From Russia, with Love

From Russia, with Love is the fifth novel by the English writer Ian Fleming to feature his British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the story in early 1956 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, at a point when he thought it might be his last Bond book, and it was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 8 April 1957.

The plot is SMERSH's rather than Bond's. The Soviet counter-intelligence agency wants him assassinated in circumstances that will damage both his reputation and the organisation he works for, and it builds the operation around bait it judges him unable to resist: a Russian cipher clerk named Tatiana Romanova, who presents herself as willing to defect and to bring the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine, with her. A large part of the action is set in Istanbul and then aboard the Orient Express as Bond collects the woman and the machine and travels back towards the West, unaware that the terms of the meeting were decided in Moscow. Fleming drew on a trip he had made to Turkey on behalf of The Sunday Times to report on an Interpol conference, from which he returned on the Orient Express.

The book belongs to the Cold War of the 1950s and to the East-West tensions of that period, and it is as concerned with the decline of British power and influence after the Second World War as with the mechanics of the operation against Bond.