" While at Lincoln Junior High School I had two sets of friends. Ralph Bloomdahl and his younger brother, Steve, were the ones in the neighborhood, Ralph having been in class with me since I moved to Park Ridge, Illinois in fifth grade. Like me, he wasn't popular, but at least he wasn't unpopular. In school he was quiet. Outside of school he, Steve and I were into drawing and invented role-playing games involving homemade scooters consisting of old roller skates nailed to pieces of wood and a community of shops and institutions located in their basement. They were good kids, but a little dull. Further away from home were Frank Canady and John Case, both of whom lived on the extreme south end of town, both of whom were relatively bad kids, but exciting. Frank had big collections of collectibles: pornography (including Tijahuana Bibles!), comics (kept in plastic, never to be read), graphic novels (ditto), Bond memorabilia and the like. They'd do crazy things like lie down in the middle of busy Higgins Road, laughing as the cars would swerve and brake to avoid them; throw eggs on Mr. Messenger's roof from John's to attract flocks of seagulls; spy on neighbors, both residential and business; roam the interstate near their homes, looking for the pornography amazingly abundant in the gullies alongside (a significant percentage of it was foreign). I did some of these things, avoided others because of moral scruples and cowardice.
One thing in common between both sets of friends was an interest in international espionage in general and with James Bond in particular. Network television had several shows devoted to the former and the Pickwick Theatre downtown showed each one of the Bond films as they came out as well as the occasional copycats.
This was the last Bond novel actually written, at least through its first draft, by Fleming himself and may well have been the last Bond book I ever read. Frank got into the successor novels, but I scorned them. Indeed, I was getting tired of the things, having read them all. The movies, however, were another matter. I will still watch a Bond film occasionally despite the expectation, usually fulfilled, of being disappointed. "
— Erik, 1/21/2014