On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the tenth novel and eleventh book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 1 April 1963. Fleming changed the formula and structure from the previous novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, and made a determined effort to produce a work that adhered to his tried and tested format. The initial and secondary print runs sold out quickly, with over 60,000 copies sold in the first month, double that of the previous book's first month of sales. Fleming wrote the novel at Goldeneye, his holiday home in Jamaica, while Dr. No, the first entry in the James Bond film series by Eon Productions, was being filmed nearby.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the second book in what is known as the "Blofeld trilogy", which begins with Thunderball and concludes with You Only Live Twice. This episode centres on Bond's ongoing search to find Ernst Stavro Blofeld after the Thunderball incident. Bond finds Blofeld in Switzerland and attacks the centre where he is based, although Blofeld escapes in the confusion. Bond meets and falls in love with Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo during the story. The pair marry at the end of the novel, but hours after the ceremony, Blofeld and his partner, Irma Bunt, attack the couple and Tracy is killed. Fleming developed Bond's character within the book, showing an emotional side that was not present in the previous stories.
As he had done in previous novels, Fleming used his past experiences and details of people he met during his work to provide details in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The novel is one of three Bond stories to deal with the disruption of markets and the economy, in this case Blofeld's planned disruption to the food supply by bioterrorism. The theme of food and drink is referred to throughout the novel, with Bond's meals and drinks being described in detail.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service received broadly positive reviews in the British and American press with some reviewers pleased at the return to the more traditional form of Bond storyline. The novel was adapted as a three-part story in Playboy in 1963, serialised in eleven parts in the Daily Express and then developed as a daily cartoon strip in the Daily Express in 1964–1965. In 1969 the novel was adapted as the sixth film in the Eon Productions James Bond film series; this was the only film to star George Lazenby as Bond.
Plot For more than a year, the Secret Service agent James Bond has been involved in "Operation Bedlam": tracking down the criminal organisation SPECTRE and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, after they had hijacked two nuclear devices in an attempt to blackmail the Western world. Convinced SPECTRE no longer exists, Bond is frustrated by his service's insistence that he continue the search and by his inability to find Blofeld. He mentally composes a letter of resignation for his superior, M.
While driving across northern France to Britain, Bond encounters a beautiful young woman named Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo. He subsequently meets her at a gaming table, where he saves her from dishonour by paying the gambling debt she is unable to cover. The next day Bond follows her and interrupts her attempted suicide, but they are captured by professional henchmen. They are taken to the offices of Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse, the biggest European crime syndicate. Tracy is the only child of Draco, who believes the only way to save his daughter from further suicide attempts is for Bond to marry her. To facilitate this, he offers Bond a dowry of £1 million; Bond refuses the offer but agrees to keep in contact with Tracy after she has medical assistance.
At Bond's request, Draco uses his contacts to establish that Blofeld is somewhere in Switzerland. Bond returns to England to be given another lead: the College of Arms in London has discovered that Blofeld has assumed the title and name of Comte Balthazar de Bleuville and, wanting formal confirmation of the title, has asked the College to declare him a count.
On the pretext that an inherited minor physical abnormality (a lack of earlobes) needs a personal confirmation, Bond impersonates a College of Arms representative, Sir Hilary Bray, to visit Blofeld's lair atop Piz Gloria, a fictional mountain in the Swiss Alps. He finally meets Blofeld, who has lost weight and undergone plastic surgery, partly to remove his earlobes, but also to disguise himself from the police and security services who are tracking him down.
Bond learns that Blofeld has apparently been curing a group of young British and Irish women of their allergies to food and livestock. In truth, Blofeld and his aide, Irma Bunt, have been brainwashing them into carrying biological warfare agents back to Britain and Ireland to destroy the agricultural economy, upon which post–Second World War Britain depends. Believing himself discovered, Bond escapes by ski from Piz Gloria, chased by SPECTRE operatives, some of whom he kills in the process; Blofeld sets off an avalanche, which narrowly misses Bond. Afterward, in a state of total exhaustion, he encounters Tracy. She is in the town at the base of the mountain after being told by her father that Bond may be in the vicinity. Bond is too weak to take on Blofeld's henchmen alone and she helps him escape to the airport. Smitten by the resourceful, headstrong woman, he proposes marriage and she accepts. Bond then returns to England and works on the plan to capture Blofeld and thwart his plot.
Helped by Draco's Unione Corse, Bond mounts an air assault against the clinic and Blofeld. The clinic is destroyed, but Blofeld makes off down a bobsled run and—pursued by Bond—he escapes. Bond flies to Germany where he marries Tracy. The two of them drive off on their honeymoon but, a few hours later, Blofeld and Bunt attack the car and Tracy is killed.
Background and writing history By January 1962 the author Ian Fleming had published nine books in the preceding nine years: eight novels and a collection of short stories. A tenth book, The Spy Who Loved Me, was being edited and prepared for production; it was released at the end of March 1962. Fleming travelled to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January 1962 to write On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He followed his usual practice, which he later outlined in Books and Bookmen magazine: "I write for about three hours in the morning ... and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day." For On Her Majesty's Secret Service he "took as much trouble as ever with the plot", according to his biographer, John Pearson.
Fleming experimented with his format in The Spy Who Loved Me, writing the story in the first-person narrative of a Canadian woman whom Bond rescues from rape at the hands of two thugs. He reverted to his usual formula for On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He had undertaken some research in Britain before he left for Jamaica, and he contacted the Writers and Speakers Research Agency to ask about "which parts of the United Kingdom would be the best targets for which bacteria, etc", and to find someone who could speak Corsican and provide information about the Unione Corse. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was written in January and February 1962, while the first Bond film, Dr. No, was being filmed nearby; Fleming visited the film set several times and met the cast, even inviting them to dine at Goldeneye with one of his friends and neighbours, Noël Coward. Fleming was attracted to the film's female lead, Ursula Andress, and included a mention of her in the novel he was writing.
The first draft of the novel was 196 pages long and called The Belles of Hell. Fleming later changed the title after being told of a nineteenth-century sailing novel called On Her Majesty's Secret Service, seen by his friend Nicholas Henderson in Portobello Road Market. Fleming thought his draft was the best book he had yet written. Sections were later added in England after he undertook further research on heraldry and biological warfare. Robin de La Lanne-Mirrlees of the College of Arms assisted Fleming with the background and also designed a coat of arms for Bond.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the second book in "the Blofeld trilogy", sitting between Thunderball (1961), where SPECTRE is introduced, and You Only Live Twice (1964), where Bond finally kills Blofeld. Although Blofeld is present in Thunderball, he directs operations from a distance and so he and Bond never meet. On Her Majesty's Secret Service constitutes his and Bond's first meeting. Although Fleming did not date the events within his novels, John Griswold and Henry Chancellor—both of whom wrote books for Ian Fleming Publications—have identified timelines based on episodes and situations within the novel series as a whole. Chancellor put the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1961; Griswold is more precise and considers the story to have taken place between September 1961 and 1 January 1962.
Although he was often a formulaic writer, with the death of Bond's new wife at the end of the novel Fleming showed he was prepared to break the formula of a popular writer by avoiding a happy ending, according to the writer John Atkins. The communications academic Jerry Palmer believes Fleming was adopting a different convention of a thriller: that the hero should be alone. Palmer states that conventions determined Tracy needed to die, adding "James Bond happily married is a contradiction in terms".
Development Inspirations
As with all his Bond books, Fleming used events or names from his life in his writing. In the 1930s Fleming often visited Kitzbühel in Austria to ski; he once deliberately set off down a slope that had been closed because of the danger of an avalanche. The snow cracked behind him and an avalanche came down, catching him at its end: Fleming used the incident as the model for Bond's escape from Piz Gloria. Fleming would occasionally stay at the sports club of Schloss Mittersill in the Austrian Alps; in 1940 the Nazis closed down the club and turned it into an institute for research into so-called "race science". It was this pseudo-scientific research centre that inspired Blofeld's own centre of Piz Gloria.
The connection between M and the inspiration for his character, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, was made apparent with Bond visiting Quarterdeck, M's home. There, Bond rings the ship's bell for HMS Repulse, M's last command: it was Godfrey's ship too. Godfrey was Fleming's superior officer in the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) during the war and was known for his bellicose and irascible temperament. Fleming also used the name of Donald McLachlan, a former colleague of both his and Godfrey's in the NID.
The name "Hilary Bray" was that of an old Etonian with whom Fleming worked at the stockbroking firm Rowe & Pitman. "Sable Basilisk" was based on the title of "Rouge Dragon" in the College of Arms. Rouge Dragon was Lanne-Mirrlees's title at the college; he asked Fleming not to use his real title in the book, although it did appear in the manuscript and typescripts. In a play on words, Fleming used Lanne-Mirrlees's address, a flat in Basil Street, and combined it with a dragon-like creature, a basilisk, to come up with the name. Lanne-Mirrlees's ancestors were generally born without earlobes, and Fleming used this physical attribute for Blofeld. During his research, Lanne-Mirrlees also discovered that the line of the Bonds of Peckham bears the family motto "The World is Not Enough", which Fleming appropriated for Bond's own family.