A "Literary" Licence to Kill?

Responding to author Sam Jordison's Guardian blog post on the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth, The Rap Sheet's Linda L. Richards writes:

Later in the piece, though, Jordison loses me--and possibly you--when he says that “just like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, Fleming is slowly being adopted into the literary fold.”

The Bond books were often fun, the storytelling competent, and a few really good films have been based on those tales. But let’s face it, folks, as a writer Fleming was never in the same league as Chandler and Hammett.

I commented:

In the books that established his reputation, Fleming portrayed Bond as a very believable, well rounded character. That's all I can ask of any writer. It was the movies, for the most part, that stretched plausibility and turned Bond into a caricature.

Some of Fleming's books are better than others. That's true of Chandler and Hammett, too.