Julius No

Background

In the novel he is born in Peking to a German Methodist missionary and a Chinese girl and raised by his aunt. In Shanghai he becomes involved with the Tongs, is smuggled to the United States and rises to treasurer of the Hip-Sings in New York. During a mob war in the late 1920s he steals a million dollars of Tong gold and disappears; caught and tortured, he refuses to reveal where it is, so the Tongs cut off his hands, shoot him through the left side of the chest and leave him for dead. He survives because of dextrocardia, his heart being on the right side, studies medicine in Milwaukee, adopts the title Doctor and takes the name Julius No in rejection of his father, also called Julius.

Dr No is tall and very thin, at least six inches taller than Bond, with a head Fleming describes as shaped like a reverse oil drop. He fits himself with metal hands the book describes as simple pincers, wears one of the first pairs of contact lenses and stacked-heel shoes, all to conceal his identity from the Tongs. The stolen million goes into rare stamps and then into Crab Key, an island off Jamaica where a revived guano business covers his real work: with Soviet help he jams nearby American missile tests, recovers unexploded missiles for the Russians and hopes to turn the Cold War hot. Bond only learns of this after he, Quarrel and Honeychile Rider are captured on the island, and he finally kills No by burying him in a mound of guano.

The film's Dr No is a brilliant scientist with an implied Napoleon complex who lost both hands to radiation and replaced them with crude metal ones of great strength but little dexterity. Rejected by both the Americans and the Soviets, he joined SPECTRE and settled on Crab Key, from where he plans to disrupt an American rocket launch. No captures Bond and Honey Ryder when they trespass on his island and invites them to dinner at his private apartment, where he offers Bond a position in his organisation, but Bond refuses. Bond sabotages the swimming pool reactor, and in the fight that follows No cannot get a grip on the metal framework with his metal hands and is slowly boiled to death in the overheating coolant. SPECTRE's vow of revenge for his death leads into From Russia with Love.