Guide to James Bond

In Quantum of Solace, the Walther PPK, Aston Martin DBS and Omega Seamaster all make their return. This time Bond has a Sony Ericsson C902 mobile phone with a built-in identification imager, capable of compiling a composite facial image of a potential suspect even when the person being photographed is looking to the side. This phone can also receive information immediately regarding the suspect as it is also tied into the MI6 data mainframe. At At MI6 they havethey have the latest Microsoft Surface touch-screen computer interface. They use a similar device to compile information concerning possible suspects and relays them back to Bond via his cell phone.

Q also supplies Bond with an eye piece he uses to eaves drop on Dominic Greene, while Greene uses a hydrogen fuel cell to power his desert lair. It seems that technology is rapidly catching up with both Q and the Bond villains. Nothing they come up with these days seems even remotely outlandish.

Chapter 8 – The Girls
Along with the guns and the gadgets, the other staple of Bond is the girls. In the books Bond sleeps with just fourteen women; in the movies he has clocked up over sixty conquests – not an unusually high total for a man approaching middle age. They are all, of course, beautiful. But not flawless. The girls in the books are not pin-ups. They haved physical and emotional defects that make them real. Though sometimes vulnerable, they are strong, independent, assertive women who do not wait to be rescued by the macho hero. In several instances, it is the girl who rescues Bond rather than the other way around. They are usually drive faster than he does and are sexually experienced. Bond makes little effort to seduce themn. They go to bed with him on their own initiative, because they want to to, and they find him sexually attractive. Even if they try to keep him at arm’s length, they are drawn together by experiencing shared dangers. Bond girls are always part of the plot, not a mere adornment.

Vesper Lynd

The first Bond girl is Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. It is thought that she is based on Krystyna Skarbek, a yna Skarbek, Pole who worked for SOE during the war under the name Christine Granville. In the book, Vesper works for Section S, which deals with the Soviet Union, and is sent to Royale-les-Eaux under the guise of a radio sales person assisting René Mathis. Bond is annoyed, until he sets eyes on her. Then he is “excited by her beauty and intrigued by her composure”.

Vesper is the prototype Bond girl. She wears her black hair long and natural. She is suntanned and wears little make-up “except on her mouth which was wide and sensual”; her eyes are deep blue and wide apart. Her clothes are plain, but elegant. She wears little jewellery and her breasts are “fine”. Like Bond, she drinks and smokes.

She is named Vesper, she says, because she was born on a very stormy evening, which her parents wanted to remember. “Some people like it, others don’t,” she says. Bond promptly names his special Mmartini after it.

Having survived their run-in with Le Chiffre, Vesper visits Bond in hospital every day and, much to his surprise, he develops feelings fortowards her. They take a holiday together and become lovers. However, before meeting Bond, she was in love with a Polish officer in the RAF. When he rhad returned to Poland after the war, he washad been arrested by the Russians who said that they would keep him alive if she worked for them as a double agent. But then she became attracted todeveloped feelings for Bond and, when she decided to have an affair with him, she told them that she would not work for them any more, knowing her previous boyfriend would have to die. She hoped that she and Bond could escape together to South America and she would have his baby. However, SMERSH is are on her tailtale. Knowing she canwould never escape them, she commits suicide.

Although at the end of the Casino Royale, Bond says “The bitch is deadd…” he continues to hold a torch for her. In Diamonds Are Forever, he skips the track “La Vie en Rose” because it holds eld memories for him. In Goldfinger, when Bond is drugged and thinks that he and Tilly Masterton have died and gone to heaven, he wonders whether he would introduce her to Vesper there. Then On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – the tenth novel – begins with Bond making his annual pilgrimage to visit Vesper’s grave in Royale-les-Eaux.

However, she doesid not seem to be uppermost in Bond’s mind when is ogling the black girls in Harlem in Live and Let Die. All he can think of during the frenzied fan dance of G-G Sumatra is her small, hard, bronze, beautiful, oiled body as it goes into a series of juddering spasms.
Solitaire

Then he meets twenty-five-year-old clairvoyant Solitaire. Solitaire is, after all, “one of the most beautiful women Bond had ever seen”. Her hair is blue-black and shoulder--length; her eyes blue, disdainful with a touch of humour. Unusually for a Bond girl, it is implied that she is a virgin. Mr Big, who intends to marry her, says she will have nothing to do with men – that’s why, in Haiti, they call her Solitaire. Bond doubts this and, sure enough, after letting herself be kissed on the train she quickly shows herself to him naked and appears disappointed that he can’t make love to her.

Solitaire’s real name is Simone Latrelle. Bond imagines that she comescame from a plantation house – she hasd the face of the daughter of a French colonial slave-owner and the pale skin of white families who have lived too long in the tropics. Her parents died; the house was sold. She worked as a governess, a companion, a secretary – “all of which meant respectable prostitution”. Then in the sleazy nightclubs of Port-au-Prince, she performed a mysterious act that involved magic, until Mr Big turned up one night.

Although she has diamond earrings and a thin diamond bracelet, she wears no rings. Her nails are short and unpainted. Her mouth is “sensual” with a hint of cruelty, but at their first meeting Bond’s eyes are drawn to her breasts and the valley between them. She then teases him with her nudity, but Bond is impeded by a broken finger and the need to maintain vigilance that night. Later she is stripped naked and the two of them are tied together, but as they face being dragged over a reef this is hardly erotic. In fact, they do not consummate their relationship in the book, though there is every prospect that they will do so on the holiday Bond is planning. And when Bond returnsed to the Caribbean in Dr. No, he thinks of Solitaire and wonders what has become of her;, but he leaves it there.

Gala Brand

However, back in England for Moonraker, Bond forgets all about Solitaire. Instead, he gets to work with Gala Brand, a Special Branch officer posing as Drax’s personal assistant. Her full name is Galatea, after the cruiser her father was serving on when she was born. This is either the HMS Galatea commissioned in 1914 and scrapped in 1921, or the HMS Galatea commissioned in 1935 and sunk in 1941. So either Gala is between thirty-four and forty-one when the book iswas published in 1955 – making her the oldest Bond girl – or between fourteen and twenty – making her the youngest. However, she had been in the Wrens before joining Special Branch, so she seems to have been the oldest.

On the taking the assignment, Bond gets to see her personnel file. Though he is unimpressed with the photograph of her in her police uniform, he reads on: “Hair: Auburn. Eyes: Blue. Height: 5 ft 7. Weight: 9 stone. Hips: 38. Waist: 26. Bust: 38. Distinguishing marks: Mole on upper curvature of right breast.” The latter clearly interests him. However, he makes little progress with her. She is a dedicated police woman. Although she finds Bond attractive, she dismissesd him as a playboy. Walking on the beach in Kent, Bond persuades her to strip down to her underwear to go swimming, but she undresses demurely behind a rock. In the water, Bond seizes the opportunity to kiss her. She curses him, but afterwards sunbathes in her bra and panties while Bond ogles the “pointed hillocks of her breasts” and “the mystery of her tightly closed thighs”. Then the explosion that covers them with rubble leaves them naked, but inunder the circumstances this is hardly erotic.

During their escape from Moonraker’s silo they are forced together again. At the end of the book, Bond plans to take her away on holiday to a farmhouse in France. She turns him down. Instead she is going to marry another police man. This is a solitary example in the books of Bond not getting his wicked way.

Tiffany Case

In Diamonds Are Forever, Tiffany Case proves a tantalizing prospect. When he goes to meet her in her hotel room, he finds her half--naked in front of the dressing table mirror. Wearing only a black bra and lace panties, “the splay of her legs whipped at Bond’s senses”. Her skin is lightly tanned. Again she wears no make-up except deep red lipstick on her “sinful mouth”. She does not paint her nails, which pleases Bond. At first, he does not know her name. Seeing “Miss T. Case” on a label on her luggage, he speculates on what the T strands for. Two of the possibilities he comes up with are Teresa and Tilly – the names of two future Bond girls.

Later, Leiter fills in her background. Tiffany’s mother had been a madam in San Francisco. When she refused to pay protection money, gangsters wrecked the place and gang-raped sixteen-year-old Tiffany, turning her against men. She worked as a hat-check girl, taxi-dancer, movie extra and a waitress until she was twenty, when she decided to drink herself to death. But she saved a child from drowning and got her name in the paper. A rich woman took an interest, got Tiffany to Alcoholics Anonymous and took her around the world as her companion. Eventually Tiffany went back to San Francisco to live with her mother, who had given up the business. But Tiffany found this dull, went on the lam again and ended up working in a club in Reno where she got to know the gangsters who were smuggling diamonds.

In New York, Bond persuades Tiffany to have dinner with him. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” she says and warns him not to waste his money. But after caviar and champagne, she softens. Outside the door of her hotel room, Bond notices that her eyelashes are wet. She tells him to be careful because she does not want to lose him, then kisses him fiercely. But when he tries to return the kiss she tells him to get away from her, and slams the door in his face.

After Bond has been beaten up by the gangsters at Spectreville, Tiffany rescues him. On a romantic cruise back to England, she Tiffany is kidnapped and Bond gets to rescue her. They live together for a few months. By the beginning of From Russia With Love, she has left him and returned to the US with a Marine Corps major who had been on the military attaché’s staff at the embassy. Bond did not have the energy or the desire to find a temporary replacement. Maybe this was why he was so eager to go to Istanbul to collect Tatiana Romanova, even when her invitation is so obviously as trap.
Tatiana Romanova

Tatiana’s story is that she saw Bond’s picture in the MGB’s central files. M believes that such a thing could happen and convinces Bond. After all, the head of Station T has reported that she is “very good-looking”.

A twenty-four-year-old corporal in the MGB – Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti or Ministry of State Security – Tatiana has been chosen to seduce Bond. She does not know that she is merely the bait to lure him to his death. One of her boyfriends compared her to the young Greta Garbo. Her brown silky hair falls to her shoulders and has a curl at the end. Her skin is pale with an ivory sheen at the cheek bones. Her eyes are blue and, again, set apart, with natural eyebrows and long lashes. Her mouth is also wide with the hint of a smile at the corners and the lips are full and finely etched. Her body is firm. She had trained as a ballet dancer until she grew too tall, but continues to keep fit by figure skating and walking to work. Her arms and her breasts are faultless, but the muscles of her buttocks haved hardened and her backside “jutted like a man’s”.

In her interview with Rosa Klebb, Tatiana is forced, tearfully, to admit that she has had three lovers – one at seventeen, a second at twenty-two, then a third she had met skating the previous year. When she is shown a photograph of Bond, she finds him good-looking. She does not know whether she can fall in love with him, but has no choice but to accept the assignment. However, she flees from Klebb’s attempted seduction. Klebb concludes that she is prudish and needs more training. However, she doesdid not seem at all prudish when she turns up in Bond’s bed in Istanbul naked except for a black velvet ribbon around her neck and black silk stockings. Perhaps the training worked. But then she did not know about the camera crew behind the one-way mirror in the honeymoon suite. They travel on the Orient Express as husband and wife. After that, But then no more is heard of her.

Honeychile Rider

Bond can be forgiven for forgetting about Tatiana when Honeychile Rider emerges from the sea naked except for the belt around her waist. WThen when he whistles along to her tune, she does not cover her body with the two classical gestures, leaving her “beautiful firm breasts” jutting “towards him without concealment”. Then a hand goes to the knife on her belt, ready to defend herself. Like the other Bond girls,Again she has blue eyes, set wide apart, and a wide mouth. This time, her hair is ash blonde, but again it hangs to her shoulders. They spend some time in conversation before she becomesame self-conscious about her nakedness. Even then she iswas in no hurry to get dressed, more concerned about her shells than her clothing.

Like Solitaire, Honeychile is the daughter of an old colonial family. She was orphaned at five when the plantation house, Beau Desert, burned down. She lived in the cellar with her black nanny until she died when Honeychile was fifteen. Then a drunken white overseer, who she hated, hit her, breaking her nose, and raped her. She killed him with a poisonous spider – “He took a week to die.”

She supports herself by collecting and selling shells. Then, when she has saved up enough money, she intends to go to America and have her nose fixed by a plastic surgeon. After that she would become a call girl until she has made enough money to buy back her parents’ plantation, and get married and have children.

Bond wants to take care of her. At twenty, she is Bond considers her just a child, though there is nothing childish about her body or her personality. She is highly intelligent and more than capable of taking care of herself. But when she invites Bond to share her sleeping bag, he declines, even when she says they do not have to make love.

After they are captured by Dr. No’s men, Bond and HoOneychile are locked in a suite together. She undresses to have a bath and flings her arms around him. He kisses her and fondles her left breast – “Its peak … hard with passion”. But then he decides that this is no time to make love as they are in danger, so he threatens to spank her if she does not get into the bath.

Bond frequently threatens to spank girls. He wanted to spank Vesper in Casino Royale. In From Russia With Love, he tells Tania that, if there were a bit more room in their compartment on the Orient Express, he would put her across his knee and spank her. In Goldfinger, Bond decides that it would be ungallant to spank Tilly Masterton “on an empty stomach”. In For Your Eyes Only, he threatens to give Judy Havelock “ such a spanking you won’t be able to sit down for a week”. And in Thunderball, he even threatens to give Miss Moneypenny such a spanking that she willould have to do her typing on a block of Dunlopillo. But she doubts that he would have the strength to spank her that hard after going to the health farm and living off nuts and lemon juice for two weeks.

Honeychile appears naked again when Dr. No’s men strip her and stake her out to be eaten by land crabs. Finally Bond and Honeychile do to make love in her cellar home at Beau Desert. Returning to Jamaica six books later in The Man wWith the Golden Gun, he recalls of his time with Honeychile at Beau Desert. The last he heard, she had married a doctor called Wilder in Philadelphia and has two children. She never wrote.

Jill and Tilly Masterton

But Bond does not give Honeychile a second thought when he creeps into Jill Masterton’s hotel room to find her in a black brassiere and black silk briefs. Her pale blonde hair hangs heavily to her shoulders. Her eyes are blue and her skin suntanned. Her face is beautiful and she is unselfconscious about her splendid body. But unlike other Bond girls, she paints her nails.

BondHe forces Goldfinger to book a compartment on the train to New York for Bond himself Bond and Jill, taking the girl as a prize. She has been starved of sex and makes love to Bond five times on the journey. But then she returns to Goldfinger, whor he has Oddjob paint her naked body with gold paint, killing her.

Next a pretty girl overtakes him in a Triumph TR3. She has a with gash of red lipstick ,and black hair tied back under a spotted handkerchief. In Macon, Bond reverses his Aston Martin into her car and gives her a lift to Geneva. She is a beautiful girl, “the kind who leaves her beauty alone”, and throws out her fine breasts against her taut silk blouse in a way that is both provocative and challenging. However, Bond thinks there is something faintly mannish about her.

He meets her again when she tries to kill Goldfinger. He has to restrain her and she explains that she is Tilly Masterton, Jill’s sister, out for revenge. Although they stay together for much of the book, there is little chance of her becoming a Bond girl as she instantly falls for Pussy Galore when she meets her. The feeling is mutual and Pussy calls Jill “yummy”.
Pussy Galore

While it is clear that Pussy is obviously a lesbian, yet Bond has little trouble seducing her once Tilly has been killed by Oddjob.

“They told me you only liked women,” says Bond.

“I never met a man before,” says Pussy, explaining that she had been put off men after being raped by her uncle at the age of twelve.

Unfortunately she is going strange straight to Sing Sing and asks James to write to her. It is not clear whether he does so as there is no further mention of her. But then she had violet – sometimes blue-violet – eyes and long nails painted silver, so she was not really his type.
Mary Ann Russell

“A View to a Kill” finds Bond in Paris looking for a girl, willing even to pay her fifty thousand francs for her company that evening while knowing that he would be disappointed. But then a tall girl with pale skin and blonde hair turns up. This is Mary Ann Russell. She is number 765 from Station F. Bond is wanted. She worries about him taking unnecessary risks, telling him off when he reports by phone each evening. He invites her to dinner, promising pink champagne and gypsy violins. In the end when Bond gets the worst of it in a fight with enemy assassins, she turns up to save him.

Judy Havelock and Liz Krest

In “For Your Eyes Only”, Bond is held up at arrow-w-point by a bow-wielding Judy Havelock. Again the heroineshe hasd pale blonde hair which fallsfell to her shoulders. She hasd a beautiful face with a wild, animal look to it, a wild sensuous mouth, high cheekbones and silvery grey eyes. After they haved killed the baddies, Bond says he is taking her to London to meet M. But first he must take her to a motel. He has already promised her a spanking. Although she says she is twenty-five, she seems a lot younger – more concerned about the deaths of her dog and her pony than those of her parents.

There are no Bond girls in “Quantum of Solace” or “Risico”, but in “The Hildebrand Rarity” Bond makes off with Mrs Krest, presumably to comfort the widow who has almost certainly just killed her husband.
Patricia Fearing

In Thunderball, Bond is saved from the traction machine by nurse Patricia Fearing. To aid healing, she brings him brandy and gives him a massage wearing minkwink gloves. He asks her to marry him because “you’re the only girl I’ve ever met who knows how to treat a man properly”. Later he enjoys her “strong, smooth body” on the squab seats from her bubble car high up on the Downs.

Domino Vitali

In Nassau, Bond meets Domino Vitali. After going to school in Cheltenham and attending RADA, Domino returned to Italy after her parents were killed in a train crash. Unable to make a living as an actress, she became the mistress of millionaire yacht-owner Emilio Largo.

She has a Brigitte Bardot haircut, a small upturned nose and a snarling, half-pouting mouth. Her breasts are high with a deep cleavage. Bond can tell she is a wilful, sensual girl – “a beautiful Arab mare who would only allow herself to be ridden by a horseman with steel thighs and velvet hands, and then only with curb and saw bit – and then only when he had broken her to bridle and saddle”. But he can see she belongs to another man,, another rider who has to be unseated first.

While skin -diving, she gets sea-egg spines in her foot. Bond sucks them out. Then they make love and go skinny-dipping before Bond tells her about the death of her brother. Thanks to Bond, Domino gets caught with a Geiger counter by Largo, who tortures her with a lighted cigar. She survives to rescue Bond when Largo is trying to kill him. When they are in hospital together, Bond makes it to her room, but collapses before he can take things any further.

Vivienne Michel

In The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming gives the Bond girl’s point of view. The protagonist Vivienne Michel is five foot six with blue eyes and brown wavy hair which she one -day wants to give a “lion’s streak” to make her look older. Originally from Quebec, she was orphaned at eight when her parents died in a plane crash. Brought up by a widowed aunt, she was sent to a finishing school in England at the age of sixteen. She was losing her virginity to her boyfriend in a box in a cinema in Windsor when they goet caught and humiliated. Then they completed the act in a field. Two weeks later, she receiveds a letter saying that he wasis marrying someone else as hishe parents did not approve of “foreigners”, presumably because she is a French-Canadian.

Vivienne thenShe got a job with a German news agency and started sleeping with her boss. She becamefell pregnant, but he would not marry her because he had inherited strong views about “mixed blood”. However, he arranged for her to have an abortion in Switzerland and gave her the money.

At the time of the action, she is twenty-three. Sheand thought she had a good figure until the English girls at her finishing school told her that her behind stuck out too much, and that she should wear a tighter bra. In fact, she does without one during the tale – surely a rebellion against sher strict convent education.

An outdoor girl, she has high cheekbones which make her look “foreign”. Her nose is too small and her mouth too big, so she looks sexy when she doesn’t want it to. She considers herself sanguine, a romantic tinged with melancholy, but also wayward and independent to a degree that worried the sisters at the convent and her teachers at finishing school.

When Bond turns up, he has a “quality of deadliness” that makes her think that he may be another gangster. But he is good-looking and, when she uses her hands to hide her nakedness, he smiles and she thinks things might be all right.

When they think they have killed off the gangsters, Vivienne insists that she is not going to leave Bond that night, adding chastely,: “I’ll sleep on the floor.” Bond says that, if she is going to sleep on the floor, he will sleep on the floor too – though “its seems rather a waste of a fine double bed”.