Abstract
The article makes an original contribution in that it claims that previous research had correctly underlined the innovative character of Ian Fleming’s novels, but failed to appreciate the true ways in which Fleming’s novel innovated the detective story as a genre. Previous scholarship had identified in the formalism, in the repetition of formulas and in what is known/unknown to the reader the main innovations introduce by Fleming in the detective story genre. In contrast to this interpretive line, this paper argues that Fleming innovated the detective story by re-introducing some elements of the myth (such as the special disjunction) that the detective stories had thus far discarded and by simplifying the structure of the novel—innovations that previous studies had failed to properly appreciate.