Live And Let Die – Ian Fleming, 1954 ★★★½

A Second Debut for 007

While it is the second James Bond novel, Live And Let Die feels like a kind of debut, introducing what generations of readers and movie fans expect from a James Bond adventure yarn.

The first of Ian Fleming’s novels, Casino Royale, kept Bond penned up in a single locale playing cards, not physically hurting anyone. Live And Let Die gives us a more peripatetic and lethal hero, journeying from London to Harlem to Florida and finally Jamaica and leaving a trail of death behind. 

He’s still a one-woman man, but this time it’s a different woman: Solitaire, the card-reading consort of SMERSH’s African-American ally Mr. Big, up to no good. While it isn’t clear what that is, it apparently involves drugs, murder, and some gold that used to belong to a pirate, Bloody Morgan. Bond’s boss M gives Bond a rundown on Mr. Big:

“He’s not pure negro. Born in Haiti. Good dose of French blood. Trained in Moscow, too, as you’ll see from the file. And the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all, there are 250,000,000 of them in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve got plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.”

Helping Bond on his mission will be his CIA pal from Casino Royale, Felix Leiter, and a “saturnine” FBI handler named Captain Dexter who would just as soon see Bond go away. Captain Dexter’s avowed policy of dealing with Mr. Big, “live and let live,” gives Bond an excuse to announce the book’s title as rejoinder.

Ian Fleming enjoys two of his favorite things: cigarettes and Jamaica. Image from https://www.thetravelcurrent.com/jamaica/ocho-rios/lifestyle/history/james-bond-and-jamaica-must-sees-007-fans.

Fleming is often cited as your typical white racist, a categorization both understandable and unfair. He did play to racial stereotypes, and Live And Let Die does employ some N-bombs for atmosphere. While you can see M’s above description of Mr. Big as patronizing stuff – black people just coming up to the level of other races – it was also fairly enlightened for the period. There’s no bell-curve nonsense in this one. Fleming treats his black characters – both villains and good guys – as equals.

When Fleming isn’t presenting an entire subcategory of people with a broad brush, it’s because he’s not trying. Some of the best word pictures offered in Live And Let Die manage to be recognizably accurate, amusing, and offensive all at once. Take this account of Bond’s arrival in Manhattan:

He was glad to keep silent and gaze out at his first sight of America since the war. It was no waste of time to start picking up the American idiom again: the advertisements, the new car models and the prices of second-hand ones in the used-car lots; the exotic pungency of the road signs: SOFT SHOULDERS – SHARP CURVES – SQUEEZE AHEAD – SLIPPERY WHEN WET; the standard of driving; the number of women at the wheel, their menfolk docilely beside them; the men’s clothes; the way the women were doing their hair; the Civil Defense warnings: IN CASE OF ENEMY ATTACK – KEEP MOVING – GET OFF BRIDGE; the thick rash of television aerials and the impact of TV on hoardings and shop windows; the occasional helicopter; the public appeals for cancer and polio funds: THE MARCH OF DIMES – all the small, fleeting impressions that were as important to his trade as are broken bark and bent twigs to the trapper in the jungle.

Adding to Bond's pre-film popularity was a running series of comic strips based on his Fleming-authored adventures. A treatment of Live And Let Die drawn by Henry Gammidge debuted in December 1958. Image from http://www.michaelmay.online/2014/07/live-and-let-die-comic-strip.html.

If not the hard-edged, rather refined psychodrama that was Casino Royale, Live And Let Die is the first Bond novel that makes you want to read another Bond novel.

Many Bondophiles rate it higher than Casino Royale. I don’t: Casino Royale has more depth and an ending that lingers. Still, I understand the enthusiasm.

It’s one thing to watch Bond kill people in a ruthless and effective manner, which you see happen here for the first time in the series. But even his breakfasts get your attention the way Fleming writes them, Bond noshing on paw-paw and guava jelly as he stares out across the “green flanks” of the hilly Jamaican coastlands to Mr. Big’s island haven, in preparation for his final assault. Or staring blankly as an adversary gets chomped on by a shark, hearing “one terrible snuffling grunt as if a great pig was getting its mouth full.”

This is Fleming the detail maven, setting vivid scenes and then sending you off on what his aficionados call “the Fleming sweep.” The best such scene in Live And Let Die carries you with Bond as he snorkels under a moonlit bay, evading octopus and barracuda as Fleming presses you so tight against his narrative you feel yourself wanting for air:

Wide sea fans swayed and beckoned in the eddies, and in the grey valleys they caught the light of the moon and waved spectrally, like fragments of the shrouds of men buried at sea.

Market Stone Beach lies along the Agualta Vale coastline of Jamaica, the region where the latter half of Live And Let Die is set. The beach is a short drive southeast from an international airport named after Ian Fleming himself. Image by hotboy.tic from http://trip-suggest.com/jamaica/saint-mary/agualta-vale/.

Fleming’s love for and appreciation of his adopted land lifts the second half of the novel; that relationship has been the subject of one fine book about the author and would provide a setting for more Bond adventures than any non-English locale. Jamaica never got a more vivid and loving depiction in his work than here.

One thing I recognized from re-reading Live And Let Die was just how much Fleming was influenced by American pulp fiction. Just look at that title, and the chief baddie’s name! Other bad guys go by names like Tee-Hee, McThing, Blabbermouth, Sam Miami, and The Whisper. People talk in tough-guy argot so thick you can hear the Cagney sneer. Rather than slip a cobra into Bond’s railroad car, they just rip it into oblivion with machine-gun fire.

Bond visits a Harlem nightspot, lit eerily by colored lamps, “macabre and livid, as if El Greco had done a painting by moonlight of an exhumed graveyard in a burning town.” He visits cheap hotels and greasy spoons and has an ugly encounter with a rifle-toting watchman who shoots a harmless pelican because he can.

Violence runs thick with this one. Early in the book Bond kills a trio of Mr. Big’s top henchmen in gruesome fashion, then finds himself helpless as Mr. Big exacts vengeance, leaving a mangled body on a bed for Bond to find with a note reading: “HE DISAGREED WITH SOMETHING THAT ATE HIM.”

Roger Moore as Bond opposite Jane Seymour's Solitaire in a voodoo-rite sequence in the 1973 film version of Live And Let Die. The mood is the same in the book, though not served up as garishly as here. Image from https://englishlanguagethoughts.com/2017/10/07/live-and-let-die/

That scene was repurposed in a later Bond movie, not the one titled Live And Let Die, which introduced Roger Moore as Bond and plays as a spoofy mash-up of past Bond films and the blaxplotation genre well underway by 1973, when the movie was released. Humor in the novel is more subdued, limned throughout by Fleming’s unique fatalism:

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs.

Live And Let Die suffers from a storyline that doesn’t actually need Bond. Mr. Big’s big scheme moving uncovered gold hardly appears illegal in itself, let alone to warrant a British spy’s help upsetting it.

To be fair, Fleming himself notes this in passing:

The gold belonged to the black men who had died to hide it. It should go back to the black men.

The fact Mr. Big belongs to SMERSH, the Soviet assassin force that did Bond wrong in Casino Royale, is a strained tangent, as is the presence of Solitaire, a pale substitute for Royale’s haunting Vesper Lynd.

Solitaire is the novel’s weakest character. She was abducted as a girl to use her other-worldly intuition in aiding Mr. Big’s criminal enterprise. Not surprisingly, she wants out, but fears her boss’s powers. “You can’t kill him,” she warns Bond. “He’s already dead. He’s a Zombie.”

Fleming's own enthusiasm for scuba diving in his beloved Jamaica serves up some intense imagery in Live And Let Die. Here a snorkeler enjoys Jamaican coral up close. Bond gets some scrapes from same in the novel. Image from https://www.my-island-jamaica.com/snorkeling_in_jamaica.html.

The voodoo aspects of Live And Let Die is another card to play for those who argue for Fleming’s racism. But Fleming himself seems to take the matter seriously. He works in notions of juju and Baron Samedi into his story as malignant spirits underlining the struggle Bond must rise above in order to see his assignment through.

While Mr. Big himself later explains his voodoo talk is a means of keeping himself feared by underlings, Bond senses a lot of power to the man that goes beyond rational understanding:

He’s a raving megalomaniac, thought Bond. And all the more dangerous because of it. The fault in most criminal minds was that greed was their only impulse. A dedicated mind was quite another matter. The man was no gangster. He was a menace. Bond was fascinated and slightly awestruck.

Bond’s shoot-first style of detective work here seems extreme. I quite understood Captain Dexter’s reservations, as much of a stick as he is portrayed. Yet at least Bond is more active and engaged. He makes Mr. Big shadowing him early on. He takes charge of enabling Solitaire’s escape. He does make dumb decisions which pock the middle section of the book (traveling by train, leaving Solitaire unguarded in a hotel), but Fleming needs those missteps to advance his plot.

While sharks get much of the attention in book-cover art for Live And Let Die, the fish that gives Bond more trouble is barracuda like this. Writes Fleming: "Although it only weighed just over ten pounds, it was over four feet long, a nickel bullet of muscle and hard flesh." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda. 

It’s a good story, just not a perfect one. The ending is somewhat anti-climactic. Given Mr. Big’s build-up, you expect a better send-off than you get here. Bond’s final plunge into the Jamaican waters promises to be his most lethal, yet is over before it begins.

Elements I enjoy most in this novel are the Jamaican descriptions and the welcome return of Leiter, affecting company as the story centers on his friendship with Bond. The relationship between them is a lot warmer than what we got in Casino Royale, and would be further deepened in later entries.

The reinvention of Bond himself into more of an action hero is another plus, however overactive he gets. We even get the debut of Bond’s sense of humor, as when Mr. Big informs a strapped-down-and-bloodied Bond he is to die at six o’clock, give or take a few minutes.

“Let’s give those minutes,” replies Bond. “I enjoy my life.”

You will, too, reading this introduction to 007 on the go.