Octopussy and The Living Daylights (sometimes published as Octopussy) is the fourteenth and final James Bond book written by Ian Fleming. It is a collection of short stories published posthumously in the United Kingdom and the United States by Glidrose Productions, in 1966, as a postscript to his James Bond canon.

It originally contained:

1. Octopussy
2. The Living Daylights

More recent editions have also included:

1. The Property of a Lady – added in 1967
2. 007 in New York – added in 2002

Three of the short stories included in the collection have been adapted into films. The first, Octopussy (1983), starring Roger Moore as James Bond, was the thirteenth film in the EON Productions series. It was loosely based on the short story of the same name as well as “The Property of a Lady.” The Living Daylights (1987) was later adapted as the fifteenth film.

Plot summary: It has been suggested that the stories in this collection may well have taken place during the dark period of Bond’s career following the death of his wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond complains at the start of You Only Live Twice (the novel that follows OHMSS) about the meaningless assignments he had undertaken since then. This is however, not likely to be true as all of these stories seemingly take place prior to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “The Living Daylights,” for instance, is believed to have taken place after Thunderball sometime in 1960. It was also written and published prior to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Some sources claim that “Octopussy” followed The Spy Who Loved Me chronologically, which itself was followed by “007 in New York” and “The Property of a Lady,” and finally by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Given the fact that Fleming was known to have purposefully changed dates to maintain Bond’s age of roughly 38 years, and that some dates contradicted others in the same books, it is unknown for sure when exactly these stories took place.

“Octopussy”: Bond is assigned to apprehend a hero of the Second World War implicated in a murder involving a cache of Nazi gold. Agent 007 appears briefly in this story, which is told mostly in flashback and from the point of view of Major Dexter Smythe, the villain. (The later 1983 film of the same name introduced a female protagonist who is said to be the major’s daughter.)

“The Living Daylights”: An unusually morose James Bond is assigned sniper duty to help a defector known as “272” escape from East Berlin. Bond’s duty is to prevent a top KGB assassin codenamed “Trigger” from killing 272 by eliminating the sniper. However, the assignment becomes difficult when Bond discovers that Trigger is a beautiful female cellist whom he had earlier admired. Bond, never wishing to kill anyone in cold blood, decides instead to shoot the butt of her rifle, preventing her from making the kill. The mission, while successful, is also considered a failure due to Bond’s last-second decision, and it ends with Bond hoping that M fires him for it.

The story includes an oblique reference to Ian Fleming’s half-sister, cellist Amaryllis Fleming, where Bond muses: “There was something almost indecent in the idea of that bulbous, ungainly instrument between her splayed thighs. Of couse Suggia had managed to look elegant, and so did that girl Amaryllis somebody.”

“The Property of a Lady”: James Bond investigates a Secret Service employee, Maria Freudenstein, who is a double agent about to be paid by her Russian keepers by auctioning a Fabergé egg by Carl Fabergé at Sotheby’s in her name. The Russians have sent the Resident Director of the KGB in London to attend the auction and underbid for the item in order to push the price to the necessary value to pay for her services as a double agent. Bond attends the auction in hopes of spotting this man; after doing so the man is expelled from London as persona non grata.

Maria Freudenstein was hired by the British Secret Service with prior knowledge that she was a double agent. She is essentially tasked with sending phony SITREPS to Washington DC, which she copies and sends to Moscow unknowing that they are fake. Her unpleasant fate is revealed in Fleming’s novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, though as it happened most readers did not get to see this story, in which she first appeared, until several years after the novel came out.

The short story also includes Kenneth Snowman as an ally of Bond. Snowman, in reality, was a master jeweller and one of the leading experts on Carl Fabergé. “The Property of a Lady” features a number of notes on the items for auction, one of which references a book by Kenneth Snowman. Snowman thus became one of the few real people to appear in the Fleming canon (though later Bond works by John Gardner and Raymond Benson would feature appearances by people ranging from American presidents to Playboy Playmates).

“007 in New York”: A brief tale in which Bond muses about New York City, and his favourite recipe for scrambled eggs, during a quick mission to the Big Apple to warn a female MI6 employee that her new boyfriend is a KGB agent. It is notable only for including a rare humorous conclusion, and for its mention of Solange, a young lady of Bond’s intimate acquaintance who works in a shop, Abercrombie’s, “appropriately employed in their Indoor Games Department”.

See also:

• Bond novels: Ian Fleming