Bond texts are governed by a set of rules determining the organisation of the plots

and the moves of the characters as in a game of chess. Eco further concludes that
Fleming's writing is a 'tongue-in-cheek bricolage of various popular literary
forms, including fairy tale, science fiction, and adventure narrative. 'Narrative
Structures in Fleming has had a profound impact on Bond criticism - not least
because it was instrumental in establishing James Bond as a 'valid' area of study
in academic circles.
For Bond critics since the 1960s, such as those featured in this book, Eco's essay
has been a common point of reference, a frequent point of depar-ture, and even an
occasional site of contestation.
Michael Denning's essay 'Licensed to Look locates Fleming's 007 novels in the
larger context of twentieth-century British spy writing.
Reading Fleming's work from a Marxist point of view, Denning argues that the Bond
novels are complicit in the racist and sexist cultural politics of the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Along the way, Denning explains Fleming's 007 thrillers as an
historically specific variation of the imperial spy novel that, like the novels of
Len Deighton and John le Carré, belongs to the era of Cold War politics and an
emerging 'society of the spectacle.
For Denning, consumerism and tourism are the post-war cultural codes that the Bond
texts register and ultimately reinforce.
As Umberto Eco and Michael Denning both point out, the Bond novels share many of
the formal and thematic concerns of classic detective narrative. My essay argues
that because Fleming locates his writing within the broader context of Cold War
ideology and post-war geopoli-tics, the Bond novels also mark a departure from a
transatlantic tradition of detective writing. Specifically, I propose that the 007
series registers a shift in the cultural understanding of crime that, in the
immediate wake of World War II, came to include crimes against humanity. The
discussion examines how this shift generates new ideological imperatives for the
detective - a figure now reconfigured as the secret agent, licensed to kill
In the final essay in this section, Claire Hines examines the multi-fac-eted
relationship between James Bond and Playboy magazine, which was launched the same
year as Fleming's first Bond novel in 1953, and which has regularly featured 007
throughout its publishing history. Addressing the significance of this long-
standing association between Bond and Playboy, Hines examines the ways in which 007
was originally inserted into Playboy's ideology of sexual liberation and hedonistic
consumerism, providing readers with an ideal model of the fantasy image the men's
lifestyle magazine sought to represent. Hines persuasive argument is that