I read all of the James Bond novels. Moonraker was pretty weak, but the rest of them were good.

Dr. No was a good movie version of the novel. They did change the end a bit. In the movie, Bond killed off Dr. No by pushing him into boiling water heated by an atomic pile. In the book, Bond used a different kind of pile:   he buried Dr. No under several tons of guano (dried bird poop). What a way to go!

From Russia with Love was pretty good. I thought the movie version lost a great opportunity for suspense by changing the latter part of the novel. In the novel, when Bond and the girl were on the Orient Express on their way to Paris, Fleming built up the suspense nicely because the reader knew that the British agent that Bond was expecting to meet was actually a brutal Smersh assassin—a psychopathic killer—(played menacingly in the movie by Robert Shaw) sent to do Bond and the girl in. You knew it when he showed up, but Bond didn't. They did play it that way in the movie, but it was much better done in the novel. It was the kind of high suspense that Eric Ambler used to write. Then, in the movie, they bunged in that scene with Bond and the girl ducking and dodging while the baddies in the helicopter tried to drop grenades on them.

Goldfinger was pretty well done, but that was the one that in which Q started loading Bond down with his cockamamie gadgets (the tricked-up Aston Martin for one) and the movies started going downhill from there. But Goldfinger wasn't too bad.

Thunderball was where they started getting downright silly. And it was pure comic book from there on.

Sean Connery made the movie role. As far as I'm concerned, he was the only James Bond. Timothy Dalton liked the novels and wanted to get back to Fleming's original concept of the Bond character, but with the scripts they gave him, he was fighting a losing battle. Too bad.

There was an American version of Le Femme Nikita called Point of No Return (1993) starring Bridget Fonda. Very good! Bridget Fonda. Yummmm!!

Don Firth