Depending on the depth of your passion for James Bond, The James Bond Omnibus 003 will be either mandatory or casual dirty fun. The volume collects the comic strip adaptations of Ian Fleming — and, in the case of Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis — that ran in London’s Daily Mail in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Sean Connery started the movie craze for Bond.

As drawn by Yaroslav Horak, Bond looks like George Lazenby would have looked if he had Clark Gable’s hair. Interestingly, the daily strip also commissioned original adventures, stories which carry generic titles like River of Death and Double Jeopardy.

As befitting the tradition of adventure comic strips, there’s a lot more action than sex, but the strips are nevertheless reflective of the art form at mid-century.

The James Bond Omnibus 003 is the first book publication of the strips, which can’t be said of Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live (Morrow), a sort of memoir the famed mystery writer published in 1946.

Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, was an archeologist, and Come, Tell Me How You Live concerns itself with the writer and her husband on digs in the Middle East in the early 1930s, before World War II closed the area off.

It’s very much a one-off; Christie was already a legendary mystery author and didn’t make a habit of nonfiction. She portrays herself as something of a doofus in rough circumstances who attempts to help her husband. The book has considerable charm and Christie obviously loved the land and its people. If all you know of Christie is Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Come, Tell Me How You Live provides considerable shading in the life experiences of an author.

In the Pipeline…

Sam Roberts of The New York Times is writing a book about how Grand Central Station led the way in urban expansion for the next century. Appropriately enough, Grand Central: How A Train Station Transformed America will be published next year by Grand Central… Doubleday has bought The Rathbones, a first novel by Janice Clark about a whaling family crumbling over a century.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

velitation: a skirmish.

Quote Unquote…

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

— Franklin P. Adams