Fleming changed the formula and structure from the previous novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, and made a determined effort to produce a work that adhered to his tried and tested format.

The pair marry at the end of the novel, but hours after the ceremony, Blofeld and his partner, Irma Bunt, attack the couple and Tracy is killed.

For more than a year, the Secret Service agent James Bond has been involved in "Operation Bedlam": tracking down the criminal organisation SPECTRE and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, after they had hijacked two nuclear devices in an attempt to blackmail the Western world.

He mentally composes a letter of resignation for his superior, M. While driving across northern France to Britain, Bond encounters a beautiful young woman named Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo.

On the pretext that an inherited minor physical abnormality (a lack of earlobes) needs a personal confirmation, Bond impersonates a College of Arms representative, Sir Hilary Bray, to visit Blofeld's lair atop Piz Gloria, a fictional mountain in the Swiss Alps.

He finally meets Blofeld, who has lost weight and undergone plastic surgery, partly to remove his earlobes, but also to disguise himself from the police and security services who are tracking him down.

[6] Fleming experimented with his format in The Spy Who Loved Me, writing the story in the first-person narrative of a Canadian woman whom Bond rescues from rape at the hands of two thugs.

[14] Fleming later changed the title after being told of a nineteenth-century sailing novel called On Her Majesty's Secret Service, seen by his friend Nicholas Henderson in Portobello Road Market.

Palmer states that conventions determined Tracy needed to die, adding "James Bond happily married is a contradiction in terms".

[50] Despite Tracy's independent and assertive character, the media historian James Chapman observes that part of her role in the book is to act as "a traditional ... male fantasy of women's sexuality".

[51] In doing do, he says, Tracy is fulfilling the same role as some of the women in the other Bond novels, including Jill Masterton in Goldfinger, Domino Vitali in Thunderball and Viv in The Spy Who Loved Me.

[51] The cultural critic Umberto Eco lists Marc-Ange Draco among those characters in the Bond novels who undertake activities 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 Enrico Colombo (the short story "Risico").

[53][54] The sociologist Anthony Synnott observes that many of the men who assist Bond are either handsome or striking looking;[55] this includes Draco, about whom Fleming writes: "The man had such a delightful face, so lit with humour and mischief and magnetism that ...

Wisps of brownish grey hair, with a tight, neat bun at the back, showed from under a skiing hat with a yellow talc visor that had straps which met under her chin.

Sauerberg identifies Le Chiffre (Casino Royale) and Mr Big (Live and Let Die) as criminals with large ambitions and Hugo Drax, Doctor No and Goldfinger as those who commit crimes in order to complete their larger plans; all five are connected with the Soviet Union.

[58] Blofeld's ancestry shows he is Polish and Greek and, during the Second World War, he had betrayed Poland by working with the Abwehr, the Nazi military-intelligence service.

Where the sweep is broken, it is at the visit to the College of Arms and at the meeting at M's house; in both these parts, journalistic background provides necessary detail to enable the plot to proceed.

[18] The hooks combine with what the novelist Anthony Burgess calls "a heightened journalistic style";[72] this, says Fleming, produces "a speed of narrative, which hustles the reader past each danger point of mockery".

[73] The literary analyst LeRoy L. Panek sees On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a fable; he considers Fleming also saw this, and subverted some aspects of the convention within the novel, such as when Bond thinks that "It would be amusing to reverse the old fable—first to rescue the girl, then to slay the monster".

[74][75] Panek sees aspects of fables in many of the Bond novels, often associated with the villains—Fleming describes Le Chiffre as an ogre, Mr Big as a giant, Drax (Moonraker) and Klebb (From Russia, With Love) as a dragon and a toad, respectively—and notes that "Fleming puts damsels in distress in all the books".

[79] Within the fifty-two days covered in the novel, eight meals are described, Bond's drinks are enumerated and his thoughts on modern cooking and the standard in French restaurants are outlined.

[83] Hale analyses the novel from the point of view of individualism: the plot starts with Bond alone, voluntarily, prior to meeting Tracy; it ends with him alone, involuntarily, after her murder.

[86] In September 1964—after Fleming's death in May that year—Pan Books published a paperback version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in the UK that sold 125,000 copies before the end of the year and 1.8 million in 1965.

Although many of Fleming's racial epithets were removed from the novel, the reference to "homosexual tendencies" being one of the "stubborn disabilities" treatable by hypnosis was retained in the new release.

[99] Marghanita Laski, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, thought that "the new James Bond we've been meeting of late [is] somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty".

[87] In the view of the reviewer, it was enough of a recovery for them to point out that "it is time, perhaps, to forget the much exaggerated things which have been said about sex, sadism and snobbery, and return to the simple, indisputable fact that Mr. Fleming is a most compelling story-teller".

[87] Writing in The Guardian, the critic Anthony Berkeley Cox, under the name Francis Iles, considered that On Her Majesty's Secret Service was "not only up to Mr. Fleming's usual level, but perhaps even a bit above it".

[24] Gene Brackley, writing in The Boston Globe about the fantastic nature of the plots, suggested that "Fleming's accounts of the half-world of the Secret Service have the ring of authenticity" because of his previous role with the Naval Intelligence Division.

[103] Writing in The New York Times, Anthony Boucher—later described by John Pearson as "throughout an avid anti-Bond and an anti-Fleming man"[104]—was again critical, although he wrote that "you can't argue with success".

[106] Following the success of the publication of the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity" in Playboy in March 1960, Fleming chose to serialise On Her Majesty's Secret Service in the magazine in the April, May and June 1963 issues.