He travels to exotic locales, where he suffers violent tortures at the hands of bad-guy foreigners--Le Chiffre, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, Drax, Dr. No--but prevails in the end, enjoying and exploiting along the way the favors of beautiful women with silly names. He has been called a mythical hero for a mythless age.
Critics' opinions about Fleming's body of popular fiction vary widely. Kingsley Amis wrote in New Statesman that Fleming "was a good writer, occasionally a brilliant one" with "gifts for sustaining and varying action, and for holding down the wildest fantasies with cleverly synthesised pseudo- facts." Others, however, take the view of Leroy L. Panek, who wrote in his book The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980 that Bond is "a muddled hero created by a third-rate hack." Fleming himself held no literary pretensions. He aimed at entertaining his readers and making money, saying that his was simply "the business of getting intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds, to turn over the page," according to Joan DelFattore in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
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