The Spy Who Loved Me Add a review

The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel and tenth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published by Jonathan Cape on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels, as well as the only Bond novel told in the first person. Its narrator is a young Canadian woman, Viv Michel. Bond himself does not appear until two-thirds of the way through the book, arriving at precisely the right moment to save Viv from being raped and murdered by two criminals. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving the character Viv credit as a co-author.

The story uses a recurring motif of Saint George against the dragon, and contains themes of power, and the moral ambiguity between those acting with good and evil intent. As the narrator who tells her own backstory and expresses her emotions and motives, Viv has been described as the best realised and most rounded female character in the Bond canon. The reviewers were largely negative, with some expressing a desire for a return to the structure and form of the previous Bond novels. In a letter to his editor after the reviews had been published, Fleming reflected that "the experiment has obviously gone very much awry".

Following the negative reactions of critics, Fleming attempted to suppress elements of the novel: he blocked a paperback edition in the United Kingdom and, when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, they were permitted to use the title but none of the plot of the book. In the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth in the Eon Productions series, only the title and the character of one of the villains, Jaws, are taken from the book. The film was the third to star Roger Moore as Bond. A heavily adapted version of The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in The Daily Express newspaper in daily comic strip format between 1967 and 1968; a British paperback edition of the novel was published after Fleming's death.