Diamonds Are Forever – Ian Fleming, 1956 ★½

Travelogue in Search of a Plot

Ian Fleming was a brilliant travel writer, but he had to contort his travelogues into spy stories to get anyone to pay attention. Nowhere is this case better made than in Diamonds Are Forever.

This fourth installment in the James Bond series puts Bond on the trail of a diamond-smuggling operation, hopping from England to the Eastern United States to the Western United States to what was then still French Guinea in pursuit of gangsters and their fetching gem moll, Tiffany Case.

What better way to have at middle-class America in the middle of the twentieth century than plonk Bond in the middle of Las Vegas?

“And wait till you see the little old ladies in gloves and chokers working those slots. They have shopping baskets to carry away their loot of nickels and dimes and quarters. They work those slots ten, twenty hours a day without going to the rest room. You don’t believe me? You know why they wear those gloves? To keep their hands from bleeding.”

However amusing the sightseeing, or catchy the title, there’s a reason Diamonds Are Forever is among Fleming’s lesser-regarded Bond novels: It’s hard rooting for a protagonist who’s such a git.

Las Vegas in the 1950s proves an arresting if deadly backdrop for 007. “And boy, you ain’t seen nothing ‘till you’ve seen that Strip. Five solid miles of gambling joints. Neon lighting that makes Broadway look like a kid’s Christmas tree. Monte Carlo!” Leiter snorted. “Steam-age stuff.” Image from https://klyker.com/color-photos-las-vegas-1950s/. 

Bond is given a cache of stolen diamonds and a name of a known trafficker of same. Calling himself “James Bond” because why the hell not, he immediately falls in love with this mob contact, the beautiful but bruised Ms. Case. Despite being surrounded by suspicious mobsters, he breaks cover to chat up ex-CIA buddy Felix Leiter in public, talking shop and daring to be caught out.

Bond just doesn’t think these American crooks are worth taking seriously:

“There’s nothing so extraordinary about American gangsters,” said Bond. “Anyway, they’re not really Americans. Mostly a lot of Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent all over themselves.”

A little later:

Bond remembered cold, dedicated, chess-playing Russians; brilliant, neurotic Germans; silent, deadly, anonymous men from Central Europe; the people in his own Service, the double-firsts, the gay soldiers of fortune, the men who counted life well lost for a thousand a year. Compared to such men, Bond decided, these people were just teenage pillow-fantasies.

Hey, I really don’t mind Fleming crapping on Italian-Americans. I went to Catholic school and got beat up by the boys who were egged on by the girls. Us Irish still haven’t gotten over St. Valentine’s Day… But talk about killing your story dead before it begins!

A good thriller needs a capable adversary. Fleming here settles on stupid but dangerous, and it’s not enough. In taking a detour from the Cold War setting of prior Bond outings, Fleming settles on a story with plenty of gunplay and wise-guy lingo, apparently trying to out-Hammer Mickey Spillane. It’s not his forte, and it shows.

A Beretta 418, Bond's trusty .25-caliber sidearm throughout his first five novels, before switching to his better-known Walther PPK. Bond's own version has a unique skeleton grip for faster, if more dangerous, drawing power. Image from https://mjmoss.tumblr.com/post/31486129160/beretta-418-james-bonds-original-pistol-of.

Before all this, though, the novel starts promisingly. We watch a scorpion in an African desert make short work of a wandering beetle. Then a diamond smuggler does the same to the scorpion. A ruthless, edgy tone is established, and continues through the first chapter:

His mind full of lush dreams, the man on the motorcycle bumped his way as fast as he could across the plain and away from the great thornbush where the pipe line for the richest smuggling operation in the world started its devious route to where it would finally flow out onto soft bosoms five thousand miles away.

After that introduction, the smuggling pipeline is left to dangle while Bond sets off on his infiltration mission, which involves diamonds but also corrupt horse racing. Bond is at a loss about why he’s getting this job, thinking it might be better handled by police investigators.

“M seemed to have been going through a bad phase of mixing in other people’s business,” he muses.

This fish-out-of-water feeling grows as the novel goes on. Bond experiences a criminal underworld peopled with characters like “Tingaling” Bell and “Shady” Tree. Because nothing suggests sordid criminality like the cast of a Strawberry Shortcake cartoon.

“They’ve got a good machine, even if they do have funny names,” Leiter warns Bond.

Felix is wrong, however. The “Spangled Mob” Bond does battle against, named for a couple of bad brothers named Spang but suggesting a certain banner that did wave, are amateurs. Only with Bond’s lunkish decision-making do they come close to threatening him. Even Moonraker, the previous, disappointing Bond adventure, has a cohesive story. Here Bond just goes from place to place.

Bond takes in a horse race at Saratoga during one of his many stops in Diamonds Are Forever. It's a fixed race, but Bond and Felix Leiter find a way to throw a wrench in the gears, one of many plot elements that winds up going nowhere. Image from https://www.saratoga.com/hotspots/saratoga-race-course/.

What Fleming consistently nails is the travel-writing. Whether describing mud baths in Saratoga, N.Y. or dining out in Manhattan, Fleming makes sure his prose bathes you with atmosphere:

He carried his bag across the parched lawn between the beds of Beauty Bush and forced gladioli and let himself into the neat, sparsely furnished double room with the armchair, the bedside table, the Currier and Ives print, the chest of drawers and the brown plastic ashtray that are standard motel equipment all over America.

Fleming’s ability to make such minutia diverting is a source of wonder for me. If only he gave Bond a decent case.

There are some flecks of gold in stray lines like this comment from Bond to Tiffany: “Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.”

While set in the United States, Diamonds Are Forever didn't connect with American audiences until the beginning of the 1960s, when President Kennedy listed another Fleming novel (From Russia, With Love) in a list of his top ten favorite books. Above is the 1961 Signet edition. Image from https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=19340013.

Bond in fact takes rather strongly to Tiffany, suggesting his iconic role as devil-may-care playboy had yet to form this early on:

Once he committed himself to her it would be forever. His would be the role of the healer, the analyst, to whom the patient had transferred all her love and trust. There could be no cruelty equal to dropping her hand once he had taken it in his. Was he ready for all that that meant to his life and his career?

[Small Spoiler Alert!] No, he isn’t. But you don’t find this out until the next Bond novel, From Russia, With Love.

I have mixed feelings about bashing Diamonds Are Forever. I love that it reintroduces Felix Leiter to the series, however improbably. Okay, he has a hook for a hand and walks with a limp, but is otherwise fit enough despite having been fed to a shark in Live And Let Die. He’s a cool guy.

The book is also responsible for my favorite Bond film of the same name, starring Sean Connery. The movie’s story is also poorly constructed, but I enjoy its loose energy and playful tone, well suited to 1971, sending up the Bond formula as it does with an absurdly unkillable villain, hot-and-ready Bond girls, and a pair of gay assassins.

Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith) and Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) as they appear in the 1971 Bond film version of Diamonds Are Forever. The film also stars Sean Connery in his final bow for the EON-produced franchise. Image from https://cinefilesreviews.com/2015/10/13/diamonds-are-forever-1971-movie-review/.

These assassins, Wint and Kidd, do appear in the novel as well. In the movie Wint and Kidd are played more for offbeat laughs; Fleming presents their homosexuality instead as a sinister element. “Some of these homos make the worst killers,” Leiter explains.

Other bits of the book do reappear in the movie. Both begin in an African desert and have deadly finales on an ocean liner. Las Vegas is a central setting. There’s also a desert chase in both; though the movie employs a moon buggy, the book a train.

Often, what works for me as jaded charm in the movie comes off as lackadaisical and ill-judged in the novel. Fleming unaptly rushes things. Bond fires his gun (here a Beretta semi-automatic with a skeletal grip) more than in any other novel I remember, and like I said, shrugs off the spycraft when he gets bored, which he too often does.

“‘Baby needs a new pair of shoes.’ Kid stuff. I’d like to hear the banker for the Greek Syndicate whining ‘Baby needs a new pair of shoes’ when he’s got two nines against him at the high table and there are ten million francs on each tableau.”

There are a handful of amusing moments. A mob kingpin is said to drive without eyeglasses because he “has the windshields of his Cadillacs ground to his prescription.” Later, a bad guy ridicules accomplices for having “delusions of adequacy.”

The RMS Queen Elizabeth in Manhattan, circa 1950. Bond's adventure concludes on this ship, en route from New York to London. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Elizabeth.

But Bond’s breezy dismissal of his adversaries as “brutal, theatrical, overblown dead-end adults” is too-well-borne-out by what follows.

Fleming did a lot of research for Diamonds Are Forever, including a fact-finding tour of Africa’s diamond industry. Oddly, he saved his best material for a later book, The Diamond Smugglers, which while similarly thin on story at least offers some varied anecdotes on the dark side of the diamond trade. Here, Fleming abandons the diamond angle soon after introducing it, only referencing it again near the end.

Not that I cared. I enjoy reading Fleming, but his lazy plotting can be a weight even when his travelogues are diverting. This time, sightseeing alone is not enough.