Friday, April 18, 2008

Top 10 Settings for James Bond Novels

Read more about Jamaica and nine other settings for Bond novels at the link.

Top 10 Bond locations - Times Online: "Bond fans have much to thank Jamaica for.

“It was a naked girl, with her back to him. She was not quite naked. She wore a broad leather belt round her waist with a hunting knife in a leather sheath at her right hip. The belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic…

'The whole scene, the empty beach, the green and blue sea, the naked girl with the strands of fair hair, reminded Bond of something. He searched his mind. Yes, she was Botticelli’s Venus, seen from behind.” (Dr No)."

4 comments:

Randy Johnson said...

I remember that passage from DR. No well. It was the first Bond novel I ever read. I think I was about thirteen at the time, the perfect age for Honeychile Ryder to leave a lasting impression. As good as Ursula Andress looked in the movie, the effect was lost with the white bikini she wore.

Benjie said...

Is the headline a Freudian slip, or pun intended?

Before I traveled the world, I went there with Bond.

Unknown said...

Just a typical Crider typo, now corrected. Thanks for the catch.

Fred Blosser said...

As reader "Nigel" notes at the end of the article, the movie locations described in the feature were not the locations of the source novels, in many cases. And GOLDENEYE, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, and DIE ANOTHER DAY were original screenplays, not Fleming stories. It gets a little confusing when the article transitions from Lucy Fleming to her co-authors.

The main location for "The Spy Who Loved Me," other than a London-set backstory, was an off-season motel near the Canadian border. Probably the least glamorous place Bond ever visited. When the heroine meets 007, he alludes to having just completed a mission in Canada, searching out (if I remember correctly) a SPECTRE operative with the help of the Mounties. Now that was the novel that Ian should have written, rather than the one he did. I believe one of the Bond comic strips later covered this "untold adventure."

As a 14-year-old, I wondered how one could wrangle an invitation to a Gypsy camp in Turkey, watch two hotties have a catfight, and wind up with them as Connery did.