Moonraker (James Bond 007) (Paperback)

The industrialist Drax's heroic story is told through Bond's admiring mouth. His unconscious, and later amnesiac, body was recovered from an explosion site in Germany during the war (WWII) and eventually was determined to be an MIA British private named Hugo Drax. Over the subsequent decade he became a self-made international metals broker, notably through columbite (yes, it is a real mineral). He has recently returned to England and spent lavishly on charities, but more notably, on privately financing and building an ICBM capable of delivering an atomic warhead anywhere in Europe. The intriguing mystery is why such a popular patriot would stoop to cheating at cards, recalling that at the time of the writing some fifty years ago, as M puts it: "It's about the only way a man can ruin himself!" Most readers will, at this early stage, have already smelt a huge rat, and picked up on the the obvious clue Fleming not-so-subtly weaves in, and will have figured out what's really happening. This is the books major weakness, since from there on, one is waiting for Bond to catch up, and thus the villain's final monologue, in which All Is Revealed, is more than a little anticlimactic.

In any event, Bond's appearance at the club and a nerve-racking high-stakes bridge game against the fabulously wealthy Hugo Drax starts the ball rolling. It's a nice bit of tension-building, however those (like myself) who are unfamiliar with the game of bridge will probably not get as much out of it. Still, it's a nice set-piece, and also serves to remind one how puny Bond's salary is as a glorified civil servant when the stakes rise to ten times his annual salary! From here the book proceeds rather slowly, as a suspicious murder-suicide allows Bond to join the Moonraker missile team as security officer. He and a voluptuous undercover cop work to try and figure out what's so fishy about the whole project.

Make no mistake, the book is entirely predictable, the bad guys are either stereotypically insane or stereotypically robotic machines with zero depth to them. And perhaps weakest of all, Bond and the female cop are left to escape when throughout the whole story the villain has been ruthlessly precise about eliminating troublemakers. At the the time they're captured, there's no reason whatsoever for him not to simply shoot them in the head and leave them dead in a field. Even so, it's a decent page-turner that, with its lurking ogres of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction via atomic missile) and lurking Nazism, offers an interesting window to the past.