The Times rounds up other `heinous titles` from Ian Fleming

The Times likes the cool and moody poster, but they'd be lying if they said they didn’t wince a bit when they heard the title of the new Bond movie. According to the paper, least the Bond team didn’t pick one of these "even more heinous titles" from the Ian Fleming archives.

The Hildebrand Rarity First published in Playboy magazine, this short story is set in the Seychelles and involves Bond and a chum being hired by a millionaire to find a rare fish. In name alone, it sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel, but there’s a strong back story, some of which made it into the 1989 movie Licence to Kill.

007 in New York This startlingly flimsy yarn, originally published in the New York Herald Tribune in October 1963, is little more than a brief Bond outing to Manhattan and features his favourite recipe for scrambled eggs. We’ve seen Bond in the Big Apple before, of course – most memorably in 1973’s majestically cheesy Live and Let Die, Roger Moore’s finest hour.

The Property of a Lady Included in later editions of Fleming’s last Bond book – Octopussy and The Living Daylights – this short story sees our hero tussling with Russian baddies (again) over something involving corrupt secret service employees and a Fabergé egg. A Fabergé egg, fans will note, is central to the storyline of the 1983 Octopussy film.

Risico Evidently the working title for Quantum of Solace, this strange handle was a short story in a 1960 Fleming tome called For Your Eyes Only, a book that also featured From a View to a Kill. Risico means “risk” in Italian, though it sounds more like an antacid.

Man’s Work This risible title should never surface, thanks to the fact that it’s already been made: Man’s Work was the story Fleming was going to call For Your Eyes Only. FYEO seems to have been Fleming’s hardest-to-come-by title – the author had also planned on calling it, among other things, Death Leaves an Echo. Which isn’t bad, to be fair.

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