with the same erotic fetishes: lush black hair, wide level blue eyes, fine wide mouth with hint of cruelty.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 The details of height, weight, coloring and build provide a template against which to measure the looks of the various actors who have portrayed Bond. I’ll do that when we get to the films.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Bond is the Chosen One, the target upon which to recoup the reputation of the Soviet spy machine. He must be eliminated “with ignominy,” so as to reflect badly on him & the British Secret Service.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 After 50 pages of creepy Soviet exposition (deflecting the reader from the inherent silliness of the honeypot plot), General G summons his dragons (TV Trope alert!), Kleb and Kronsteen.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 (In the film, SPECTRE hatches the konspiratzia independently and without the knowledge of the official USSR apparatus, with an off-camera Blofeld (fronted, of course, by his cat) replacing General G.)

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Kronsteen is the Planner, Wizard of Ice, chess-master, intellectual, analytic. He coldly and dispassionately disapproves of his colleagues, especially Kleb. “The devil only knows what her breasts look like,” he thinks.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Comrade Colonel Kleb is the true grotesque in this gallery of sociopaths: torturer, sadist, short (a major beauty sin in Fleming’s view!), squat, toadlike. The Evil Mother. Her first name, of course, is Rosa!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 We learn more about Rosa in the next chapter, from the PoV of the Beautiful Lure. Tatiana Romanova is a lovely, innocent, guileless apparatchika. Even if her ballet and figure skating derrière is not up to purist standards!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Summoned to meet Kleb in her relatively luxurious apartment, Tatiana is tortured with fear & flattery, chocolate & Champagne. Not that she has any choice, but she agrees to the konspiratzia, to fall in love with the English agent.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Rosa, in orange crêpe de chine over a brassiere of two pink satin roses (!) tries to seduce TR, who flees in terror & disgust. A very funny scene, too OTT for the film, which made do with a brilliant performance by Lotte Lenya.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Finally, Grant is summoned to meet with Kleb & Kronsteen. She brutally tests him; he brutally passes. Kronsteen objects that Romanova has a buivshi (Imperial) name. Kleb counters, unironically, “all our grandparents were former people.”

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 We are 1/3 of the way through the novel and James Bond has yet to appear!
As intermission, a few writerly observations about Fleming follow. In Casino the PoV was only Bond: every sensory detail, every missed clue, even the torture scene.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 It’s very effective, “The Fleming Sweep” and lends reader sympathy to the anti-hero. But Ian seems to have found it boring and works from book to book to expand the PoV. In L&LD, we get a couple of pages of Solitaire’s perspective on herself, Bond and Voodoo.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 In Moonraker, we get a few pages and then two entire chapters from Gala’s PoV. And a radio broadcast at the climax. In DAF, we’re back to Bond-only, although I’d love to have heard from Tiffany, bad American accent and all.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Notice in FRWL, the stepping back from Bond, how the points of view shift from chapter to chapter: the masseuse, Grant, Generals G & K, Kronsteen, Romanova. Perhaps IF was getting bored with Bond, as we shall see later. But not yet.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 After 97 pages of SMERSH shenanigans, Bond returns in an exposition that would have been Chapter 2 in the previous novels. In the earlier works, Fleming fights off formula, but by Thunderball (conceived as a screenplay) the undertow pulls him under.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 It’s been a year since Bond’s last assignment and he’s restless and bored. Moreover, his relationship with Tiffany has soured; instead of marrying Bond, she’s gone back to America with a Marine attached to the US Embassy.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 For the first time a Bond Girl® is mentioned in the follow-on novel. Vesper haunts the series, but not by name. Solitaire simply vanishes (I’d love to know how she got on after Jamaica). We know explicitly why Gala is gone from Bond’s life.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 And not just mentioned, getting rid of Tiff is essential to the plot. M questions 007 about his relationship with Tiff as a prelude to dropping the bomb that is Tatiana’s proposed defection. With a SPEKTOR coding device to sweeten the deal.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 The proposal is made through the head of T—Britain’s man in Istanbul--in a nice coded message that describes TR and conveys T’s doubts about her whole story. Once we meet T, this will be much funnier.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 TR’s cover has an elaborate backstory: she fell in love with Bond’s photo & his resemblance to her favorite Russian Romantic antihero. No, not Onegin, Pechorin. His story is set in the Caucasus, for another echo of the Rose motif.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Bond is gobsmacked, “In love with me?” Rather than the omnisexual self-confidence of Connery, Fleming’s Bond worries if he’s up to faking it! M points out, distastefully, how even the girls of their own Service develop crushes on film stars (lol).

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Bond flies to Istanbul with the first Q gadget: briefcase with hidden ammo, Wilkinson throwing knives (British Steel joke), gold Sovereigns. Gun under arm (the good old days), silencer hidden in Palmolive shaving cream tube. He emptied the cyanide pill dispenser asap.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Between uncertainties & a rough flight, Bond can’t read his copy of Coffin for Demetrios (Ambler’s most famous novel, Istanbul joke). The last leg is better, a good dinner (good old days indeed!), 2 Martinis and a bottle of claret improves his mood.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Bond has chosen an out-of-the-way, Romantic hotel. With bedbugs. But the view and an exotic breakfast of yoghurt, figs and coffee convinces him to stay. Antique Rolls Royce sent for him to meet T, Darko Kerim.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 This “Exuberant shrewd pirate” with one gold earring (not in the film, alas, too much for 1963, although Armendarez's performance, his last, is perfect) is larger than Bond in every way, appetites unbridled by temperament, channeled into Intelligence.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 Darko tells his backstory over Raki and raw fish: His English mother was kidnapped by a Turkish fisherman (@bronzeagemantis, you’d love Darko Kerim!), one of a brood of 15 raised in an ad hoc harem of many mothers.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis I just noticed the odd parallel with Red Grant, the son of an Irish barmaid’s one-night stand with a German circus strongman. Kerim pere kidnapped his mother from a circus audience (!) and Darko trained to be a strongman.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis A man of huge vitality, Darko is the real love interest. Like previous allies Leiter and Mathis, but turned up to 11. The genre-savvy among us know what this means, so enjoy it while it lasts!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Kerim takes Bond to his periscope in the sewers (great boat and rat scene, finely depicted in the film) that spies upon the Soviets. Can’t hear much, but Bond gets his first glimpse of Tatiana, or at least her fine figure-skater’s legs!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis I forgot this. In Kerim's office, newly painted because limpet bomb damage (he only escaped cause he was boinking a Roumanian honeypot) are 2 portraits: Churchill and The Queen. It was a with a frisson that I realized she's still the Queen!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis This one, perhaps. There were several.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis In honor of Sean Connery's birthday #OnThisDay

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Not to jump ahead, but...

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis And hot damn, she's still behaving like one!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Kerim takes Bond to his periscope in the sewers (great boat and rat scene, finely depicted in the film) that spies upon the Soviets. Can’t hear anything, but Bond gets his first glimpse of Tatiana, and finds her more than fetching enough!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis There’s also a Chekov Bomb (TV Trope alert) under the Soviet offices. We are now caught up in the Fleming Sweep®. Rather than sit around drinking raki and waiting for the next move (remember, they don’t know it’s SMERSH)…

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis …Kerim takes Bond to meet the Gypsies. Sorry, the belly dancer is only in the film, so you’ll have to wait to hear my retired belly dancer take on that. But the Gypsy cat fight is indeed in the novel, only they get to rip each other’s clothes off completely.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis As in the film, the fight is interrupted by a Bulgarian biker attack (instigated by Kerim’s Roumanian enemy), in which Bond saves Kerim’s life and after which Bond gets the Gypsy patriarch to rescind the to-the-death part of the catfight.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis And then Kerim decides he must assassinate Kerilencu, in a scene well captured in the film (tho for IP reasons, it’s not Marilyn on the hoarding!). Bond assists, but is disgusted by the cold-blooded killing, and disgusted with his disgust.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis This is two chapters of distraction, so that when Bond returns to his wedding suite, he’s off his guard. Showers (in the film he leaves it running!) before he notices Tatiana is in the bed wearing her iconic black velvet choker and thigh high stockings. And nothing else!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis A very funny dialogue ensues as both spies try to stick to their scripts while Eros shoots them both in the heart, or at least the genitals. Their coupling, per the conspiratzia, is being filmed through the big mirror over the bed.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis @threadreaderapp unroll please

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Now things speed up. TR insists on leaving via the Orient Express and arranges to meet Bond there with the SPEKTOR that night. Kerim has already set up fake passports for them to travel as Mr & Mrs Somerset.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis On the train (more train porn! The second best train sequence in the novels or the films). Kerim spies 3 Soviet agents and gets two of them arrested at Uzunkopru. Bond & Tatiana alternately make love and stand guard.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Spoiler alert! The third spy kills Kerim, but Kerim kills him too. Bond is devastated and his mission crippled. He reports to M via doubletalk when he can get to a phone at Belgrade. He regrets not asking M for reinforcements.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Book Bond makes more mistakes than Film Bond, but this one is a doozy. Enter Red Grant, posing unconvinvingly as a British agent. Bond’s groggy, grieving & infatuated; misses all the red flags. Tatiana is suspicious, since Grant’s alias, Nash, is a giveaway Russian pun!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis The film’s Chianti with fish gaffe is not in the book. Grant surreptitiously dopes Tatiana, offers to stand guard. Stupidly, Bond agrees. He sleeps. Grant wakes him a half hour before the scheduled assassination (Kronsteen is nothing if not precise).

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Why? Because he wants to tell Bond all about it before he offs him! This is what TVTropes calls Bond Villain Stupidity, but it’s generally the Big Bad who’s too chatty. Perhaps Grant is lonely, or isn’t getting enough pats on the head from SMERSH.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis He reveals the whole plot: SMERSH, the sex scandal angle, how he will kill them (bullet to the heart from his gun hidden in War & Peace), the SPEKTOR is booby-trapped, mentions Kronsteen, even tells him the time & place he’s to meet Kleb!

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Now Bond has more motivation to survive & bring this trove of intelligence back to M. Grant lets him smoke, Bond, wishing he had an exploding cigarette, manages to put his cigarette case inside his Ambler novel and…

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis …it works! Not a spoiler, it’s 007. But you will need to read the details. I’ll just leave you with Bond’s observation that he could never beat Grant in unarmed combat. The film features a famous struggle in the compartment.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis In a few short sentences, Bond cleans up after the 10 pints of blood on the floor, packs, bribes the conductor to leave his friend Nash alone until Paris and hustles a still groggy Tatiana out of the train at Dijon.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Last chapter. Bond arrives at the Ritz to make Grant’s appointment with Kleb. Fleming is clearly tiring of hos creation, and my fellow Sherlock Holmes fans will know what's coming.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Back in Chapter X, Kronsteen or G had observed that Kleb was the very type of the tricoteuses, the old women who sat knitting during the trials of the Terror, condemning aristocrats and nuns. And indeed, Rosa in disguise, sits like a spider with her poisoned knitting needles.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Bond has a double vodka at the Ritz bar (nice bar, been there), which is another big mistake. His confrontation with Kleb goes badly, her disguise flummoxes him and he introduces himself! "Bond. James Bond."

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Bond has a double vodka at the Ritz bar (nice bar, been there), which is another big mistake. Rosa's French aristocrat crone disguise confuses him. He introduces himself. "Bond. James Bond."!!!!.

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis Mathis is back up and enters with reinforcements but.... too late...and the novel ends mid-sentence, with Bond's last thoughts on Tatiana...

@lilchiva @PalimpsestMan @Outis169 @bronzeagemantis @threadreaderapp unroll please