For Your Eyes Only is a collection of short stories by Ian Fleming, and the eighth book to feature the fictional British Secret Service agent Commander James Bond.

The Secret Service agent James Bond investigates the murder of a motorcycle dispatch-rider and the theft of his top-secret documents by a motorcycle-riding assassin.

The rider was en route from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, then located in Versailles, to his base, Station F, in Saint-Germain in France.

The Havelocks, a British couple living in Jamaica, refuse to sell their estate to Herr von Hammerstein, a former Gestapo officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service.

M gives Bond a voluntary assignment, unconnected to sanctioned Secret Service duties, to travel to Vermont via Canada, find von Hammerstein at his rented estate at Echo Lake and assassinate him as a warning to future criminals who might think to target British citizens.

When Bond arrives on the scene, he finds the Havelocks' daughter, Judy, who intends to carry out her own mission of revenge with a bow and arrow.

After meeting aboard a flight to London, the couple married, and went to live in Bermuda, but after a time Rhoda began a long open affair with the eldest son of a rich Bermudian family.

Upon his return Masters was determined to end his marriage and he divided their home into two sections, half to each of them and refused to have anything to do with his wife in private—although they continued to appear as a couple in public.

He eventually returned to the UK alone, leaving Rhoda with unpaid debts and stranded in Bermuda—a cruel act which he would have been incapable of carrying out just a few months earlier.

Bond is on an assignment in the Seychelles; through Fidele Barbey, his influential and well-connected local contact, he meets an uncouth American millionaire, Milton Krest, who challenges the two to aid him in the search for a rare fish, the Hildebrand Rarity.

[5] Fleming travelled to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January 1959, where he adapted four of the CBS television plots into short stories and added a fifth he had written in the summer of 1958.

[6][19] Fleming combined the backdrop of the Seychelles with his experience he and Blanche Blackwell had undergone when they had visited Pedro Keys, two islands off Jamaica, and watched two scientists do something similar with poison to obtain samples.

[23] The collection For Your Eyes Only had two names prior to publication: The Rough with the Smooth[24] and Man's Work; it was provisionally subtitled "Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond".

[26] The idea of the underground hideout in "From a View to a Kill" was inspired by Fleming's brother Peter's band of Auxiliary Units who dug tunnel networks in Britain in 1940 as part of a resistance movement in advance of a German invasion.

[27] "For Your Eyes Only" was set in Vermont, where Fleming had spent a number of summers at his friend Ivar Bryce's Black Hole Hollow Farm, which became the model for von Hammerstein's hideaway, Echo Lake.

[30] The story's name comes from a stamp used in the Naval Intelligence Division to show the classification of secret documents; Fleming was a member of the unit during the war.

"[27] "Quantum of Solace" takes its structure – an agent's private conversation with a high-ranking diplomat about socially unequal romance – from Maugham's short story "His Excellency".

[32] In addition to being inspired by his visit to the Seychelles in 1958, Fleming recalled a trip to two small islands off Jamaica he had made to observe a scientific expedition.

[34] In "The Hildebrand Rarity", Bond is also shown with a humanitarian side, with feelings for the plight of Liz at the hands of her husband and for the use of the poison on the fish by Milton Krest.

With his stance against the evil that Hammerstein brings, Synnott sees Bond's decision as that of an honourable man making a morally good verdict based on his own code of values.

[38] The daughter of M's friends, Judy Havelock, is a tough and resourceful character, according to Benson, although after she has avenged her parents' death and is wounded, she softens and allows Bond to take up his usual role of protector.

[38] In "From a View to a Kill" the SHAPE head of security, Colonel Schreiber, is described as having "the politely negative manner of a bank manager" and is shown as the antithesis of Bond, according to the historian Jeremy Black.

[39] The cultural critic Umberto Eco identifies the character of Enrico Colombo in "Risico" as an example of those characters who have morals closer to those of the traditional villains, but who act on the side of good in support of Bond; others of this type include Darko Kerim (From Russia, with Love), Tiger Tanaka (You Only Live Twice) and Marc-Ange Draco (On Her Majesty's Secret Service).

[40] Within the James Bond series, Benson identifies what he described as the "Fleming Sweep", the use of "hooks" at the end of chapters to heighten tension and pull the reader into the next.

[50][51] In "For Your Eyes Only" the British residents in the colony of Jamaica are declining in number, either being bought out of their homes—being paid in United States dollars, rather than in sterling—or, like the Havelocks, being killed.

[57] For Your Eyes Only was published in the US in August 1960 by Viking Press and the subtitle was changed to Five Secret Exploits of James Bond; in later editions, it was dropped altogether.

[27][59] Several reviewers thought the short story format suited Bond:[f] Francis Iles wrote in The Guardian that the structure was "better than the novels".

[53] Philip Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement thought "occasionally there seem to be echoes of Ashenden and glimpses of Rogue Male, but the Bond ambience is persuasive".

[62] In The Spectator, Cyril Ray, writing under the pseudonym Christopher Pym, wrote that "our hero seems to have lost, as well as any claims to plausibility, the know-how, the know-who, know-what and sheer zing that used to carry the unlikely plots along".

[20] Four of the five short stories in For Your Eyes Only were adapted into comic strips published in the British newspaper Daily Express and subsequently syndicated around the world.