The Man With the Golden Gun

The final Bond novel written by Fleming before his death, The Man With The Golden Gun is a kind of reset button for our favourite Secret Agent after the long Blofeld story arc that featured in previous novels.

Set for the majority in a place very familiar to Fleming, Jamaica, the story first starts with a brainwashed Bond trying to assassinate M. He fails of course and with the help of a few electroshock therapies, he's soon sent back out into the field to re-win his spurs. This time his quarry is the deadly gun for hire of the title, Scaramanga. But rather than a quick kill, Bond uncovers a more complicated plot and decides to insinuate himself into Scaramanga's network.

This short novel is not on a par with the peaks of OHMSS or Goldfinger. Tarnished by the casual racism that was Fleming's Achilles heel, the tale has a tawdry feel in places. Scaramanga is a thug, not the scheming mastermind that Bond has come up against previously. It reads like a rerun of other, better novels. We even get a cameo by Felix Leiter, Bond's ex-CIA buddy, and his old secretary Mary Goodnight. It feels like Fleming was trying to get Bond back to being the human weapon of the early novels, the cold killer, the heartless assassin.

But the whole thing, despite some tense scenes at the denouement, feels tired and over familiar. I don't know where Fleming would have taken Bond next. Perhaps he was tired of the character. In any case the next book, Colonel Sun, was written by Kingsley Amis (as Ian Fleming), before the character was handed over to journeymen writers like John Gardner in the 1980s.

So that's all of Fleming's Bond stories read. Some good, some so-so, but all worth a read if you are into spy fiction. It's kinda required.