Octopussy and The Living Daylights

Did You Know?

• The artist Barry Geller used Sean Connery's likeness for the illustrations accompanying "Octopussy" in Playboy.
• The comic strip adaptation of "The Living Daylights" ran in the Daily Express from 12 September to 12 November 1966, adapted by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Yaroslav Horak.

Plots

In "Octopussy", Secret Service operative James Bond travels to Jamaica to interview Major Dexter Smythe, a former Royal Marine officer implicated in the murder of Austrian mountain guide Hannes Oberhauser and the theft of Nazi gold worth £40,000–50,000. The story is mostly told from Smythe's perspective; Bond appears only briefly. Smythe remained in Kitzbühel after the Second World War, found the gold with Oberhauser's help, and killed him. Bond was assigned after the guide's body fell from a glacier over fifteen years later; Oberhauser had been Bond's skiing instructor and "something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one".

Bond leaves Smythe to contemplate suicide or court-martial. While hunting for a scorpion fish to feed an octopus named Octopussy, Smythe is stung by the fish and dragged underwater by the octopus as poison sets in. Bond views the death as suicide but classifies it as accidental drowning. In "The Living Daylights", Bond is assigned sniper duty to help British agent 272 escape from East Berlin by eliminating a KGB assassin codenamed "Trigger".

Over three nights, Bond notices a beautiful blonde cellist in an orchestra. When 272 crosses, Bond sees Trigger is the cellist; he shoots her weapon instead of killing her, allowing 272 to reach safety. In "The Property of a Lady", Bond learns that double agent Maria Freudenstein has received a Fabergé item and plans to auction it at Sotheby's. Bond suspects the KGB resident director will underbid to drive up the price to pay Freudenstein. Bond spots the man and arranges his expulsion as persona non grata.

Background and writing history

By the time Fleming died of a heart attack on 12 August 1964, he had published eleven novels and one short story collection in his James Bond series. Eight months later his twelfth and final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, was published. The rights were held by Glidrose Productions (now Ian Fleming Publications), which decided to publish two short stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights", in 1966. In July 1962, amid marital troubles with his wife Ann, Fleming sent a telegram from New York saying he needed "time to rest and reflect on our future which at present looks intolerable" and travelled to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, where he wrote "Octopussy".

The story has Bond as a catalyst for a narrative told in flashback, in the manner of "Quantum of Solace". "Octopussy" was serialised in the Daily Express from 4–8 October 1965. The Sunday Times launched a colour magazine on 4 February 1962 and asked Fleming to write an article; he wrote "The Guns of James Bond", which was rejected as too long and specialised, so he wrote the sniper story instead. He corresponded with Captain E. K. Le Mesurier of the British National Rifle Association for background research.

Fleming originally titled the story "Trigger Finger", though it was published as "The Living Daylights". It also appeared in the June 1962 issue of Argosy as "Berlin Escape". Fleming commissioned Graham Sutherland for artwork at 100 guineas, but it was not used. "Property of a Lady", written in early 1963, was commissioned by Sotheby's for their journal The Ivory Hammer and published in November 1963.

Sotheby's chairman Peter Wilson is mentioned by name. Fleming was unhappy with the piece and refused payment. His original names were "The Diamond Egg" and "The Fabulous Pay-Off".

Development

Much of the background of "Octopussy" comes from Fleming's own interests and experiences, including wartime commando deeds, climbing in Kitzbühel, hidden gold, and the sea-life of Jamaica. Fleming hiked and skied in Kitzbühel in the late 1920s while attending a small private school, and his experiences were used for Smythe's gold hunt. Fleming observed an octopus he named "Pussy" while diving at Goldeneye and wrote an article about it for The Sunday Times in 1957, "My Friend the Octopus".

Neighbour and later lover Blanche Blackwell gave Fleming a coracle he named Octopussy, which he used for the story. Smythe's wartime unit, the "Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau", was a fictional version of Fleming's 30 AU unit. Fleming had a long-standing interest in hidden gold and was involved in commissioning an article for The Sunday Times about Nazi gold supposedly dumped in Lake Toplitz, Austria. The plot of "The Living Daylights" used the noise of an orchestra to cover a crossing over no man's land, inspired by Pat Reid's escape from Colditz, where two escapees ran across a courtyard under cover of an orchestra.

The Colditz orchestra conductor was Douglas Bader, who played golf with Fleming. The assassin Trigger was partly based on Fleming's half-sister Amaryllis, a concert cellist with blonde hair; Fleming included a passing reference to her in the story. He used the surname of wartime MI6 head Sir Stewart Menzies for Corporal Menzies, who aids Bond during rifle practice. Fleming included in "007 in New York" a recipe for scrambled eggs that came from May Maxwell, housekeeper of his friend Ivar Bryce; he also used her name for Bond's housekeeper May.

Release and reception

The hardback of Octopussy and The Living Daylights hit British shelves on 23 June 1966, priced at 10s.6d and published by Jonathan Cape. It featured just the two stories from its title. Richard Chopping, who had handled many of Fleming’s Bond covers before, created the artwork for 350 guineas. Around 45,000 copies were printed, but they moved slowly; the first edition was still in shops when the UK switched to decimal currency in February 1971, forcing Cape to slap stickers over the old price.

The US version came out in mid-1966 from New American Library, with Paul Bacon’s illustrations. Pan Books released a UK paperback in July 1967, adding “The Property of a Lady” without changing the book’s name. That year, it sold 79,000 copies in Britain, jumping to 362,000 in 1968, while overseas sales for 1967 topped 76,000. By 2002, Viking Press had included “007 in New York.”

Critic Philip Larkin, writing in The Spectator, found the two stories “full of shading and nuance” but felt Bond didn’t suit short-story length. The Times Literary Supplement called the plots predictable, though it praised the descriptions of ballistics and sea-life. Anthony Burgess, in The Listener, observed that Fleming’s “fascinated poring on things” showed that anti-novel material needn’t come from a deliberate aesthetic, adding that “the mastery of the world” carved Fleming’s unique literary spot.