Live and Let Die

Did You Know?

• Fleming wrote for about three hours in the morning and another hour between six and seven in the evening, producing 2,000 words a day.
• The novel was adapted as a comic strip in 1958–59 by John McLusky in the Daily Express.

Plot

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. Mr Big is an agent of the Soviet counterintelligence organisation SMERSH and an underworld voodoo leader suspected of selling 17th-century gold coins to finance Soviet spy operations in America. The coins are believed to be part of a treasure buried in Jamaica by the pirate Henry Morgan. In New York, Bond meets his CIA counterpart Felix Leiter, and the two visit Mr Big's nightclubs in Harlem but are captured.

Mr Big interrogates Bond, using his fortune-telling employee Solitaire to determine if Bond is truthful; Solitaire lies to support Bond's cover story. Mr Big releases Bond and Leiter, breaking one of Bond's fingers. Bond kills three of Mr Big's men, and Leiter is released with minimal harm. Solitaire later leaves Mr Big and contacts Bond; they travel by train to St. Petersburg, Florida, where they meet Leiter.

While Bond and Leiter scout a warehouse used for storing exotic fish, Solitaire is kidnapped. Leiter returns to the warehouse alone and is either captured and fed to a shark or tricked into falling through a trap door into a shark tank; he survives but loses an arm and a leg. Bond investigates the warehouse and discovers Mr Big is smuggling gold coins hidden in fish tanks containing poisonous tropical fish. Bond is attacked by the Robber, Mr Big's gunman, and in the gunfight outwits him, causing the Robber to fall into the shark tank.

Development

The novel is heavily rooted in Ian Fleming’s own life. Bond’s arrival at New York’s Idlewild Airport came from Fleming’s trips there in 1941 and 1953. The shark attack on Leiter happens in a warehouse modeled after one Fleming and his wife saw in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Silver Meteor train journeys Bond and Solitaire take were based on Fleming’s own two rides on that line.

Fleming gave his friends’ names to characters: Ivar Bryce became Bond’s alias, and Tommy Leiter became Felix Leiter, with Bryce’s middle name Felix used for Leiter’s first name. The MI6 station chief in Jamaica got part of his name from John Fox-Strangways. The main female character was named after the local Jamaican rufous-throated solitaire bird. Bond’s swim to Mr Big’s boat draws heavily on Fleming’s first scuba dive with Jacques Cousteau in 1953.

The limpet-mining idea may come from the Italian navy’s 10th Light Flotilla frogmen in World War II. Fleming quoted extensively from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s 1950 book The Traveller’s Tree for voodoo details, a book partly written at Fleming’s home, Goldeneye. A lifelong interest in pirates, sparked by childhood novels and films like Captain Blood, was fueled by visits to Port Royal, Jamaica, once Sir Henry Morgan’s base. For Mr Big’s treasure island, Fleming used the real Cabritta Island in Port Maria Bay, where Morgan’s hoard was actually hidden.

Themes

Live and Let Die shifts the Cold War focus from British-Soviet tensions seen in Casino Royale to an American setting, where Bond travels to Harlem to counter Soviet agents exploiting the Black Power movement. The novel portrays America as the primary Soviet target, with Bond describing New York as “the fattest atomic-bomb target on the whole face of the world.” Fleming also used the story to express his worries about growing American influence in Jamaica, a concern he shared with Noël Coward.

Bond’s relief at leaving “the great hard continent of Eldollarado” for “the soft green flanks of Jamaica” reflects Fleming’s view that American tourism threatened the island. Through Bond’s briefing, Fleming presents racial attitudes typical of his era. Cultural historian Jeremy Black notes that M and Bond’s comments on crime and ethnicity reveal “ignorance, the inherited racialist prejudices of London clubland,” and that Fleming’s frequent racial stereotypes were common among writers of his time.

Writer Louise Welsh observes that the novel captures the paranoia some white people felt as civil rights movements challenged inequality. This insecurity led Fleming to share the intelligence community’s belief that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was a communist front. The communist threat felt closer to Jamaica after American authorities arrested the anti-communist Jamaican politician Alexander Bustamante in 1952 while he was in Puerto Rico on official business, and local Jamaican parties expelled members for communist ties that same year.

Publication and reception

Live and Let Die was published in hardback by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1954. As with Casino Royale, Fleming designed the cover, which featured the title lettering prominently. The initial print run of 7,500 copies sold out, and a reprint of 2,000 copies was soon undertaken; by the end of the first year, over 9,000 copies had been sold. In May 1954 the novel was banned in Ireland by the Irish Censorship of Publications Board, a ban that biographer Lycett observed helped publicity in other territories.

In October 1957 Pan Books issued a paperback version that sold 50,000 copies in the first year. The US edition was published by Macmillan in January 1955, with one major change: the title of the fifth chapter was changed from 'Nigger Heaven' to 'Seventh Avenue'. US sales were poor, with only 5,000 copies sold in the first year. Philip Day of The Sunday Times noted 'How wincingly well Mr Fleming writes.'

The Times reviewer thought it 'an ingenious affair, full of recondite knowledge and horrific spills and thrills.' Elizabeth L Sturch in The Times Literary Supplement observed that Fleming was 'without doubt the most interesting recent recruit among thriller-writers' and that the novel 'fully maintains the promise of Casino Royale.' The Daily Telegraph reviewer felt the book 'is continually exciting' and 'more entertaining because Mr Fleming does not take it all too seriously himself.'