I thought I’d give this one a try because the Kindle price was only ninety-nine cents, and the concept was so promising that I wanted it to be good.

Sadly, a good concept does not a good novel make. Good writing is also required. Some of the writing in The Ian Fleming Files: Operation Armada is good enough, but the author’s pallet is limited, and his reach exceeds his grasp.

Here’s the concept: Most of us know that Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, was himself a British agent during World War II, and much of the procedures he describes were based on his experience. Certain characters in the fictional stories are also based on real people.

Damian Stevenson makes the creative jump of presenting Fleming as the original Bond, and telling a story of one of his assignments as if he were writing a Bond script.

Things start out fairly well. Aside from his tendency to show off his research by itemizing his characters’ outfits like an announcer at a fashion show, the setting (London in 1940) is well described, the characters lifelike, and the conversation natural.

Then Fleming gets sent on a mission – to deliver a payment of money to a French Admiral in return for the surrender of his ships to the British. But things go wrong, the payment gold is lost, and Fleming finds himself working with a company of Resistance fighters to recover the money and make the rendezvous deadline.

And that’s where things turned south for me as a reader. Realism went by the board, replaced by the kind of over the top action you expect from a Bond movie. Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned here before, “movie logic” doesn’t work as well on the pages of a novel. The reader has time to think, “That doesn’t make much sense. That doesn’t seem very likely.”

For instance – and this seems odd in a writer as obsessed with clothing as Stevenson seems to be – we see Fleming and a Resistance ally (a beautiful woman, of course) robbing a French chateau, and fleeing just ahead of Nazi pursuers. They make their escape over a mountain pass in winter, and the next day don skis in order to participate in a very cinematic (but not very credible) slalom chase.

During the robbery, we are told that Fleming is wearing a dinner jacket, and the girl is wearing a designer dress. During the chase they have no chance to change their clothes, yet somehow they manage to climb the mountain in freezing temperatures. And the next day they dress in ski wear for the second part of the chase, though it’s never explained where this new clothing came from. Such things require explanation in a novel.

And Stevenson gets out of his depth in the action sequences. He tries to match his prose to the action, but doesn’t do it very well, and so is reduced to employing exclamation marks to inform the reader when he ought to be excited.

I was also troubled by the use of anachronistic terms, like “grooving” and “hip.” And Stevenson has trouble with his vocabulary generally. At one point he speaks of “well-oiled troops,” which doesn’t mean what he thinks it does. And in the final showdown I found it very hard to figure out where things and people were, so that the action was all a muddle to me.

Operation Armada constitutes a nice try, but ultimately fails as a novel. Maybe the movie treatment will do better.