It was a question of options and I didn’t seem to have any. There was just simply nothing in the world that anyone would pay me money for that I wanted to do. Most of it was rather immoral anyway, which always bothered me. There was, for instance, a lot of selling people things that they didn’t actually want going on in the world. I didn’t want to be a party to that. As it happened, honesty was something that I insisted upon, which meant I was the world’s worst salesman—I still am. I couldn’t sell ice cream in Timbuktu.

Even Ian Fleming couldn’t get it right all the time. He rushed back to the formula for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the movie lost out badly when Sean Connery quit. Australian George Lazenby got the gig and many people regard him as the worst Bond of all. Actually, he wasn’t all that bad, and was not dumped from the role as legend has it. In fact Katzman and Broccoli wanted him back but, as a result of the worst piece of career advice in cinema history, his agent persuaded him to turn it down. They were afraid he might get type-cast—in fact the result was that he never got cast again in anything worthwhile at all. What the film did have was Diana Rigg and Tely Savalas, terrific, as Blofeld. The book had some pretty good bits too.
There was a brief glimpse of steel rails below, a tremendous thudding in his ears and a ferocious blast, only yards away, from the train’s siren. Then he crashed onto the icy road, tried to stop, failed and fetched up in an almighty skid against the hard snow wall on the other side. As he did so, there was a terrible scream from behind him, a loud splintering of wood and the screech of the train’s brakes being applied.
    At the same time, the spray from the snow-fan, that now reached Bond, turned pink !
    Bond wiped some of it from his face and looked at it. His stomach turned. God! The man had tried to follow him, had been too late or missed the jump, and had been caught in the murderous blades of the snow-fan ! Mincemeat ! ...
    While the James Bond books went downhill after that, the movies did even worse. Live and Let Die marked the end of Sean Connery and the beginning of the inferior Roger Moore movies, and with it, the change in official classification of the Bond movies from thriller to comedy.
    Ian Fleming plunged to even greater depths when in 1965 when he wrote The Man with the Golden Gun, a corny, poorly handled yarn that only repeated what he had done before. The only good bit was when he turns down a knighthood. Even the most enduring readers would not have come at Sir James Bond.
    The end of James Bond and Ian Fleming who died in 1966, leaving two remaining short stories—Octopussy and The Living Daylights—which were published together. It was all rather in need of further development, I think, but ironically it all ends when Bond decides against killing a KGB agent. Attractive female type, of course. Maybe he had nowhere to go after that, but it had been fun for most of the journey.