Publication history
On Her Majesty's Secret Service was published on 1 April 1963 in the UK as a hardcover edition by Jonathan Cape;[87] it was 288 pages long.[88] A limited edition of 285 copies was also printed; 250 were for sale, having been numbered and signed by Fleming, and the remainder were signed and marked "For Presentation".[89] The artist Richard Chopping undertook the cover illustration for the first edition, as he had done for all the previous Bond books.[87] There were 42,000 advance orders for the hardback first edition[90] and Cape did an immediate second impression of 15,000 copies, selling over 60,000 by the end of April 1963.[91] By the end of 1963 it had sold in excess of 75,000 copies.[92]
The novel was published in America in August 1963 by the New American Library,[87] after Fleming changed publishers from Viking Press following The Spy Who Loved Me;[93] On Her Majesty's Secret Service was 299 pages long.[94] It was the first of Fleming's novels listed in The New York Times Best Seller list,[95] and topped it for over six months.[87]
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.[96] Since its initial publication the book has been re-issued in hardback and paperback editions, translated into several languages and, as at 2024, has never been out of print.[97] In 2023 Ian Fleming Publications—the company that administers all Fleming's literary works—had the Bond series edited as part of a sensitivity review to remove or reword some racial or ethnic descriptors. 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. The release of the bowdlerised series was for the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel.[98][99]
Critical reception
In The Observer, Maurice Richardson pondered if there had been "a deliberate moral reformation" of Bond,[100] although he noted Bond still had his harder side when needed.[100] 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".[101] Writing for The Washington Post, Jerry Doolittle thought that Bond is "still irresistible to women, still handsome in a menacing way, still charming. He has nerves of steel and thews of whipcord",[94] even if "he's starting to look a little older".[94]
The critic for The Times considered that after The Spy Who Loved Me, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service constitutes a substantial, if not quite a complete, recovery".[88] 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".[88] 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".[102] Richardson also thought that "in reforming Bond Mr. Fleming has reformed his own story-telling which had been getting very loose".[100] Overall he thought that "O.H.M.S.S. is certainly the best Bond for several books. It is better plotted and retains its insane grip until the end".[100] Mortimer, in The Sunday Times, thought the novel Fleming's best; despite innovations for the Bond formula, Mortimer noted that overall, "the pattern here ... is traditional".[38][j] The New York Herald Tribune thought On Her Majesty's Secret Service to be "solid Fleming",[24] and the Houston Chronicle considered the novel to be "Fleming at his urbanely murderous best, a notable chapter in the saga of James Bond".[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] Doolittle considered that "Fleming's new book will not disappoint his millions of fans".[94] The critic for Time magazine referred to previous criticism of Fleming and thought that "in Fleming's latest Bond bombshell, there are disquieting signs that he took the critics to heart"[104] when they complained about "the consumer snobbery of his caddish hero".[104] The critic mourned that even worse was to follow, when "Bond is threatened with what, for an international cad, would clearly be a fate worse than death: matrimony".[104]
Writing in The New York Times, Anthony Boucher—later described by John Pearson as "throughout an avid anti-Bond and an anti-Fleming man"[105]—was again critical, although he wrote that "you can't argue with success".[106] He went on to say that "simply pro forma, I must set down my opinion that this is a silly and tedious novel".[106] Boucher went on to bemoan that although On Her Majesty's Secret Service was better than The Spy Who Loved Me, "it is still a lazy and inadequate story",[106] going on to say that "my complaint is not that the adventures of James Bond are bad literature ... but that they aren't good bad literature".[106] Laski considered, however, that "it really is time to stop treating Ian Fleming as a Significant Portent, and to accept him as a good, if rather vulgar thriller-writer, well suited to his times and to us his readers".[101]
Robert Kirsch, writing in the Los Angeles Times, considered Fleming's work to be a significant point in fiction, saying that the Bond novels "are harbingers of a change in emphasis in fiction which is important".[107] The importance, Kirsch claimed, sprung from "a revolution in taste, a return to qualities in fiction which [are] all but submerged in the 20th-century vogue of realism and naturalism"[107] and the importance was such that they were "comparable ... only to the phenomenon of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories".[107] Kirsch also believed that "with Fleming, ... we do not merely accept the willing suspension of disbelief, we yearn for it, we hunger for it".[107]
