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Dr. Medulla
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Re: m

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Silent Majority wrote:
Dr. Medulla wrote:I can accept them in the context of the time when they were written, but the writing and plotting is just plain dull. In Moonraker, for example, the set-up goes on and on and on about how Bond is assigned to find out how Drax is cheating at bridge. Only Bond is skilled enough at bridge to defeat Drax. Over and over and over. And then, ridiculously casually, it's revealed that Drax cheats by using a highly reflective cigarette case to see others' cards. All set-up and no pay-off. And that's how all the Bond novels that I've read have been—ridiculous but compelling spy premises with awful follow through.
I tend to think of them as like the blues, or Wodehouse. Everything sounds the same, but the details change and you're getting under the skin of a character (very different from the action Bond of the films who was essentially made by Connery) who's obsessed with tiny details and very, very occasionally shoots people on his travelogue adventures. It's less about that Drax cheats at bridge, but about how the villain's described.
Yet the fifty page build-up about the card cheat and how Bond, being so masterful at bridge, is the only one who might beat him is abusive of the reader's time to dismiss it so casually. It comes off as Fleming realizing by the time he gets to the game that he doesn't know what the cheat should be or how Bond should expose it, so he tosses off any old explanation and moves on. It's awful storytelling. I have no problem with any of the premises—the utter romanticization of the Cold War as a stage between sophisticated actors engaged in mind and physical games—but the execution is horrible.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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