A reviewer in The Listener described Casino Royale as 'Supersonic John Buchan', and a comparison between the two authors is extremely revealing. Fleming's hero, James Bond, like Buchan's Richard Hannay, is a Secret Service agent, continually either chasing or being chased by enemy spies, often at the point of death but always saved by some improbable turn of events. Hannay's adversaries, before and during World War I, were the somewhat casual and heavy-handed emissaries of Imperial Germany: in the Bond stories, which are set against the background of the Cold War, the enemy is the far more efficient and deadly Soviet counter-espionage organization called S M E R S H (except in Diamonds are Forever, where Bond takes time off to deal with a team of American gangsters and diamond-smugglers)…. [Bond] is a thoroughgoing professional, and at the top of his class; he is one of the three double 'O' numbers in the British Secret Service, which means he has liberty to kill when necessary; he is an expert pistol shot, boxer, and knife thrower, is always armed and sometimes wears steel-capped shoes (one can't imagine Hannay doing that). (pp. 220-21)
The professionalism of Mr Fleming's hero is reflected in the far greater slickness and pace of the writing; one is well aware that [Ernest] Hemingway and the American thriller have intervened since Buchan, who often seems, in comparison, wordy and excessively leisurely. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Fleming is the better writer—he certainly isn't. Buchan could write very well, whereas Fleming rarely rises above the glossy prose of the advertising copywriter.
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