Ian Fleming

I have never been a fan of James bond novels or films, though the first film to have Daniel Craig as Bond was rather good. He is believeable as a human being; the others were not. Yet, while I'm reading the latest Bond book, a collection of short stories with the title "Quondam of Solace" (same title as the new film), I keep imagining Bond not as Daniel Craig but as Roger Moore, someone I didn't like at all in his Bond films.
I don't know how they were able to produce a whole film from the story with the title "Quondam of Solace" because it hardly has Bond in it - he spends the whole short story listening to someone tell him about a certain man who married an air hostess and how the marriage broke up.... and so on. Bond in not involved in any physical action, he just sits and listens.
I shall see what they have done with the story when I see the film soon.
Raymond Chandler was a fan of Ian Fleming. I was, at first, surprised to hear this since Chandler is such a fine writer and Ian Fleming, I always thought, was an inferior writer of pulp fiction.
I was wrong. Fleming is a very good writer indeed. He has a way with phrases that make them almost poetic in the sense that you feel he has hit the spot with ease and style. There is, of course, a nasty brutal aspect to Bond that is not in the character of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe and this comes out occasionaly so strongly that you wonder why you find the man so fascinating. But Fleming tells a very good short story, a thing he may be better at than novel writing, like Maupassant.