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.
The story centres on Bond's pursuit of "Mr Big", a criminal who has links to the American criminal network, the world of voodoo and SMERSH—an arm of the Soviet secret service—all of which are threats to the First World. Bond becomes involved in the US through Mr Big's smuggling of 17th-century gold coins from British territories in the Caribbean. The novel deals with the themes of the ongoing East–West struggle of the Cold War, including British and American relations, Britain's position in the world, race relations, and the struggle between good and evil.
As with Casino Royale, Live and Let Die was broadly well received by the critics. The initial print run of 7,500 copies quickly sold out and a second print run was ordered within the year. US sales, when the novel was released there a year later, were much slower. Following a comic strip adaptation in 1958–59 by John McLusky in the Daily Express, the novel was adapted in 1973 as the eighth film in the Eon Productions Bond series and the first to star Roger Moore as Bond. Major plot elements from the novel were also incorporated into the Bond films For Your Eyes Only in 1981 and Licence to Kill in 1989.
Plot
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. Big 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.
In New York, Bond meets up with his counterpart in the CIA, Felix Leiter. The two visit some of Mr Big's nightclubs in Harlem, but are captured. Bond is interrogated by Mr Big, who uses his fortune-telling employee, Solitaire (so named because she excludes men from her life), to determine if Bond is telling the truth. Solitaire lies to Mr Big, supporting Bond's cover story. Mr Big decides to release Bond and Leiter, and has one of Bond's fingers broken. On leaving, Bond kills three of Mr Big's men; Leiter is released with minimal physical harm by a gang member, sympathetic because of a shared appreciation of jazz.
Solitaire later leaves Mr Big and contacts Bond; the couple travel by train to St. Petersburg, Florida, where they meet Leiter. While Bond and Leiter are scouting one of Mr Big's warehouses used for storing exotic fish, Solitaire is kidnapped by Mr Big's minions. Leiter later returns to the warehouse by himself, but is either captured and fed to a shark or tricked into standing on a trap door over the shark tank through which he falls; he survives, but loses an arm and a leg. Bond finds him in their safe house with a note pinned to his chest "He disagreed with something that ate him". Bond then investigates the warehouse himself and discovers that Mr Big is smuggling gold coins by hiding them in the bottom of fish tanks holding poisonous tropical fish, which he is bringing into the US. He is attacked in the warehouse by "the Robber", Mr Big's gunman, and in the resultant gunfight Bond outwits the Robber and causes him to fall into the shark tank.
Bond continues his mission in Jamaica, where he meets a local fisherman, Quarrel, and John Strangways, the head of the local MI6 station. Quarrel gives Bond training in scuba diving in the local waters. Bond swims through shark- and barracuda-infested waters to Mr Big's island and manages to plant a limpet mine on the hull of his yacht before being captured once again by Mr Big. Bond is reunited with Solitaire; the following morning Mr Big ties the couple to a line behind his yacht and plans to drag them over the shallow coral reef and into deeper water so that the sharks and barracuda that he attracts in to the area with regular feedings will eat them.
Bond and Solitaire are saved when the limpet mine explodes seconds before they are dragged over the reef. Though temporarily stunned by the explosion and injured on the coral, they are protected from the explosion by the reef and Bond watches as Mr Big, who survived the explosion, is killed by the sharks and barracuda.
Background Between January and March 1952, the journalist Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale, his first novel, at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. Fleming conducted research for Live and Let Die, and completed the novel before Casino Royale was published in January 1953, four months before his second book was published. Fleming and his wife Ann flew to New York before taking the Silver Meteor train to St. Petersburg in Florida and then flying on to Jamaica. In doing so, they followed the same train route Fleming had taken with his friend Ivar Bryce in July 1943, when Fleming had first visited the island.
Once Fleming and his wife arrived at Goldeneye, he started work on the second Bond novel. In May 1963 he wrote an article for Books and Bookmen magazine describing his approach to writing, in which he said: "I write for about three hours in the morning ... and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day." As he had done with Casino Royale, Fleming showed the manuscript to his friend, the writer William Plomer, who reacted favourably to the story, telling Fleming that "the new book held this reader like a limpet mine & the denouement was shattering". On a trip to the US in May 1953, Fleming used his five-day travelling time on RMS Queen Elizabeth to correct the proofs of the novel.
Fleming intended the book to have a more serious tone than his debut novel, and he initially considered making the story a meditation on the nature of evil. The novel's original title, The Undertaker's Wind, reflects this; the undertaker's wind, which was to act as a metaphor for the story, describes one of Jamaica's winds that "blows all the bad air out of the island".
The literary critic Daniel Ferreras Savoye considers the titles of Fleming's novels to have importance individually and collectively; Live and Let Die, he writes, "turns an expression of collective wisdom, in this case fraternal and positive, into its exact opposite, suggesting a materialistic epistemological outlook, individualistic and lucid". This is in keeping with the storyline in that Bond brings order without which "the world would quickly turn into the dystopian, barbarian reality feared by [Thomas] Hobbes and celebrated by [Marquis] de Sade."
Although Fleming provided no dates within his novels, two writers have identified different timelines based on events and situations within the novel series as a whole. John Griswold and Henry Chancellor—both of whom have written books on behalf of Ian Fleming Publications—put the events of Live and Let Die in 1952; Griswold is more precise, and considers the story to have taken place in January and February that year.
Development
Plot inspirations
Much of the novel draws from Fleming's personal experiences: the opening of the book, with Bond's arrival at New York's Idlewild Airport was inspired by Fleming's own journeys in 1941 and 1953, and the warehouse at which Leiter is attacked by a shark was based on a similar building Fleming and his wife had visited in St. Petersburg, Florida, on their recent journey. He also used his experiences on his two journeys on the Silver Meteor as background for the route taken by Bond and Solitaire.
Fleming used the names of some of his friends in the story, including Ivar Bryce for Bond's alias, and Tommy Leiter for Felix Leiter; He borrowed Bryce's middle name, Felix, for Leiter's first name, and part of John Fox-Strangways's surname for the name of the MI6 station chief in Jamaica. Fleming also used the name of the local Jamaican rufous-throated solitaire bird as the name of the book's main female character.
Fleming's experiences on his first scuba dive with Jacques Cousteau in 1953 provided much of the description of Bond's swim to Mr Big's boat. The concept of limpet-mining is possibly based on the wartime activities of the elite 10th Light Flotilla, a unit of Italian navy frogmen. Fleming also used, and extensively quoted, information about voodoo from his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1950 book The Traveller's Tree, which had also been partly written at Goldeneye.
Fleming had a long-held interest in pirates, from the novels he read as a child through to films such as Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn, which he enjoyed watching. From his Goldeneye home on Jamaica's northern shore, Fleming had visited Port Royal on the south of the island, which was once the home port of Sir Henry Morgan, all of which stimulated Fleming's interest. For the background to Mr Big's treasure island, Fleming appropriated the details of Cabritta Island in Port Maria Bay, which was the true location of Morgan's hoard.
Characters Fleming builds the main character in Live and Let Die to make Bond come across as more human than in Casino Royale, becoming "a much warmer, more likeable man from the opening chapter", according to the novelist Raymond Benson, who between 1997 and 2002 wrote a series of Bond novels and short stories. Savoye sees the introduction of a vulnerable side to Bond, identifying the agent's tears towards the end of the story as evidence of this. Similarly, over the course of the book, the American character Leiter develops and also emerges as a more complete and human character and his and Bond's friendship is evident in the story. Despite the relationship, Leiter is again subordinate to Bond. While in Casino Royale his role was to provide technical support and money to Bond, in Live and Let Die the character is secondary to Bond, and the only time he takes the initiative, he loses an arm and a leg, while Bond wins his own battle with the same opponent. Although Fleming had initially intended to kill Leiter off in the story, his American literary agent protested, and the character was saved.
Quarrel was Fleming's ideal concept of a black person, and the character was based on his genuine liking for Jamaicans, whom he saw as "full of goodwill and cheerfulness and humour". The relationship between Bond and Quarrel was based on a mutual assumption of Bond's superiority. Fleming described the relationship as "that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility".
Fleming's villain was physically abnormal—as many of Bond's later adversaries were. Mr Big is described as being intellectually brilliant, with a "great football of a head, twice the normal size and very nearly round" and skin which was "grey-black, taut and shining like the face of a week-old corpse in the river". For Benson, "Mr Big is only an adequate villain", with little depth. According to the literary analyst LeRoy L. Panek, in his examination of 20th century British spy novels, Live and Let Die was a departure from the "gentleman crook" that appeared in much earlier literature, as the intellectual and organisational skills of Mr Big were emphasised, rather than the behavioural. Within Mr Big's organisation, Panek identifies Mr Big's henchmen as "merely incompetent gunsels" whom Bond can eliminate with relative ease.
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