The Man with the Golden Gun
Encyclopedia
The Man with the Golden Gun is the twelfth novel
(and thirteenth book) of Ian Fleming
's James Bond series of books. 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 bestseller.
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 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", which he does.
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 subsequently used.
The novel was serialised in 1965 firstly in the Daily Express
newspaper and then Playboy
magazine; in 1966 a daily comic strip
adaptation was also published in the Daily Express. In 1974 the book was loosely adapted as the ninth film
in the Eon Productions
James Bond series with Roger Moore
playing Bond and Fleming's cousin, Christopher Lee
, as Scaramanga.
, 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 subsequent 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 on returning to England.
Now de-programmed
, Bond is given a chance to prove his worth as a member of the 00 section following the assassination attempt. M sends him to Jamaica
and the seemingly impossible mission of killing Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga
, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed several British secret agents. Scaramanga is also known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt
.45 which fires silver jacketed solid gold bullets.
Bond locates Scaramanga in a Jamaican bordello and manages to become Scaramanga's temporary personal assistant under the name "Mark Hazard". He learns that Scaramanga is involved with 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. The group is also involved in 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, Bond learns that Scaramanga plans to eliminate him when the weekend is over. Bond's true identity is confirmed by the KGB agent and Scaramanga makes new plans to entertain the gangsters and the KGB man 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 Bonds off-guard and shoots him with a golden derringer
he had hidden behind his neck. Bond is hit but returns fire and shoots Scaramanga several times—killing him at last.
. His character is not developed any further than it has been in the previous books, except that, when given the opportunity to kill Scaramanga in cold blood, he cannot bring himself to do it. The first time this happens, when Bond sits in a car behind him, the method of killing is compared to that used by the KGB and Nazis and Bond has to rise above that. 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 all along. 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.
For the first time in the Bond canon, M's full name of "Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG" is finally revealed. 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.
The main adversary of the book is Francisco Scaramanga; according to Benson, he is more a henchman than a major adversary and "a second-rate, smalltime crook who happens to have gotten lucky with his shooting." Comentale, Watt and Willman note that Scaramanga is the same character as Herr von Hammerstein, the former Gestapo
officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service in
"For Your Eyes Only".
There are two main themes of note that appear in the novel. The fist is that with Scaramanga providing the Rastafarians with drugs in return for fires in the sugar plantations, there is the return of the theme used in "Risico", of drugs being used for political purposes to undermine the West. Academic Jeremy Black
notes that the independent enquiry at the end of the novel, conducted in Bond's hospital bedroom, was undertaken by the Jamaican judiciary and the CIA and MI6 were acting "under the closest liaison and direction of the Jamaican CID". This was the new world of a non-colonial, independent Jamaica, underlining the collapse of the British Empire
.
in Jamaica in January and February 1964, completing it by the beginning of March. 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.
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 Morris
Tourer, 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 From Russia, with Love, but also The Man with the Golden Gun.
As well as using events, 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 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. Similarly, the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club
, Mark Nicholson, gave his name to the CIA representative at the hotel. 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 West Indies after the war 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.
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 devices used. One of these was in the opening scenes of the attempted assassination of M, which 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.
Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964 and wrote to the copy editor of all his novels, William Plomer
, saying it needed a lot of re-writing. 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. Five months after returning from Jamaica, on the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack. His obituary in The Times
noted that he "had completed and was revising a new novel, The Man with the Golden Gun."
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. Cape had taken the step because they thought the novel was thin and "feeble" and 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 the worked into the second draft by Fleming, but their absence shows that no such additional work was done on this occasion. The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously, eight months after its author's death.
, was 221 pages long and cost eighteen shilling
s. Cover artist Richard Chopping
undertook the cover design again and was paid 300 guineas
for the artwork. The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the US in August 1965, 183 pages long and costing $4.50. Even before the US edition was published, The Man with the Golden Gun was ninth place on the bestseller lists, with 80,000 pre-orders for the hardback version.
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." 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."
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." 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." 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
." 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." The Man with the Golden Gun, however, sinks to the level of a "farrago".
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." 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." Trevor did admit that "for those who like to escape to Bondsville, the old boom-town hasn't changed a scrap."
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". 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."
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." In his review for The New York Times
, Charles Poore wrote that The Man with the Golden Gun was "a gory, glittering saga". Poore noted that " "The Gee-whizzery...starts early and never flags" and that, despite the passing of Fleming, "the James Bond spirit soars on". 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".
Whilst 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", 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". 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."
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.
Playboy serialisation (1965)
This novel was also serialised over four issues of Playboy
magazine from April through July 1965.
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
. The strip was reprinted by Titan Books
in The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 2, published in 2011.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
In 1974, Eon Productions
made the ninth Bond film
, loosely based on the novel. The film starred Roger Moore
as Bond and Fleming's cousin, Christopher Lee
, as Scaramanga. The film moved away from Jamaica to the Far East and borrowed from the martial arts genre
that was popular in the 1970s. The plot also changed and used the 1973 energy crisis
as a backdrop to the film, allowing the MacGuffin
of the "Solex agitator" to be introduced.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
(and thirteenth book) of Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
's James Bond series of books. It was first published by Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
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 bestseller.
The story centres on the fictional British Secret Service
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
operative James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
, who had been posted missing, presumed dead after his last mission in Japan. Bond returns via the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, where he had been brainwashed to attempt to assassinate his superior, M
M (James Bond)
M is a fictional character in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, as well as the films in the Bond franchise. The head of MI6 and Bond's superior, M has been portrayed by three actors in the official Bond film series: Bernard Lee, Robert Brown and since 1995 by Judi Dench. Background =Ian Fleming...
. After being "cured" by the MI6 doctors, Bond is sent to the Caribbean to find and kill Francisco Scaramanga
Francisco Scaramanga
Francisco Scaramanga is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the James Bond film and novel The Man with the Golden Gun. The film was so named because it described Scaramanga's possession of a golden gun....
, the titular "Man with the Golden Gun", which he does.
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
William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE was a South African author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom...
, 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
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
passed the manuscript to Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
for his thoughts and advice on the story, although his suggestions were not subsequently used.
The novel was serialised in 1965 firstly in the Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
newspaper and then Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
magazine; in 1966 a daily comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
adaptation was also published in the Daily Express. In 1974 the book was loosely adapted as the ninth film
The Man with the Golden Gun (film)
The Man with the Golden Gun is the ninth spy film in the James Bond series and the second to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond...
in the Eon Productions
EON Productions
Eon Productions is a film production company known for producing the James Bond film series. The company is based in London's Piccadilly and also operates from Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom...
James Bond series with Roger Moore
Roger Moore
Sir Roger George Moore KBE , is an English actor, perhaps best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in seven films from 1973 to 1985. He also portrayed Simon Templar in the long-running British television series The Saint.-Early life:Moore was born in Stockwell, London...
playing Bond and Fleming's cousin, Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee
Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ is an English actor and musician. Lee initially portrayed villains and became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films...
, as Scaramanga.
Plot
A year after James Bond's final confrontation with Ernst Stavro BlofeldErnst Stavro Blofeld
Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a fictional character and a supervillain from the James Bond series of novels and films, who was created by Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory. An evil genius with aspirations of world domination, he is the archenemy of the British Secret Service agent James Bond and is arguably...
, 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
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
, 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 subsequent amnesia
Amnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
. Having lived as a Japanese fisherman for several months, Bond travelled into the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
to learn his true identity. While there, he was brainwashed
Mind control
Mind control refers to a process in which a group or individual "systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator, often to the detriment of the person being manipulated"...
and assigned to kill M on returning to England.
Now de-programmed
Deprogramming
Deprogramming refers to actions that attempt to force a person to abandon allegiance to a religious, political, economic, or social group. Methods and practices may involve kidnapping and coercion...
, Bond is given a chance to prove his worth as a member of the 00 section following the assassination attempt. M sends him to Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
and the seemingly impossible mission of killing Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga
Francisco Scaramanga
Francisco Scaramanga is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the James Bond film and novel The Man with the Golden Gun. The film was so named because it described Scaramanga's possession of a golden gun....
, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed several British secret agents. Scaramanga is also known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt
Colt's Manufacturing Company
Colt's Manufacturing Company is a United States firearms manufacturer, whose first predecessor corporation was founded in 1836 by Sam Colt. Colt is best known for the engineering, production, and marketing of firearms over the later half of the 19th and the 20th century...
.45 which fires silver jacketed solid gold bullets.
Bond locates Scaramanga in a Jamaican bordello and manages to become Scaramanga's temporary personal assistant under the name "Mark Hazard". He learns that Scaramanga is involved with a hotel development on the island with a group of investors that consists of a syndicate of American gangsters and the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
. Scaramanga and the other investors are also engaged in a scheme to destabilise Western interests in the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
's sugar
Sugar
Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...
industry and increase the value of the Cuban sugar crop. The group is also involved in 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
Felix Leiter
Felix Leiter is a fictional CIA agent created by Ian Fleming in the James Bond series of novels and films. In both, Leiter works for the CIA and assists Bond in his various adventures as well as being his best friend. In further novels Leiter joins the Pinkerton Detective Agency and in the film...
, who has been recalled to duty by the CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
and is working ostensibly as an electrical engineer while setting up bugs in Scaramanga's meeting room. However, Bond learns that Scaramanga plans to eliminate him when the weekend is over. Bond's true identity is confirmed by the KGB agent and Scaramanga makes new plans to entertain the gangsters and the KGB man 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 Bonds off-guard and shoots him with a golden derringer
Derringer
The term derringer is a genericized misspelling of the last name of Henry Deringer, a famous 19th-century maker of small pocket pistols. Many copies of the original Philadelphia Deringer pistol were made by other gun makers worldwide, and the name was often misspelled; this misspelling soon became...
he had hidden behind his neck. 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, although in The Man with the Golden Gun, he appears as a different character from the previous stories and is robot-like, according to author of the "continuation" Bond novels, Raymond BensonRaymond Benson
Raymond Benson is an American author best known for being the official author of the adult James Bond novels from 1997 to 2003. Benson was born in Midland, Texas and graduated from Permian High School in Odessa in 1973...
. His character is not developed any further than it has been in the previous books, except that, when given the opportunity to kill Scaramanga in cold blood, he cannot bring himself to do it. The first time this happens, when Bond sits in a car behind him, the method of killing is compared to that used by the KGB and Nazis and Bond has to rise above that. Once the mission is completed, Bond is offered the KCMG
Order of St Michael and St George
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is an order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, while he was acting as Prince Regent for his father, George III....
, but he refuses the honour and reflects on his own name "a quiet, dull, anonymous name", which had been Fleming's aim all along. 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.
For the first time in the Bond canon, M's full name of "Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG" is finally revealed. 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.
The main adversary of the book is Francisco Scaramanga; according to Benson, he is more a henchman than a major adversary and "a second-rate, smalltime crook who happens to have gotten lucky with his shooting." Comentale, Watt and Willman note that Scaramanga is the same character as Herr von Hammerstein, the former Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service in
"For Your Eyes Only".
There are two main themes of note that appear in the novel. The fist is that with Scaramanga providing the Rastafarians with drugs in return for fires in the sugar plantations, there is the return of the theme used in "Risico", of drugs being used for political purposes to undermine the West. Academic Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black (historian)
Jeremy Black MBE is a British historian and a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute...
notes that the independent enquiry at the end of the novel, conducted in Bond's hospital bedroom, was undertaken by the Jamaican judiciary and the CIA and MI6 were acting "under the closest liaison and direction of the Jamaican CID". This was the new world of a non-colonial, independent Jamaica, underlining the collapse of the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
.
Background
Ian Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun at his Goldeneye estateGoldeneye (estate)
Goldeneye was the name given by Ian Fleming to his estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica. He purchased the land next door to Golden Clouds estate and built his house on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a private beach. The original house was a modest structure consisting of three bedrooms and a swimming...
in Jamaica in January and February 1964, completing it by the beginning of March. 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.
As with his previous novels, Fleming used events from his past as elements in his novel. Whilst at Kitzbühel
Kitzbühel
-Demographic evolution:-Personalities:*Karl Wilhelm von Dalla Torre , entomologist and botanist*Alfons Walde , expressionist painter and architect*Peter Aufschnaiter , mountaineer and geographer...
in the 1930s, Fleming's car, a Morris
Morris Motor Company
The Morris Motor Company was a British car manufacturing company. After the incorporation of the company into larger corporations, the Morris name remained in use as a marque until 1984 when British Leyland's Austin Rover Group decided to concentrate on the more popular Austin marque...
Tourer, 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 From Russia, with Love, but also The Man with the Golden Gun.
As well as using events, Fleming also used names of individuals he knew for some of his characters; the editor of The London Magazine, Alan Ross
Alan Ross
Alan John Ross, , was a British poet, writer and editor. He was born in Calcutta, India, where he spent the first seven years of his life...
, had provided Fleming with details about the effects of electroshock therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy , formerly known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Its mode of action is unknown...
that Bond went through and, by way of thanks, the novel's SIS station chief in Jamaica, Commander Ross, was named after him. Similarly, the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club
Royal St George's Golf Club
The Royal St George's Golf Club is one of the premier golf clubs in the United Kingdom, and one of the courses on The Open Championship rotation. It has hosted 13 Open championships since 1894, when it became the first club outside Scotland to host the championship...
, Mark Nicholson, gave his name to the CIA representative at the hotel. 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
Tate & Lyle
Tate & Lyle plc is a British-based multinational agribusiness. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index as of 20 June 2011...
plantations in West Indies after the war 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.
The effects of the two Eon Productions
EON Productions
Eon Productions is a film production company known for producing the James Bond film series. The company is based in London's Piccadilly and also operates from Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom...
Bond films released prior to the writing of the novel (Dr. No
Dr. No (film)
Dr. No is a 1962 spy film, starring Sean Connery; it is the first James Bond film. Based on the 1958 Ian Fleming novel of the same name, it was adapted by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkely Mather and was directed by Terence Young. The film was produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R...
and From Russia with Love
From Russia with Love (film)
From Russia with Love is the second in the James Bond spy film series, and the second to star Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Released in 1963, the film was produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and directed by Terence Young. It is based on the 1957 novel of the...
) were reflected in the novel through the increased number of devices used. One of these was in the opening scenes of the attempted assassination of M, which was taken from the story of Bohdan Stashynsky
Bohdan Stashynsky
Bohdan Stashynsky is the KGB assassin of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera who were killed in the late 1950s.-Early biography :...
, who defected from the Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
to the West in 1961. Stashynsky was put on trial for the murder of Ukrainian nationalist
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is a Ukrainian political organization which as a movement originally was created in 1929 in Western Ukraine . The OUN accepted violence as an acceptable tool in the fight against foreign and domestic enemies particularly Poland and Russia...
leaders Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet was a Ukrainian political writer and anti-communist during World War II. He was a key cabinet member in the Ukrainian government which proclaimed independence on June 30, 1941...
and Stepan Bandera
Stepan Bandera
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian politician and one of the leaders of Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine , who headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists...
and stated that he had used a poison-spray gun to do it.
Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964 and wrote to the copy editor of all his novels, William Plomer
William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE was a South African author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom...
, saying it needed a lot of re-writing. 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. Five months after returning from Jamaica, on the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack. His obituary in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
noted that he "had completed and was revising a new novel, The Man with the Golden Gun."
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
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
to read on holiday, paying him £35.15 shillings for his thoughts and advice, although Amis' subsequent suggestions were not used by Cape. Cape had taken the step because they thought the novel was thin and "feeble" and 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 the worked into the second draft by Fleming, but their absence shows that no such additional work was done on this occasion. The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously, eight months after its author's death.
Release and reception
The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the UK on 1 April 1965 by Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
, was 221 pages long and cost eighteen shilling
Shilling
The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
s. Cover artist Richard Chopping
Richard Chopping
Richard Wasey Chopping was a British illustrator and author best known for painting the dust jackets of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels starting with From Russia, with Love .-Early life:...
undertook the cover design again and was paid 300 guineas
Guinea (British coin)
The guinea is a coin that was minted in the Kingdom of England and later in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1663 and 1813...
for the artwork. The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the US in August 1965, 183 pages long and costing $4.50. Even before the US edition was published, The Man with the Golden Gun was ninth place on the bestseller lists, with 80,000 pre-orders for the hardback version.
Reviews
The reviews 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." Kingsley AmisKingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
wrote in the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
that the book was "a sadly empty tale, empty of the interests and effects that for better or worse, Ian Fleming made his own." Meanwhile, the critic for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
wrote that the novel would "doubtless be followed with close attention by the keen-eyed admirers of the many-wiled Bond."
Maurice Richardson, writing in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
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." 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." Writing in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
s sister paper, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Christopher Wordsworth noted that "since Goldfinger 007 has been toiling hopelessly in the wake of the Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age."Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era.The...
." 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." The Man with the Golden Gun, however, sinks to the level of a "farrago".
William Trevor
William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright. He is considered one of the elder statesman of the Irish literary world and widely regarded as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language....
, 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." 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
Edgar Wallace
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was an English crime writer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and numerous articles in newspapers and journals....
or the boys adventure stories of fifty years ago." Trevor did admit that "for those who like to escape to Bondsville, the old boom-town hasn't changed a scrap."
The critic for Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
was damning, saying that "It may have been just as well that Fleming died when everybody still thought he could do no wrong". Meanwhile the critic for Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
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."
Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
wrote that "Bond and Fleming were fun. They entertained, sometimes mildly, often grandly – but always consistently. Life will be less interesting without them." In his review for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Charles Poore wrote that The Man with the Golden Gun was "a gory, glittering saga". Poore noted that " "The Gee-whizzery...starts early and never flags" and that, despite the passing of Fleming, "the James Bond spirit soars on". 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".
Whilst D.A.N. Jones, writing in The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
thought The Man with the Golden Gun was "an innocuous run-of-the-mill adventure story of 1911 vintage", Anthony Lejeune, writing in the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
, 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". 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."
Adaptations
Newspaper serialisation (1965)The Man with the Golden Gun was published in serial
Serial (literature)
In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...
form in the Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
newspaper on a daily basis from 22 March 1965 onwards.
Playboy serialisation (1965)
This novel was also serialised over four issues of Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
magazine from April through July 1965.
Comic strip (1966)
The novel was adapted as a daily comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
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
Yaroslav Horak
Yaroslav Horak is a Russian born, Australian based illustrator and comics artist, best known for his work on the newspaper comic strip, James Bond.-Biography:...
. The strip was reprinted by Titan Books
Titan Books
Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981. It is based at offices in London, England's Bankside area. The Books Division has two main areas of publishing: film & TV tie-ins/cinema reference books; and graphic novels and comics reference/art titles. The...
in The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 2, published in 2011.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
In 1974, Eon Productions
EON Productions
Eon Productions is a film production company known for producing the James Bond film series. The company is based in London's Piccadilly and also operates from Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom...
made the ninth Bond film
The Man with the Golden Gun (film)
The Man with the Golden Gun is the ninth spy film in the James Bond series and the second to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond...
, loosely based on the novel. The film starred Roger Moore
Roger Moore
Sir Roger George Moore KBE , is an English actor, perhaps best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in seven films from 1973 to 1985. He also portrayed Simon Templar in the long-running British television series The Saint.-Early life:Moore was born in Stockwell, London...
as Bond and Fleming's cousin, Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee
Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ is an English actor and musician. Lee initially portrayed villains and became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films...
, as Scaramanga. The film moved away from Jamaica to the Far East and borrowed from the martial arts genre
Martial arts film
Martial arts film is a film genre. A sub-genre of the action film, martial arts films contain numerous fights between characters, usually as the films' primary appeal and entertainment value, and often as a method of storytelling and character expression and development. Martial arts are frequently...
that was popular in the 1970s. The plot also changed and used the 1973 energy crisis
1973 oil crisis
The 1973 oil crisis started in October 1973, when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OAPEC proclaimed an oil embargo. This was "in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military" during the Yom Kippur war. It lasted until March 1974. With the...
as a backdrop to the film, allowing the MacGuffin
MacGuffin
A MacGuffin is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is...
of the "Solex agitator" to be introduced.
External links
- Ian Fleming Bibliography of James Bond 1st Editions
See also
- James Bond novels
- Differences between James Bond novels and filmsDifferences between James Bond novels and filmsThe James Bond novels, written by English author, journalist and World War II intelligence officer Ian Fleming, and the later James Bond films, often differ in tone and detail, a trend which increased with each new movie production. The James Bond novels, written mainly in the 1950s and early...