The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel and tenth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published by Jonathan Cape on 16 April 1962.

The story uses a recurring motif of Saint George against the dragon, and contains themes of power, and the moral ambiguity between those acting with good and evil intent.

As the narrator who tells her own backstory and expresses her emotions and motives, Viv has been described as the best realised and most rounded female character in the Bond canon.

[2] Following the negative reactions of critics, Fleming attempted to suppress elements of the novel: he blocked a paperback edition in the United Kingdom and, when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, they were permitted to use the title but none of the plot of the book.

I was interested in this view of James Bond, through the wrong end of the telescope so to speak, and after obtaining clearance for certain minor infringements of the Official Secrets Act I have much pleasure in sponsoring its publication.

[3]Me Vivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian woman, narrates her own story, detailing her past love affairs.

Their physical relationship ended that night, and Viv was subsequently rejected when Mallaby sent her a letter from Oxford University, where he was studying, saying he was forcibly engaged to someone else by his parents.

Them At the end of the vacation season, the Phanceys entrust Viv with looking after the motel for the night before the owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, can arrive to take inventory and close it up for the winter.

The men immediately start harassing Viv, making crude passes and aggressively asking her to dance; when she says she does not want to, they attack her, intending to rape her, when the door buzzer interrupts them.

Bond tells Viv that he is in America in the wake of Operation Thunderball and had been detailed to protect a Russian nuclear expert who defected to the West.

Viv wakes to find Bond gone, leaving a note in which he promises to send her police assistance and which he concludes by telling her not to dwell too much on the ugly events through which she has just lived.

Viv reflects on this as she drives off at the end of the book, continuing her tour of America; despite the officer's warning, she still devotes her thoughts to Bond.

[8][7] After the book was published he wrote to Michael Howard, his editor at Jonathan Cape, to explain why he had changed his approach: I had become increasingly surprised to find that my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, were being read in schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond ...

This, writes Lycett, may have been a reflection of Fleming's state of mind at the time,[7] particularly his ongoing marital difficulties: he was having an affair with his neighbour on Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell, and his wife, Ann was in a relationship with Hugh Gaitskell, the Leader of the British Labour Party.

[19][20] Her time with Derek in the area around Cookham, Berkshire, is similar to Fleming's activities and experiences while he was at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

[22] The novelist Raymond Benson—who later wrote a series of Bond novels—sees Vivienne Michel as the best-realised female characterisation undertaken by Fleming, partly because the story is told in the first-person narrative with the first third of the novel dedicated to her biography.

[28][29] The opinion of the journalist Ben Macintyre is that "Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock by reinforcing the idea of Bond's essential cruelty.

The historian Jeremy Black describes how Viv's second lover, Kurt, is a caricature of a German—a cruel racist with little capacity for love or affection—who forces her to have an abortion before ending their affair.

[35] Black sees the closest equivalent in the Bond canon is "Quantum of Solace",[35] the 1960 short story about marital relations Fleming wrote in the style of W. Somerset Maugham, a writer he greatly admired.

[28] Before the police officer's conversation with Viv, Bond also discusses with her the question of good and evil and says there was little value in his job and his way of life,[46] concluding: It's nothing but a complicated game, really.

[49][f] The artwork included a Fairbairn–Sykes commando knife; Fleming borrowed one owned by his editor, Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, as a model for Chopping.

[2] Because of the sexual content in the novel, it was banned in a number of countries,[56] including in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,[57] South Africa[58] and Australia.

"[2] while The Glasgow Herald thought Fleming's writing career was over: "His ability to invent a plot has deserted him almost entirely and he has had to substitute for a fast-moving story the sorry misadventures of an upper-class tramp, told in dreary detail.

"[2] Writing in The Observer, Maurice Richardson described the tale as "a new and regrettable if not altogether unreadable variation",[65] going on to hope that "this doesn't spell the total eclipse of Bond in a blaze of cornography".

[2] Philip Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement considered the novel's plot to be "a morbid version of that of Beauty and the Beast".

[54] The critic also bemoaned the fact that "among the shocks and disappointments 1962 still has in store ... is the discovery that the cruel, handsome, scarred face of James Bond does not turn up until more than halfway through Ian Fleming's latest book".

[54] Anthony Boucher—a critic described by Fleming's biographer, John Pearson, as "throughout an avid anti-Bond and an anti-Fleming man"[68]—meanwhile wrote that the "author has reached an unprecedented low".

Esther Howard wrote in The Spectator, "Surprisingly Ian Fleming's new book is a romantic one and, except for some early sex in England (rather well done, this) only just as nasty as is needed to show how absolutely thrilling it is for ... the narrator to be rescued from both death and worse – than by a he-man like James Bond.

[71] The comic strip was reprinted in 2011 by Titan Books in the second volume of The James Bond Omnibus; the anthology also includes The Man with the Golden Gun, You Only Live Twice and Octopussy.