Live and Let Die

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Eco, Umberto (2009). "The Narrative Structure of Ian Fleming". In Lindner, Christoph (ed.). The James Bond Phenomenon: a Critical Reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-6541-5. Besides the cringe-worthy quantities of racial slur, this is the book where Bond expresses his views of the female lead character - Solitaire - as his "prize" and that this is the only way that he is able to see her. Hmmm. When a few years ago I was told that my work was sending me to New Orleans, my immediate need was to find a copy of Live and Let Die, because, well, a part of the film is set there and the surrounding swamps of Louisiana - and I like a Bond story.

Barnes, Alan; Hearn, Marcus (2001). Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!: the Unofficial James Bond Film Companion. London: Batsford Books. ISBN 978-0-7134-8182-2. Chapman, James (2007). Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. New York: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84511-515-9. In the history of negro emancipation,’ Mr. Big continued in an easy conversational tone, ‘there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in every other walk of life.’ He paused. ‘It is unfortunate for you, Mister Bond, and for this girl, that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals. I use a vulgar word, Mister Bond, because it is the one you, as a form of policeman, would yourself use. But I prefer to regard myself as one who had the ability and the mental and nervous equipment to make his own laws and act according to them rather than accept the laws that suit the lowest common denominator of the people.” James Bond goes international with yet another beautiful woman and a villain who completely steals the show! Here is my review of Live and Let Die (James Bond #2): JAMES BOND: "Oh, Solitaire, I really want to make love to you right now in this hot, cramped compartment on a moving train with someone right outside the door trying to kill me, but---I have this broken finger, you see, which makes sex absolutely out of the question, so I'll have to exploit you at a later date."Simpson, Craig (25 February 2023). "James Bond books edited to remove racist references". The Sunday Telegraph. Archived from the original on 27 February 2023 . Retrieved 27 February 2023. The James Bond Films – 2006 onwards". BBC. Archived from the original on 15 July 2023 . Retrieved 1 April 2015. The book is totally different from the film and there was not going to be a connection with New Orleans. Instead, we follow Bond on an adventure that leads from New York, to Florida, to Jamaica. Live and Let Die is a weird story. By weird I do mean on one hand the plot of the story - if you are familiar with the films - cuts short many of the plots reused by Cubby Broccoli in the screen adventures.

I won't go into details and add spoilers, but having read this one and loved it - plotwise - I now fully understand why I loved Licence to Kill as a film. It is dark. Ian Fleming". Ian Fleming Publications. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015 . Retrieved 2 March 2015. You got a problem with my bothering to call Bond/Fleming as racist? Okay, I know it would be difficult to find many wholly enlightened and non-racist pulp, noir, adventurer stories in 1954. You don’t look for subtle feminist or anti-racist texts in the mid-twentieth century. But there’s a difference—I think—between some of James Ellroy’s racist characters and Ellroy. Bond in the movies is suave and never crass, but Fleming's Bond (and the narrator) here seems a bit nasty in places I didn’t expect. Maybe that’s my real complaint, that Fleming’s Bond is not the suave smirking seductive Bond of Sean Connery or Roger Moore but a kind of existentialist-lite cold guy dripping in some darker disdain for everything that is not him. I like him besting Solitaire and Big, though, I'll admit. While Bond travels around America’s eastern seaboard leaving many bodies and tortured friends in his wake, we readers learn he doesn’t like our American food, our clothes, our cities, our trains, our insolent manners or our low-brow culture. These opinions happen to be author Ian Fleming’s opinions, too, gentle reader, per Wikipedia. Thomas, Rebecca (19 November 1999). "The many faces of Bond". BBC. Archived from the original on 3 April 2015 . Retrieved 28 March 2015.

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In three short paragraphs, Bond and M manage to sort of or flat out disparage three different races and five countries and one entire continent. I think I should point out a couple of things to younger folks: this book was published in 1954; many of the racial terms and erroneous or egregious stereotyping and police information revealed in the above conversation was not considered at all racist on any level in this era, and some of the crime information was true. The racial terms were part of the common terminology used by liberal and racist white English and American people to describe other races, as well as being reflective of what general information even educated Western outsiders knew about other foreign cultures and nationalities. Besides, if you read the above paragraphs carefully, you may notice as I did that the French, who are mostly white, seem to be assumed to be the main contributors to the worst characteristics of criminals of the world to Bond and M. The insinuation appears to be Mr. Big is so bad because of his French ancestry? Another cool final line to a chapter on p191. ‘The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.’ The book was littered with filler that did little to progress the story. We get this rundown of voodoo, which just went on for too long and lost my interest. We get this rundown of Bond’s flight to Jamaica, which was f***ing boring as hell. Then we get this rundown of Jamaica and its history, which was bland and purely used as a transitionary chapter. It felt as if chapters were added to lengthen the book, which ended up adding next to nothing to the main story.

The British Secret Service agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, to New York City to investigate "Mr Big", real name Buonaparte Ignace Gallia. Bond's target is an agent of the Soviet counterintelligence organisation SMERSH, and an underworld voodoo leader who is suspected of selling 17th-century gold coins to finance Soviet spy operations in America. These gold coins have been turning up in the Harlem section of New York City and in Florida and are suspected of being part of a treasure that was buried in Jamaica by the pirate Henry Morgan. Lindner, Christoph (2009). The James Bond Phenomenon: a Critical Reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-6541-5. Archived from the original on 10 April 2023 . Retrieved 26 October 2020. Exciting parts: Bond fighting octopi, barracuda and sharks underwater with a harpoon gun. The octopus battle is extremely fun. At the end, Big decides to kill Bond and Solitaire by tying them together, face to face, butt-naked and dragging them behind the boat through a coral reef so that they get all bloody and sharks and barracuda eat them. I’ll say again, so much of these books is just detailing exactly what Bond has to eat and drink. Makes me very hungry. Bond finds himself in America for the majority of this book, and early on Fleming seems to get in a fair few anti-American digs. Just little digs about the food, and the fashion, and the colloquial words etc.I first came to Bond through watching The Saint episodes late at night. My Dad in an effort to get more than three channels on our TV, one of which flipped every few seconds, built this antenna the size of a small Cessna and hoisted it on a pole that soared high above the tallest trees. He connected a remote to it that would rotate the antenna allowing us to fine tune certain channels. We could now get seven channels, sort of. One of the channels put on The Saint and there was Roger Moore, young, dashing, and boy did I want to be him when I grew up. The first Bond I went to in the theater, which for the life of me I’m not sure which one, but it starred Roger Moore. So for me RM was BOND. I couldn’t say Moore was my favorite Bond or the best Bond, but like a first kiss it is hard not to be biased by that first experience. Wow. Forty years really makes a lot of difference in how things look. I never liked Simon Templar...I mean Roger Moore!...as Bond. From the get-go, I found him too TV for the role of the big screen's biggest baddest spy. What was charming and roguish in other performances was slippery and oleaginous in Moore's performances. But I had no memory of how revoltingly racist this film was. I shudder to say it, but I was probably blind to it because it was...ulp...the way I saw the lily-white privileged Republican world I lived in. Pearson, John (1967). The Life of Ian Fleming: Creator of James Bond. London: Pan Books. OCLC 60318176. So tell me again, James, which finger is broken? Because unless it's that 11th finger, the one you keep in your trousers, a broken finger is a pretty lame excuse for withholding stud service. The chase and fight scenes are beyond ridiculous, especially when Bond uses crocodiles as stepping stones to get to the other side of the water. Really, at times they are obvious about making the fights a big joke. The movie is rarely serious.

Bennett, Tony; Woollacott, Janet (1987). Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-416-01361-0. The movie differs from the book in a few ways. It's been a while, but if I recall correctly the focus is on drugs over pirate treasure, and it's set at times in New Orleans, not Florida. The blaxploitation is still there though! So by now it sounds like I hated this book, but I didn't. I'm just spouting off because it's fun, and no one's gonna read this far into the review anyway. When comparing the movies to the books, it's tough on the books (at least what I've read so far). The movies are designed to squeeze every bit of excitement they can out of the story. Here, the books are a little more leisurely when it comes to the action. Perhaps Fleming was remembering his own experiences working for and with intelligence agencies during the war. It was no doubt not half as exciting as it's portrayed in the movies. Okay, I'd known that Ian Fleming is on record as having been a racist and sexist bastard, but somehow I had managed to not really notice that much the first time I'd taken a spin through the Bond novels. And there were a couple of bits I took issue with in my recent re-read of Casino Royale, sure, though they were few and far between.Hewitt, Leah D. (1992). Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condä. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-7258-3. And women? We maybe don’t think of the Sean Connery Bond as misogynist (though maybe we’d all agree he is sexist?), but in the first two books of Fleming’s series, Bond is definitely not a big fan of women, regardless of color. Well, he appears to enjoy looking at nearly naked dancers in Harlem (call them "exotic" dancers? Strippers?), but he really doesn’t hold women in high estimation. In Florida, he says of a (white) woman, she’s “too pretty to be a nurse,” and so on. Especially n the early novels he's generally rude and disdainful of women, not the image of Bond I got from the movies, not even in my recent viewing. a b Kelly, James (2004). "The Operation of the Censorship of Publications Board: The Notebooks of C. J. O'Reilly, 1951–55". Analecta Hibernica (38): 320. ISSN 0791-6167. JSTOR 20519909. (subscription required)