It starts with one of those terrible coincidences where Bond finds himself in the right place at the right time to unknowingly get a preview of the villainous plot as it gets underway, but in this case Fleming pulls it off–but only barely. It was a mess.Īnyway, for something that caused so much drama Thunderball is one of the best of the best when it comes to both the book and the movie adaptation. The movie series was even banned from using SPECTRE and Blofeld anymore after 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever (both eventually returned to the series in 2015’s Spectre). Conveniently, Fleming passed away not long after the film series got going, but the legal drama kept escalating and escalating over time. Thunderball was supposed to be the first Bond movie but McClory fought for his legal rights to the story and it was complicated enough that Dr. It wasn’t such a big deal until the Bond series actually was sold to EON Productions. Problem is, he didn’t get approval from McClory to do that. The script was surprisingly difficult to sell to a movie studio, so in frustration Fleming adapted the script to a novel.

He prepared a screenplay for a Bond film with a man named Kevin McClory, in which James Bond must defuse a nuclear threat from a terrorist organization called SPECTRE. He cleverly recognized the popular appeal Bond would have on screen. You see, Fleming was very motivated to sell his series to a film studio. Thunderball also unleashed a host of legal troubles that plagued the Bond series for more than five decades. This organization, and Blofeld in particular, will be far more familiar than SMERSH to the casual Bond enthusiast because they are the primary antagonists to 007 in the early Bond movies. For Thunderball unleashes SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), headed up by none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Given that Bond made SMERSH his sworn enemy in Casino Royale, it seems odd that they should disappear with such an utter lack of ceremony.īut don’t fear, Fleming has a plan to replace them. There’s a passing reference that it has been two years since SMERSH disappeared and that’s it. Now in fiction as in life SMERSH has suffered the ignominious defeat of being quietly folded into the NKGB with little to no explanation. Based on an actual organization whose name was coined by Josef Stalin himself, SMERSH had been officially shuttered in 1946, long before Ian Fleming wrote the first James Bond book.

SMERSH, the Soviet spy organization that was the main villain in the early Bond books, has died an alarmingly sudden, anticlimactic death. “It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.”

Thunderball by ian fleming