 Panek, comparing the gangsters to Bond's normal adversaries, identifies them as "merely incompetent gunsels" when compared with the British agent, who can eliminate them with relative ease.The essayist Umberto Eco sees the Spangs as being a forerunner of the SPECTRE organisation Fleming uses in his later novels.Kingsley Amis, who later wrote a Bond novel, considered that there was "no decent villain", while Eco judges three of the villains—the two Spang brothers and Winter—as physically abnormal, as many of Bond's adversaries are.