Lately I've been using Ian Fleming audiobboks to lull me to sleep, and Fleming's super-exhaustive outlining of every detail in a scene's environment puts me out after about 15-20 minutes. Last night, however, I woke up about ninety minutes into DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, the fourth James Bond novel (originally published in 1956), and lay there in the dark for a while, actually concentrating on the story. I had not read that book since probably 1978, when I devoured all of the 1960's editions of Fleming because they were an ubiquitous presence in second-hand book shops (I got the whole run at Fairfield's long-defunct Book Finder), so I had forgotten just how bad that novel is.
When Fleming is firing on all cylinders, his work is exciting and visceral, but when he's off, it's painful and embarrassing to read. He tends to write American gangsters as cartoon stereotypes straight out of B movies of the 1930's and 1940's, so reading the dialogue of those characters immediately brings to mind the caricatured mobsters from Looney Tunes shorts. It's bad enough while reading the novel, but it's immeasurably worse when an actor reads it aloud in audiobook form. Yeah, I accept that all literature is a product of its era, but DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER serves to underline Fleming's considerable ignorance regarding people and cultures other than his own.
Bottom line: I rank this as Fleming's weakest book, somehow worse than THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (which also featured cartoon gangsters, one of whom was named "Slugsy"). If you ever decide to read Fleming's Bond stories, most of which have little or nothing to do with the subsequent films bearing their titles, I advise you to skip DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. It has aged about as well as milk.
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