The Man with the Golden Gun is the twelfth and final novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and thirteenth Bond book overall. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the UK on 1 April 1965, eight months after the author's death. The novel was not as detailed or polished as the others in the series, leading to poor but polite reviews. Despite that, the book was a best-seller.
The story centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond, who had been posted missing, presumed dead, after his last mission in Japan. Bond returns to Britain via the Soviet Union, where he had been brainwashed to attempt to assassinate his superior, M. After being "cured" by the MI6 doctors, Bond is sent to the Caribbean to find and kill Francisco Scaramanga, the titular "Man with the Golden Gun".
The first draft and part of the editing process was completed before Fleming's death and the manuscript had passed through the hands of his copy editor, William Plomer, but it was not as polished as other Bond stories. Much of the detail contained in the previous novels was missing, as this was often added by Fleming in the second draft. Publishers Jonathan Cape passed the manuscript to Kingsley Amis for his thoughts and advice on the story, although his suggestions were not used.
A year after James Bond's final confrontation with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, while on a mission in Japan, a man claiming to be Bond appears in London and demands to meet the head of the Secret Service, M. Bond's identity is confirmed, but during his debriefing interview with M, Bond tries to kill him with a cyanide pistol; the attempt fails. The Service learns that after destroying Blofeld's castle in Japan, Bond suffered a head injury and developed amnesia. Having lived as a Japanese fisherman for several months, Bond travelled into the Soviet Union to learn his true identity. While there, he was brainwashed and assigned to kill M upon returning to England.
Now de-programmed, Bond is given a chance to again prove his worth as a member of the 00 section following the assassination attempt. M sends Bond to Jamaica and gives him the seemingly impossible mission of killing Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed several British secret agents. Scaramanga is known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver, which fires silver-jacketed solid-gold bullets.
Bond locates Scaramanga in a Jamaican bordello and manages to become his temporary personal assistant under the name "Mark Hazard". He learns that Scaramanga is involved in a hotel development on the island with a group of investors that consists of a syndicate of American gangsters and the KGB. Scaramanga and the other investors are also engaged in a scheme to destabilise Western interests in the Caribbean's sugar industry and increase the value of the Cuban sugar crop, running drugs into America, smuggling prostitutes from Mexico into America and operating casinos in Jamaica that will cause friction between tourists and the local people.
Bond discovers that he has an ally who is also working undercover at the half-built resort, Felix Leiter, who has been recalled to duty by the CIA and is working ostensibly as an electrical engineer while setting up bugs in Scaramanga's meeting room. However, they learn that Scaramanga plans to eliminate Bond when the weekend is over. Bond's true identity is confirmed by a KGB agent and Scaramanga makes new plans to entertain the gangsters and the KGB agent by killing Bond while they are riding a sight-seeing train to a marina. However, Bond manages to turn the tables on Scaramanga and, with the help of Leiter, kill most of the conspirators. Wounded, Scaramanga escapes into the swamps, where Bond pursues him. Scaramanga lulls Bond off-guard and shoots him with a golden derringer hidden in his palm. Bond is hit but returns fire and shoots Scaramanga several times, killing him at last.
Characters and themes
The central character of the novel is James Bond. In The Man with the Golden Gun, he appears with a different personality from the previous stories and is robot-like, according to author of the "continuation" Bond novels, Raymond Benson.[1] Benson also felt that Bond's character had not been developed any further than in the previous books.[1] The historian Jeremy Black noted that when given two opportunities to kill Scaramanga in cold blood, he cannot bring himself to do it. The first time this happens, Bond sits in a car behind Scaramanga; the method of killing would be to shoot him in the back of the head and this is compared to the technique used by both the KGB and Nazis. According to Black, Bond has to rise above the actions and act more suitably for a British fictional hero.[2] Once the mission is completed, Bond is offered the KCMG, but he refuses the honour and reflects on his own name, "a quiet, dull, anonymous name", which had been Fleming's aim when he first named the character.[3] Benson also points out that the touches of humour displayed by Bond in the previous novels disappeared and he appeared in the book as cold and emotionless.[1]
For the first time in the Bond canon, M's full name of "Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG" was finally revealed.[4] Despite being the target of the failed assassination attempt, not only does M not press charges against Bond, he sends him out on further missions.[5]
According to Benson, the main adversary of the novel, Francisco Scaramanga, is more a henchman than a major adversary and "a second-rate, smalltime crook who happens to have gotten lucky with his shooting."[1] Comentale, Watt and Willman note that Scaramanga had the same character profile as Herr von Hammerstein, the former Gestapo officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service in "For Your Eyes Only".[6]
There are two main themes in the novel. The first involves Scaramanga providing the Rastafarians with drugs in return for fires in the sugar plantations, a return of the theme used in "Risico", of drugs being used for political purposes to undermine the West.[7] This was part of a wider conspiracy by Scaramanga and his KGB connection, Hendricks, to destabilise the region by a campaign of industrial sabotage against companies based in Jamaica, including Reynolds Metal, Kaiser Bauxite and Aluminia.[8]
Black notes that the independent inquiry at the end of the novel, conducted in Bond's hospital bedroom, was undertaken by the Jamaican judiciary and the CIA and MI6 were recorded as acting "under the closest liaison and direction of the Jamaican CID"; Bond and Leiter are also awarded the Jamaican Police Medal for "Services to the Independent State of Jamaica."[9] Black observes that this was the new world of a non-colonial, independent Jamaica, underlining the collapse of the British Empire.[9]
Background
Fleming's house, Goldeneye, where he wrote all the Bond novels, including The Man with the Golden Gun
Ian Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January and February 1964,[10] completing it by the beginning of March.[11] His health affected him badly during the writing process and he dropped from his usual rate of two thousand words a morning to a little over an hour's worth of work a day.[10]
As with his previous novels, Fleming used events from his past as elements in his novel. Whilst at Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Fleming's car, a StandardTourer, had been struck by a train at a level crossing and he had been dragged fifty yards down the track. From that time on he had associated trains with death, which led to their use as a plot device not just in The Man with the Golden Gun, but also in Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia, with Love.[12]
As well as using events from his past, Fleming also used names of individuals he knew for some of his characters. The editor of The London Magazine, Alan Ross, had provided Fleming with details about the effects of the electroshock therapy that Bond went through and, by way of thanks, the novel's SIS station chief in Jamaica, Commander Ross, was named after him.[13] Similarly, Fleming used the name of the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club, Mark Nicholson, for the CIA representative at the hotel.[13] Tony Hugill, the sugar planter mentioned in the novel, was named after a member of Fleming's 30 AU unit who managed the Tate & Lyle plantations in the West Indies after the war[14] and the book's main villain, Francisco Scaramanga, was named after George Scaramanga, an Etonian contemporary of Fleming's: the pair are said to have fought at school.[15]
The effects of the two Eon Productions Bond films released prior to the writing of the novel (Dr. No and From Russia with Love) were reflected in the novel through the increased number of gadgets used.[12] One of these was the poison gun used in the scene of the attempted assassination of M. The idea was taken from the story of Bohdan Stashynsky, who defected from the Eastern Bloc to the West in 1961. Stashynsky was put on trial for the murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera and stated that he had used a poison-spray gun to do it.[16][17]
Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964[11] and wrote to the copy editor of all his novels, William Plomer, saying it needed a lot of re-writing.[18] As time went on Fleming became increasingly unhappy with the book and thought about re-working it in the spring of 1965, but was persuaded against it by Plomer, who considered the novel viable for publication.[19] Five months after returning from Jamaica, on the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack.[20] His obituary in The Times noted that he "had completed and was revising a new novel, The Man with the Golden Gun."[20]
Despite William Plomer's original thought about the state of the manuscript, editors Jonathan Cape were concerned enough about the story to pass the manuscript to Kingsley Amis to read on holiday, paying him £35/15 shillings for his thoughts and advice, although Amis' subsequent suggestions were not used by Cape.[21] Cape had taken the step because they thought the novel was thin and "feeble".[21] Raymond Benson has noted that the thinness comes from a lack of the rich detail and descriptions which are normally present in Fleming's work, but which are missing from The Man with the Golden Gun; Benson suggests that these details were normally worked into the second draft by Fleming, but their absence shows that no such additional work was done on this occasion.[22]The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously, eight months after its author's death.[23]
Release and reception
This is, alas, the last Bond and, again alas, I mean it, for I really have run out of puff and zest
The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the UK on 1 April 1965[18] by Jonathan Cape, was 221 pages long and cost eighteen shillings.[24] Cover artist Richard Chopping undertook the cover design again and was paid 300 guineas for the artwork.[25]The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the US in August 1965, was 183 pages long and cost $4.50.[26] Even before the US edition was published, The Man with the Golden Gun was ninth place on the best-seller lists, with 80,000 pre-orders for the hardback version.[27]
Reviews
Critics did not praise The Man with the Golden Gun, although much of the criticism was muted. Fleming biographer Henry Chandler noted that the novel "received polite and rather sad reviews, recognizing that the book had effectively been left half-finished, and as such did not represent Fleming at the top of his game."[28]Kingsley Amis wrote in the New Statesman that the book was "a sadly empty tale, empty of the interests and effects that for better or worse, Ian Fleming made his own."[18] Meanwhile, the critic for The Times wrote that the novel would "doubtless be followed with close attention by the keen-eyed admirers of the many-wiled Bond."[29]
Maurice Richardson, writing in The Observer, lamented that "perhaps Ian Fleming was very tired when he wrote it. Perhaps... he left it unrevised. The fact remains that this posthumous Bond is a sadly sub-standard job."[30] His praise for the novel was muted, admitting "it isn't of course by any means totally unreadable but it's depressingly far from the best Bond."[30] Writing in The Observer's sister paper, The Guardian, Christopher Wordsworth noted that "since Goldfinger 007 has been toiling hopelessly in the wake of the Zeitgeist."[24] Prior to this novel, Wordsworth writes, "the distance between Live and let Die, Ian Fleming's second and best, and You Only Live Twice, his last and worst, is a long iron down the Sandwich fairway."[24]The Man with the Golden Gun, however, sinks to the level of a "farrago".[24]
William Trevor, writing in The Listener, was dismissive of the work, thinking that "Bond continues to behave with so little originality that neither Templar nor Drummond, Marlowe nor Nick Charles, would have paused to waste a pellet on him";[31] he continued, saying that "this present work is once again a fantasy for grown-up children, neither as clever nor exciting as the early thrillers of Edgar Wallace or the boys adventure stories of fifty years ago."[31] Trevor did admit that "for those who like to escape to Bondsville, the old boom-town hasn't changed a scrap."[31]
The critic for Time was damning, saying that "It may have been just as well that Fleming died when everybody still thought he could do no wrong".[27] Meanwhile, the critic for Newsweek said that "James Bond should have had a better exit. Sadly [it]... ends not with a bang but a whimper. The world will be a vastly more lacklustre and complicated place with 007 gone."[17]
The Associated Press wrote that "Bond and Fleming were fun. They entertained, sometimes mildly, often grandly – but always consistently. Life will be less interesting without them."[17] In his review for The New York Times, Charles Poore wrote that The Man with the Golden Gun was "a gory, glittering saga".[26] Poore noted that "The Gee-whizzery... starts early and never flags"[26] and that, despite the passing of Fleming, "the James Bond spirit soars on".[26] The critic for Books and Bookmen lamented the fact that "Bond has gone out like a lamb; even the girls are below par, while the villain seems like a refuge from a seedy Western. But we'll miss our James".[17]
D.A.N. Jones, writing in The New York Review of Books, thought The Man with the Golden Gun was "an innocuous run-of-the-mill adventure story of 1911 vintage",[32] Anthony Lejeune, writing in the National Review, thought that it "is undeniably slight, but, like everything Fleming wrote, intensely readable... In a sense Fleming's job was finished. He had irrevocably transformed the genre in which he worked".[17] Lejeune went on to say that "in highbrow novels sex and violence are treated gloomily: in Fleming's stories they are presented cheerfully with full enjoyment."[17]
The Man with the Golden Gun was published in serial form in the Daily Express newspaper on a daily basis from 22 March 1965 onwards.[33]
Playboy serialisation (1965)
This novel was also serialised over four issues of Playboy from April through July 1965.[34]
Comic strip (1966)
The novel was adapted as a daily comic strip which was published in the Daily Express newspaper and syndicated around the world. The adaptation ran from 10 January to 10 September 1966. The adaptation was written by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Yaroslav Horak.[35] The strip was reprinted by Titan Books in The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 2, published in 2011.[36]
The James Bond series focuses on the titular character, a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2022. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny.
Dr. No is the sixth novel by the English author Ian Fleming to feature his British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the novel in early 1957 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 31 March 1958. The novel centres on Bond's investigation into the disappearance in Jamaica of two fellow MI6 operatives. He establishes that they had been investigating Doctor No, a Chinese operator of a guano mine on the fictional Caribbean island of Crab Key. Bond travels to the island and meets Honeychile Rider and later Doctor No.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
From Russia, with Love is the fifth novel by the English author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the story in early 1956 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica; at the time he thought it might be his final Bond book. The novel was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 8 April 1957.
Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Written in January and February 1958, it was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959. The story centres on the investigation by the British Secret Service operative James Bond into the gold-smuggling activities of Auric Goldfinger, who is also suspected by MI6 of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. As well as establishing the background to the smuggling operation, Bond uncovers a much larger plot: Goldfinger plans to steal the gold reserves of the United States from Fort Knox.
Moonraker is the third novel by the British author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. It was published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1955 and featured a cover design conceived by Fleming. The plot is derived from a Fleming screenplay that was too short for a full novel, so he added the passage of the bridge game between Bond and the industrialist Hugo Drax. In the latter half of the novel, Bond is seconded to Drax's staff as the businessman builds the Moonraker, a prototype missile designed to defend England. Unknown to Bond, Drax is German, an ex-Nazi now working for the Soviets; his plan is to build the rocket, arm it with a nuclear warhead, and fire it at London. Uniquely for a Bond novel, Moonraker is set entirely in Britain, which raised comments from some readers, complaining about the lack of exotic locations.
Thunderball is the ninth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, and the eighth full-length Bond novel. It was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 27 March 1961, where the initial print run of 50,938 copies quickly sold out. The first novelisation of an unfilmed James Bond screenplay, it was born from a collaboration by five people: Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo, although the controversial shared credit of Fleming, McClory and Whittingham was the result of a courtroom decision.
You Only Live Twice is the eleventh novel and twelfth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series of stories. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom on 26 March 1964 and sold out quickly. It was the last Fleming novel published in his lifetime. It is the concluding chapter in what is known as the "Blofeld Trilogy" after Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the tenth novel and eleventh book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. It was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 1 April 1963. After changing the formula and structure of the previous novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming made a determined effort to produce a work adhering to his tried and tested format. The initial and secondary print runs sold out quickly, with over 60,000 books sold in the first month, double that of the previous book. Fleming wrote the novel at Goldeneye, his holiday home in Jamaica, while Dr. No, the first entry in the Eon Productions Bond series, was being filmed nearby.
The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel and tenth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published by Jonathan Cape on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels, as well as the only Bond novel told in the first person. Its narrator is a young Canadian woman, Viv Michel. Bond himself does not appear until two-thirds of the way through the book, arriving at precisely the right moment to save Viv from being raped and murdered by two criminals. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving the character Viv credit as a co-author.
For Your Eyes Only is a collection of short stories by the British author Ian Fleming, featuring the fictional British Secret Service agent Commander James Bond, the eighth book to feature the character. It was first published by Jonathan Cape on 11 April 1960. It marked a change of format for Fleming, who had previously written James Bond stories only as full-length novels.
Octopussy and The Living Daylights is the fourteenth and final James Bond book written by Ian Fleming in the Bond series. The book is a collection of short stories published posthumously in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 23 June 1966.
Francisco Scaramanga is a fictional character and one of the main antagonists in the James Bond novel and film version of The Man with the Golden Gun. Scaramanga is an assassin who kills with his signature weapon, a pistol made of solid gold. In the novel, the character is nicknamed "Pistols" Scaramanga and is also called "Paco". In the film, the character was played by Christopher Lee.
Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published by Jonathan Cape on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Colonel Sun is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's 1964 death. Before writing the novel, Amis wrote two other Bond related works, the literary study The James Bond Dossier and the humorous The Book of Bond. Colonel Sun centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond and his mission to track down the kidnappers of M, his superior at the Secret Service. During the mission he discovers a communist Chinese plot to cause an international incident. Bond, assisted by a Greek spy working for the Russians, finds M on a small Aegean island, rescues him and kills the two main plotters: Colonel Sun Liang-tan and a former Nazi commander, Von Richter.
James Bond was a comic strip that was based on the eponymous, fictional character created by author Ian Fleming. Starting in 1958 and continuing to 1983, it consisted of 52 story arcs that were syndicated in British newspapers, seven of which were initially published abroad.
Casino Royale is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors.
Diamonds Are Forever is the fourth novel by the British author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the story at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, inspired by a Sunday Times article on diamond smuggling. The book was first published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom on 26 March 1956.
Live and Let Die is the second novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series of stories. Set in London, the United States and Jamaica, it was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1954. Fleming wrote the novel at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica before his first book, Casino Royale, was published; much of the background came from Fleming's travel in the US and knowledge of Jamaica.
Commander James Bond is a character created by the British journalist and novelist Ian Fleming in 1953. He is the protagonist of the James Bond series of novels, films, comics and video games. Fleming wrote twelve Bond novels and two short story collections. His final two books—The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) and Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966)—were published posthumously.
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