Moonraker by Ian Fleming

Once pulp fiction passes a certain vintage, it enters a canon all its own. Clearly, Fleming's Bond novels meet this description, and therefore I will not apologise for indulging in what is essentially literature's answer to a toasted cheese sandwich on white bread with margarine and plastic cheese - delicious, but in no way nutritious.

Here are some of the choicest morsels:

'... their heads were all close-shaved... and yet, and this struck Bond as a most bizarre characteristic of a the team, each man sported a luxuriant moustache to whose culture it was clear that a great deal of attention had been devoted. They were in all shapes and tints: fair or mousy or dark; handlebar, walrus, Kaiser, Hitler -- each face bore its own hairy badge...
... there was something positively obscene about this crop of hairy tufts. It would have been just bearable if they had all been cut to the same pattern, but this range of fashions, this riot of personalized growth, had something particularly horrible about it against the background of naked round heads.'

and this:

'Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?
... He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure -- the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. The exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.'

Bond, don't you see Old Chap, is just Agatha Christie with cars and guns. Honestly - replace the Brit with a Belgian, replace talk of nuclear armament with talk of a flower show, replace the Beretta was some arsenic, and Bond and Poirot are basically the same person. Is it any wonder I can't wait to get my hands on the next one?