Ian Fleming should have been taking his ease in 1964. The year before saw him endure a nasty lawsuit and nastier heart attack. Just relax and enjoy as his creation James Bond cemented his status as moviedom’s most famous superspy in Goldfinger, opening in theaters that September.
Fleming always wanted more. So he launched a new book project, not about Bond but a flying car. The “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” series became another lasting success, but one Fleming would never see to publication, as he died in August.
It was the sort of self-destructive impulse in pursuit of duty that Bond himself obeys in the other project Fleming allowed to consume his last year of life: the 13th and penultimate Bond book.
In The Man With The Golden Gun, James Bond takes on contract killer Francisco Scaramanga to prove his vitality. Scaramanga may be a man of ruthless power and cunning, but Bond is ready and even eager to put himself in the assassin’s sights. For Bond, like Fleming, risks were meant to be taken, if sometimes for their own sake:
James Bond smiled grimly to himself. He was feeling happy. He wouldn’t have been able to explain the emotion. It was a feeling of being keyed up, wound taut. It was the moment, after twenty passes, when you got a hand you could bet on – not necessarily win, but bet on.
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| The first-edition cover of The Man With The Golden Gun features Scaramanga's title weapon, "a gold-plated, long-barreled, single-action Colt .45" which uses bullets with 24-carat gold cores. There is also a hidden clue as to who will be Bond's target in the book's iconoclastic opening. Image from https://andrew-reviews.com/2022/01/29/book-review-5-the-man-with-the-golden-gun/ |
Bond was a hand you could bet on; is The Man With The Golden Gun? It begins right where his last novel, You Only Live Twice, left off, and winds up once again in Bond’s home away from home, the newly-minted island nation of Jamaica where much of the Bond story was written and several of his adventures are set. So the odds seem in its favor.
But Fleming was not well, and a distinct ennui creeps into every page. Dialogue is trite and labored. The thin storyline is pocked with bad decisions and coincidences. Bond himself seems half-asleep, a shell going through the motions without his usual joy or finesse.
Not that it is terrible. There is enough of the old Fleming spark to keep the reader interested, if not that entertained. And the resolution does leave James on something of a high note, something you can’t say of his two prior novels, great as those are.
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| A comic strip based on the novel ran in the [U. K.] Daily Express from January to September 1966. The comic's writer, Jim Lawrence, gave Bond a revenge motive when Scaramanga shoots one of his friends. The novel lacks such a personal motive for 007. Image from https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/tmwtgg# |
His former handlers are soon alerted to something wrong, but their attempts to warn Secret Service boss M. are dismissed. Shown into M.’s office, Bond goes for his gun after saying the following:
“You’ve been making war against someone or other all your life. You’re doing so at this moment. And for most of my adult life you’ve used me as a tool. Fortunately that’s all over now.”
Yes, it’s Bond as Manchurian Candidate!
If not for a gadget M. unrealistically deploys at the last moment, a ceiling-sprung bulletproof glass shield more apropos to “The Man From U. N. C. L. E.,” Bond would have lived the great American dream of offing his boss. Instead M., continuing to display suspect judgment, sends a deprogrammed Bond on another mission, to kill the deadly Scaramanga.
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| Bond falls short in his attempt at killing M., as depicted by Howard Mueller for the first of a four-part serialization in Playboy magazine. Image from https://illustrated007.blogspot.com/2009/04/playboy-publication-of-man-with-golden.html |
“Better for him to fall on the battlefield,” M. reasons. “If he brings it off, he’ll have won his spurs back again and we can all forget the past.” Bond’s final words about being used as a tool apparently left zero impression.
The rest of The Man With The Golden Gun never recovers from that oddball opening, nor surpasses it for excitement. Instead, it follows a kind of rote but atypically bumptious path for the series. Bond infiltrates Scaramanga’s lair after a chance encounter in a bordello, uncovering with relative ease plans that include the desolation of Jamaica’s sugar crop and the exportation of ganja into the United States.
It’s not dull, exactly, but it is not written with the same color or flair one expects and usually gets from a Bond adventure. Scaramanga discusses his plans in unconvincing gangsterese, with none of the subtlety or grandiosity you expect from Bond villains. Instead he keeps aggressively reminding Bond what a bad guy he is:
“Mister, there’s something quite extra about the smell of death. Care to try it?”
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| Christopher Lee's sinister, fun turn as Scaramanga is a rare highlight of the lackluster 1974 film adaptation starring Roger Moore. But except for having a third nipple, Lee's Scaramanga bears little resemblance to the buggy bully we see in the book. Image from https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Gun/Gallery |
In this and many other ways, the novel reads very much like what so many have said it is, a first draft that Fleming never polished. I have to think a rewrite would have shored up a major plot hole, which is how Bond and Scaramanga meet.
As it stands, Bond spots an advertisement in a Jamaican newspaper for a house for sale. The house happens to be located in the coastal town of Savanna La Mar, where Bond fortuitously just found out Scaramanga is paying a visit. On a whim, he decides to stop by the house, mostly because he finds the advertisement so charming.
A few minutes after he walks in, so does Scaramanga, taking no pains to hide his identity. When Bond tells him he is a vacationing security guard, Scaramanga invites him to be his chief assistant at an upcoming meeting of spies and hoods:
“So it just occurs to me that you being live to security and such, that you could act as a kind of guard at these meetings, clean the room for mikes, stay outside the door and see that no one comes nosing around, see that when I want to be private I git private. D’you get the picture?”
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| A street scene in Savanna La Mar as seen today. Fleming describes it as a community of quaint houses with "gingerbread traceries," rickety jalousies, and sidewalks shaded by old lignum vitae trees, perfect for a tired spy to take his rest. Image from https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g736017-w4-Savanna_La_Mar_Westmoreland_Parish_Jamaica.html |
Scaramanga even introduces himself to Bond as “The Man With The Golden Gun,” which certainly cuts down on the mystery element.
The return to Jamaica is always welcome. As he did before in Live And Let Die and Dr. No and would do again in “Octopussy,” one of the stories included in his final Bond book in 1966, Fleming really showcases his love for the land’s weather, scenery, and fauna in an affecting way. He continually fills his canvas with diverting word pictures, even when the action is at a lull.
Scaramanga’s scheme is fairly ambitious, if not world-threatening. He plans to sabotage Jamaica’s cane fields, figuring he will cash in after buying tons of sugar in advance. Proceeds will help prop up a Jamaican hotel he owns.
“So now four of us stand to win or lose ten million bucks or so – us and our backers. And we’ve got this business of the Thunderbird on the red side of the sheet. So what do you think, Mr. Hendriks? Of course we burn the crops where we can get away with it.”
There is also a side business of smuggling marijuana to the States with the help of the Mob and propping up Fidel Castro, who wants the Jamaican fields sabotaged to improve his own economic standing in the region. The K. G. B. is also involved. There are a lot of moving parts, though Bond’s mission as stated at the start is a straight wet job, killing Scaramanga as a recognized threat to Her Majesty’s Government.
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| Hurricane Flora, which killed thousands and cost an estimated billion dollars in property damage when it struck Cuba in 1962, is a fictional plot point in The Man With The Golden Gun. It is why Castro funds Scaramanga's sabotage of Jamaica's sugar industry, to help his own island nation get back on its feet. Image from http://www.cubanews.acn.cu/cuba/22555-sixty-years-after-hurricane-flora-s-unfathomable-winds |
Bond’s longstanding incompetence at his job comes out in force here. In addition to being an instrument largely of dumb luck, Bond passes up multiple chances to kill Scaramanga. Riled by Scaramanga’s machismo, he blows his cover by shooting a pineapple off a frightened dancer’s head. After he overhears Scaramanga and his K. G. B. contact discuss 007’s real identity, Bond opts to hang around the killers a little longer, even though all the information he needs to destroy the operation is already in the hands of old pal Felix Leiter and the C. I. A.
Never mind the mission: Bond is just keen to see how he will do facing down the world’s greatest assassin.
It is here you get to the central conceit of the book, of Bond stepping into the breach one last time to prove his mettle or die trying. It might have even worked effectively, had there been more to the resolution.
In the 1974 film adaptation, a recognized series lowlight, this element is nevertheless developed far more effectively. Scaramanga, written as a more cunning and careful figure and played with cold suavity by Christopher Lee, has something Bond wants, and thus Roger Moore as 007 has reason to hang around, trying to stay alive.
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| The action in The Man With The Golden Gun culminates on a miniature train, where Bond is taken for a ride by Scaramanga and his goons. It is a damp squib of an ending, resolved suddenly and tidily with little effort from Bond himself. Image from https://thereelbits.com/2019/05/01/007-case-files-the-man-with-the-golden-gun/ |
Here Bond is just putting himself at risk for his self-image. This might have worked better had Fleming created more tension within Bond, as he just went through a mind-altering ordeal. Perhaps he needs a chance to prove himself after being made a Soviet puppet. But the whole Manchurian Candidate angle is dropped once Scaramanga appears, except for the briefest recollections of his recuperation at “the Farm.”
The doubts and psychological struggles which gave Bond such complexity in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice are entirely avoided, at a time when you would expect Fleming to work them to the hilt. With Bond’s sole adversary an obnoxious shoot-first type whom Bond has no trouble finding soon after touching down in Kingston, the plot alone isn’t enough to carry the novel.
It
comes back to Fleming’s state of mind in early 1964, distracted by health and
legal problems and perplexed about how to write Bond out of his Japanese exile.
I don’t think his heart was in it, and it shows. Having Bond back one last time
is nice, though. At least Fleming’s version gets the chance of turning down a
knighthood in his big farewell, rather than dying alone on some island. But how
much better this novel might have been if Fleming had taken some time off to
pause and refresh.
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