The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel and tenth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published by Jonathan Cape on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels, as well as a clear departure from previous Bond novels in that the story is told in the first person by a young Canadian woman, Viv Michel. Bond himself does not appear until two-thirds of the way through the book, arriving as a deus ex machina to save Viv from being raped and murdered by two criminals. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving Viv credit as a co-author. The story contains themes of Saint George against the dragon, power and the moral ambiguity between those acting with good and evil intent. As the narrator who told her own backstory and expressed her emotions and motives, Viv is the best-realised and most rounded female characterisation in the Bond canon. The reviewers were largely negative, with some expressing a desire for a return to the structure and form of the previous Bond novels. In a later letter to his editor, Fleming reflected that "the experiment has obviously gone very much awry".Due to the reactions by critics and fans, Fleming attempted to suppress elements of the novel where he could: he blocked a paperback edition in the United Kingdom and only gave permission for the title to be used when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, rather than any aspects of the plot. In the tenth film in the Eon Productions series, released in 1977, only the character of one of the villains, Jaws, is loosely based on a character in the book. The film was the third to star Roger Moore as Bond and used no plot elements from the novel. A heavily adapted version of The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in the Daily Express newspaper in daily comic strip format in 1967–1968 and a British paperback edition was published after Fleming's death. Source: Wikipedia (en)