Griswold is slightly pursed-lipped about the inaccuracies he perceives in his Annotations And Chronologies For Ian Fleming's Bond Stories authorised Bond biographer John Pearson’s choice of 1920 as Bond’s official birth year, for instance, is “not as good a choice as it could have been”.īoth broadly agreed on an order for the first eight novels and five short stories from For Your Eyes Only, which collected adventures published in newspapers and magazines in 19.

In the mid-Noughties Bond scholars John Griswold and Henry Chancellor separately tried to work out which order the novels and short stories were meant to have happened in over the course of Bond’s life, as if he were a recently declassified hero of the Cold War whose exploits can only now be related without fear of Moscow taking notes. There are other ways of reading the Bond saga, though. “So in that sense: at your leisure, really.”īond scholars separately tried to work out which order the novels were meant to have happened over the course of Bond’s life “I don’t think you have to read them to understand the canon what’s going on,” says Ward. You’ve got the Blofeld or the SPECTRE trilogy: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice, so they again are all sequential.”Īfter that, dip into the two short story collections. “It’s essential that you have You Only Live Twice before The Man with the Golden Gun because again they follow on from each other, they are sequels.

“ Dr No picks up From Russia with Love, for instance – they follow each other directly in the text, from one book to the next,” Ward explains. The simple answer, and the way recommended by Ian Fleming Publications’ publication manager Simon Ward, is to start with Fleming’s 12 novels and read them in the order they were published, starting with Casino Royale and ending with the posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun. So what’s the proper place to begin, and where do you go from there? On top of the original 12 Bond novels and two short story collections, there are dozens of ‘continuation’ novels. And if you’ve got a bottle in, he’ll have a glass of Taittinger Blanc de Blancs Brut 1943, thanks.īut while Fleming was very particular about Bond’s cigarettes, cars and champagne, he was somewhat less so about his diary.īond scholars have tried to piece together the proper order of Fleming’s stories, and come up with very different answers.

He drives a 1930 4.5 litre Bentley in battleship grey. He smokes Morlands, made especially for him at a tobacconists on Grosvenor Street in Mayfair. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is a character drawn with fine-point sharpness.

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