This is the fifth in a series of reviews. Previously: Moonraker. Next: Blood Fever.

Diamonds Are Forever, the fourth outing for James Bond, is a rather different proposition to its predecessors, and mostly not in a good way. It’s sometimes regarded as one of the weaker books in the series – perhaps marking the turning point between Fleming’s initial attempts to find his voice and the more formulaic Bondage to come. Be that as it may (and since I haven’t read the later novels yet, I can’t really say) I found it to be the weakest of the books to date, for reasons of narrative, character and writing.

Diamonds’ plot is a skimpy thing. Bond’s mission is to infiltrate a diamond smuggling racket – apparently a matter of considerable concern to Queen and Country, for reasons that are hard to appreciate today. But this quickly dissolves into little more than a travelogue of moneyed American playgrounds ranging from Yankee racecourses to the bright lights of Vegas. This in turn gives way to a love story, of sorts, which then turns into some sort of cruise-ship potboiler. There’s little motive force behind the plot: the reader, rather like Bond, simply stumbles from one scene to the next.

The characters are also rather disappointing. With the exception of Tiffany Case, the engaging if implausibly soft-centred diamond smuggler, the baddies get little space to make their presence felt; there’s no real nemesis in this story and the would-be Big Bads barely make an appearance before being unceremoniously despatched. On the side of the angels, Felix Leiter reappears, surprisingly unembittered by the misfortune he suffered during his last adventure with Commander Bond—and just as well he does, because without him (and his cab-driving sidekick), Bond would spend much of Diamonds are Forever blundering about cluelessly.

That cluelessness is another of this book’s irritations. You could make a moderately plausible case for Bond’s character having developed between Casino Royale (in which he acts like an out-of-his-depth ingenue) and Moonraker (in which he has learnt some smarts and shows some moxie). But in Diamonds, Bond is back to bumbling about like a bull in the proverbial, apparently oblivious to much of his surroundings. For example, this is the first Bond book to stray away from an entirely linear narrative – a very small deviation, admittedly – but the effect is to of this experiment is largely to frustrate the reader, who will have spotted the twist, such as it is, long before OO7 does.

Bond also picks fights for no readily apparent reason other than personal peevishness; gets his allies into deep trouble, while persistently relying on them to bail him out of it; and triumphs, once again, largely because of his ability to tolerate (and perhaps even thrive) on imaginatively nasty physical punishment. (I knew the Bond books contained a strong element of sadism, but I hadn’t expected Bond to be so consistently on the receiving end). The rest of his success is really down to luck and only a little resourcefulness. After three such scenes in consecutive books, this is getting a little tedious: shouldn’t England’s finest secret agent be good at something other than playing the bottom in torture games?

Much of Diamonds is also written in an overtly sneering tone – in fact, the very stereotype of English condescension towards our American cousins. In some ways, this is the mirror image of Moonraker: in that book, the Wrongness is foreign treachery at the heart of the British Establishment; in this one, it’s the gauche corruption of those colonial types that only a true-blue Brit can put right. Much of Bond’s motivation for wiping out the gang seems to derive from little more than outrage at the crassness of Americans and their amusements – something of a volte-face from Live and Let Die, in which Bond (and Fleming) seem to be quite approving of America’s vibrancy, rather than offended by its vulgarity.

Diamonds are Forever also sees Fleming retreat somewhat from literary prose: there’s still the occasional neat turn of phrase, punctilious description and pacy action sequences; but overall the impression is of workmanlike copy. The scene-setting and dialogue has a will-this-do quality about it, and there’s substantial repetition of themes and language from the earlier books. (Most jarring, by the by, is the repeated use of the word “ironical”, which Fleming appears to use as a place-keeper whenever he can’t think of anything else).

All told, then, Diamonds Are Forever was something of a disappointment. There’s some anoraky fun to be had in spotting how various elements of the Bond formula, particularly as expressed in the movies, are starting to come together – but that’s not really sufficient grounds to recommend this book, quick and easy read though it is. I’d be tempted to give up on the Bond series at this point; but as it is, I’ve heard that the next in the series, From Russia With Love sees Fleming hit his stride. So on with Bond I go.