Ian Fleming

James Bond is set up to kill his boss M in his office in London. This is just the beginning of a struggle between Bond and Scaramanga, the one they call the man with the golden gun.

When Ernst Stavro Blofeld brutally murdered the girl whom James Bond had married only hours before, the zest for life went out of Bond. He went to pieces, was even on the verge of becoming a security risk. But M is persuaded to give him one last chance.

For James Bond, British secret agent 007, international espionage can be a dirty business. Tracking down a wayward major who has taken a deadly secret with him to the Caribbean, identifying a top Russian agent secretly bidding for a Faberge egg in a Sotheby's auction room, and more, it's all in a day's work for him.

On 16 August 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, "My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold". And he did write golden words: 14 best-selling James Bond books and an equally energetic flow of letters to his wife, publisher, editors, fans, friends and critics, charting 007's progress with correspondence that ranged from badgering Jonathan Cape about his quota...

At the casino in Deauville Bond's game is baccarat, for stakes that run into millions of francs. But away from the discreet salons, it's 007 versus one of Russia's most powerful and ruthless agents.

Meet Tiffany Case, a cold, gorgeous, devil-may-care blonde. She stands between James Bond and the leaders of a diamond-smuggling ring that stretches from Africa via London to the States. Bond uses her to infiltrate this gang, but once in America the hunter becomes the hunted. Bond is in real danger until help comes from an unlikely quarter.

SMERSH is the Soviet organ of vengeance, of interrogation, torture and death. James Bond is dedicated to the destruction of its agents wherever he finds them. Then the cold eye of SMERSH focuses on Bond and far away in Moscow a trap is laid for him.

The destruction of a Russian hideout at SHAPE headquarters near Paris, the planned assassination of a Cuban thug in America, the tracking of a heroin ring from Rome to Venice and beyond, for Bond it is just routine. For anyone else - certain death.

Bringing together all of the James Bond short stories for the first time, this is the ultimate celebration of suave and deadly secret agent 007.

M has summoned agent 007 to London. It's the swinging Sixties and a flood of narcotics is pouring into Britain. Sinister industrialist Dr Julius Gorner is identified as the source and James Bond is dispatched to investigate. The trail takes Bond to Paris and then Persia leading him to Gorners secret desert headquarters.