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Why the Best James Bond will never Appear on the Screen
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Why the Best James Bond will Never Appear on the Screen

  • Robert B. Marks Robert B. Marks
  • December 4, 2019
  • 6 Minute Read

Between the trailer for Daniel Craig’s final James Bond outing, No Time to Die, and excitement for the movie rising, a number of websites are once again talking about who is the best 007.

Was it Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, or Craig himself?

The answer is: none of them.  The real, best James Bond has never appeared on the screen.

In many respects, Ian Fleming’s James Bond was anything but the superspy who appears in the movies.  The literary Bond is a civil servant who spends most of the year in an office dealing with paperwork, aided by his secretary, Mary Goodnight.  While he’s in the office, he lives a modest life.  He dresses for comfort rather than style and consumes plain British cuisine.  For a couple of months every year, he is sent abroad on assignment and uses that as an opportunity to run up MI6’s credit card as far as is humanly possible.

Bond is approaching the mandatory retirement age of 45 for 00 agents, and very aware that almost none survive that long.  He is terrified of flying, spending most of any flight fantasizing about the many different ways the plane can crash and kill him.  He also knows that the odds are even more stacked against him than normal – during his assignment in Casino Royale, a Soviet agent carved the Russian letter Ш into his hand, marking him as a spy to any Soviet agent.  In that same mission, his heart was broken by Vesper Lynd, who proved to be a double agent shortly before she was killed.  He never lost his feelings for her and visits her grave every year.

This does not prevent Bond from attempting to engage in romantic relationships, although most of them fail due to the toxic effect that his life has on them.  He was hardest hit when he fell in love with Teresa di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – he married her, only to have Ernst Stavro Blofeld kill her just after the wedding.  This sent Bond into such a self-destructive tailspin that he was sent to Japan with his 00 status revoked, in the hope that he might be able to be of some use to the diplomatic service.  There, he discovered that Blofeld had a base of operations and goes undercover to infiltrate Blofeld’s base and kill him, trained in part by a former Japanese actress named Kissy Suzuki.

Robert B. Marks

Robert B. Marks

Robert B. Marks wears many hats, only two of which are a Stetson or Tilly - he is an author, editor, publisher, military historian, and university instructor. He lives in the area of Kingston, Ontario, with his wife and daughter.
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