 I've had a blast revisiting the Fleming novels for this series so far. I finished the first three novels in the blink of an eye and quickly moved on to number 4. Diamonds Are Forever. Now, I remember not liking this novel as much, having last read it six years ago. And as you can tell, it indeed took me a lot longer to make my way through this book once again. Was it indeed a bad novel? How do I feel about it with this one fresh in my mind again? Let's get back into reading 007. Diamonds Are Forever takes James Bond undercover, taking the identity of diamond smuggler Peter Franks. His mission is to uncover a diamond smuggling ring and follow the pipeline that stretches from the African mines in Sierra Leone through London into the United States, and he needs to find out who is behind it all. During this mission, Bond teams up with a mysterious go-between in the pipeline called Tiffany Case, and learns that the people behind this are the ruthless Spangler mob, controlled by brothers Jack and Sarah Fimo Spang, whose influence stretches all across the United States. So Bond needs to go undercover in this novel, posing as a diamond smuggler, which to me sounded more exciting than it turned out to be. He's very quick in revealing his real name to Tiffany Case anyway, and doesn't bother to change his personality or appearance, which I guess is a very Bond-like thing to do anyway when he's undercover, but I feel this aspect could have been played out more. Throughout the story, Bond is constantly underestimating the people he's up against. From the moment M gives him his mission breathing and warns him to take these mobsters serious, Bond is just very light-hearted and dismissive about his enemies. M's chief of staff also gives him a warning and tells him how M is only ever really worried about certain groups of people. Smurfs, the German cipherbreakers, the Chinese opium ring, and the authority of the mafia. And again, Bond is just like Okamon. They're just a bunch of spaghetti and pizza-eating hoodlums squirting scent over themselves, which to me was very unlike Bond, who usually has some form of admiration or respect for his adversaries, even when he despises them, and at the very least he knows to never underestimate the opposition. But here, Bond is just so bored about this whole mission, and automatically, as a reader, you feel very similar, at least in the first half of the book. Of course, Bond is wrong in underestimating his opponents, who all turn out to be quite dangerous indeed. But I do feel Bond is somewhat right in how boring some of these villains are, especially compared to the other villains Flemming wrote about so far. Jack and Cero Fimo Spang really were far from Mafiosa type of villains that I was expecting and honestly hoping to read about, and they were also far from classic Flemming like Bond main villains. Cero Fimo is the owner of the Tiara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, who has a wild west fetish, dressing up as a cowboy, owning a couple of ghost towns in the desert outside of Vegas, one of which is called Spectrefield by the way, a first showcase of Flemming's love for the word Spectre. And he also owns a classic locomotive that becomes part of one of the three climaxes of the book. The other Spang brother, Jack Spang, doesn't really show up much in the book at all, Bond just has to figure out who he is. It turns out Bond already met him early on, just using another alias, Rufus BC, also better known as ABC. But there really isn't much noteworthy about him either, he just controls the European side of the diamond smuggling pipeline, and he meets his demise in the helicopter at the end of the book. There are several other gangsters appearing in the novel, one called Shady Tree, a gangster with a hunchback and a voice that squeals, that is responsible for getting Bond paid for his job posing as Peter Franks. This is an aspect I really liked about the novel, the efficiency of the gangsters, thinking of clever ways to pay out thousands of dollars without making the authorities raise an eyebrow. So Shady Tree makes Bond go to Saratoga to bet on a horse in a fixed race. Of course Bond rigs the race, preventing him from getting paid, so he can go deeper into the pipeline. I guess the most notable villains are the assassins from Detroit called Mr. Wind and Mr. Kid, who are described to be the torpedoes of the Spangled Mob, who show up several times throughout the book in some of the Dark Passages, one of which is the execution of the jockey through a hot boiling mud bath, which is quite brutal. They are also responsible for giving Bond a so-called Brooklyn beating later on in the story by stomping on him with boots, leaving Bond as a wounded animal. But again, though there are definitely threats in the novel, I think the biggest weakness of this novel is the lack of any real strong main villains that make a huge impact and have clear Bond villain-like motivations, especially when you're just coming off the brilliant Hugo Drax from the previous novel. The novel's Bond girl, however, Tiffany Case, is one of the best female characters Fleming wrote about up until this point. If you take a look at the previous Bond girl so far, with Vesper being desirable yet secretive and uncommunicative, Solitaire being sensual and mysterious, Gala brand intelligent, heroic, and perfectionistic, Tiffany seems to be the most believable and real so far. She's a tough, yet wounded woman. And the chapters of Bond first meaning her half-naked isn't just interesting because of her lack of clothes. She's described to have arrogance in the set of her head and shoulders, scornful grey eyes, and a sinful mouth. She's a woman that's been through it all, that can take care of herself and isn't about to just sleep with anybody. American Bond girls may often seem less exotic than other Bond girls that Bond comes across, but Tiffany makes up for it being one of the aspects that keeps the book interesting. And Fleming seems to imply that Bond and Tiffany are slowly falling for each other by the end of the book as they are sailing on board of the Queen Elizabeth. And this is one of my favourite descriptions that Fleming ever wrote about of an early relationship development. It is an intoxicating moment in a love affair when, for the first time, in a public place, in a restaurant or a theatre, the man puts his hand down and lays it on the thigh of the girl, and when she slips her hand over his and presses the man's hand against her. The two gestures say everything that can be said. All is agreed. All the pacts are signed. And there is a long minute of silence during which the blood sings. I do like, however, that Bond as a character does not believe in marriage. In his opinion, most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract people from each other. Which is just another one of the fascinating insights into Bond's mind that I always enjoy when reading Bond. Felix Leiter also makes his third appearance in the novels. After being maimed by the sharks in Live and Let Die, he is now no longer working for the CIA, but instead is the world's most obvious private detective with a wooden leg and a hook for a hand. I guess he's only missing an eyepatch and he would be a pirate. It's still cool to read about his return, though. He mainly functions as a source of information in the book, knowing all about the Spangled Mob, but quite frankly also being indirectly responsible for a lot of the trouble that Bond ends up in throughout the novel. The movie Sharing the Same Name was adapted very loosely in 1971. The setup of the movie is the same, with Bond taking the identity of diamond smuggler Peter Franks, who gets taken into custody so that Bond can take his place and dive into the pipeline. He also meets this movie's version of Tiffany K's inside of a hotel room during her makeup. But apart from that, story-wise, the movie takes a completely different take. Though there are mobsters in the movie, and there is also a character called Shady Tree, and some of it is also set in Vegas, Bond does not go up against the Spangled Mob in this film, but instead takes on Blofeld once again in the form of Charles Gray. Mr. Wind and Mr. Kid are also in the movie, but both are more of a comic relief than the menacing Hooded Duo Bond takes on in the novel. It's implied in both the movie and the novel that they could be a gay couple though, so I guess the movie did play into that aspect of the characters too. Other than that, the movie and the novel are two completely separate animals. Tiffany K's in the movie ends up being much more of a bin-bow near the end of the film, and is a completely different character to the one I picture in the novel. There is a moment in the novel where Tiffany works as a dealer of a blackjack table in the casino, which I think is somewhat adapted in the way Loopy becomes the dealer in the casino in License to Kill. And I guess you could say some of the cheating with the horse racing also shows up in A Future A Kill, so some of the influence of this novel still translated to other Bond movies. Those that know me well know that I am not the biggest fan of the movie Diamonds of Forever, mainly because it had so much potential to be a great revenge story follow-up to the movie Under Majesty's Secret Service. Here, with the novel Diamonds of Forever, I feel very similar for vastly different reasons, because I feel the book also had a lot of potential. This could have been a great Bond vs Mafia type of story, but I think it's very clear that Fleming doesn't know as much of the Italian American Mafia when reading about the characters he came up with for this story. And of course, you can't really blame him for it, this was written in 1956, a time when there really wasn't that much known about the Italian American Mafia compared to the breakthroughs that followed later in history, throughout the 60s to 80s, when so much more about how Mafia families are structured was discovered. It would have been great to see Bond infiltrate a mob family, Donnie Brascostow, finding out about the dons, the capos and the consulieres that make up the higher ups in the real-life five families centered in New York. Bond could have infiltrated to win trust inside of the family and break them from within. Instead, Bond is mostly up against a cowboy and cardboard-like hoodlums that seem to come from 1930s television. He's often bored throughout the mission, complaining a lot about everything that is wrong with America and it's just a lot harder to stay motivated reading this one compared to the three books that came before this. That isn't to say this is a terrible novel. Like I said before, Tiffany Case is a character that succeeds in making the story a lot more engaging and the novel essentially covers not one, but three climaxes of which are pretty satisfying. It's not a terrible book by any means, but it does take you to come to the last third of the book before it finally starts to become more engaging. The lack of any sort of presence of a main villain that has clear motivations, I think really hurts the early parts of the book and I think that is the biggest shame. On the back of my book, this is described as a first-rate thriller, but above all, it's a terrific novel by Jonathan Kellerman. And I'm sure a lot of people agree with him, but I just wish I could share that sentiment, because to me it doesn't really feel like a classic James Bond-like novel. It feels like a book that could have gone from decent to great. I'll mention this though. I gave the book a second chance after finishing it by listening to the radio drama by Toby Stephens and other actors. You can find it right here on YouTube too. This way, with the story being more concise and fast-paced, I surprisingly enjoyed it more. So my advice if you still want to consume this story is, type it in on YouTube and listen to the audio drama for free. In the case of this story, it just seems to work better. All in all, it's a decent book, but you will find that it's lacking a bit in quality when compared to the free that came before it.