The James Bond Dossier.

London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. First edition of Amis' critical analysis of the James Bond novels. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jan Pienkowski based on the famous trompe l'oeil paintings by Richard Chopping reproduced on the jackets of the James Bond books. An exceptional example. Written at the Bond-mania's zenith in the 1960s, The James Bond Dossier is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming's strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. As a mainstream novelist, Amis respected the Bond novels, especially their commercial success, believing them 'to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more ambitious kinds of fiction'. The James Bond Dossier includes most of the Bond fiction cycle, excepting Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), the final collection of 007 short stories, which was published after the Dossier. Kingsley Amis's argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming's critics said, 'a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life'. He viewed them as popular literature, akin to that of the Science Fiction texts he critiqued in New Maps of Hell (1960).