On Her Majesty's Secret Service

On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a novel by the English writer Ian Fleming, published by Jonathan Cape in April 1963 and the tenth of his James Bond books.

Fleming had experimented with the series' form in the previous novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, and wrote this one to get back to the shape his readers expected: a service errand that becomes personal, a foreign setting, and an opponent with a plan that has to be worked out from the outside. Bond's search for Blofeld leads him to an alpine clinic and to a scheme that involves a kind of biological warfare against Britain, and the book is the second part of the three-novel sequence, beginning with Thunderball and ending with You Only Live Twice, in which Blofeld is the central enemy. The other half of the story is Tracy, who is given more room than most of the women in the series and whose father's influence is what gets Bond his information. Fleming wrote the novel at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, while the first Bond film was being shot nearby, and it sold better than its predecessor: more than sixty thousand copies went in the first month.