The Man with the Golden Gun (novel)
The Man with the Golden Gun is the twelfth and final novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and the thirteenth Bond book overall. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom on 1 April 1965, eight months after the author's death. The novel was not as detailed or polished as the others in the series, leading to poor but polite reviews. Despite that, the book was a best-seller.
The story centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond, who had been posted missing, presumed dead, after his last mission in Japan. Bond returns to Britain via the Soviet Union, where he had been brainwashed to attempt to assassinate his superior, M. After being de-programmed by the MI6 doctors, Bond is sent to the Caribbean to find and kill Francisco Scaramanga, the titular "Man with the Golden Gun".
The first draft and part of the editing process was completed before Fleming's death and the manuscript had passed through the hands of his copy editor, William Plomer. Much of the detail contained in the previous novels was missing, as this was often added by Fleming in the second draft. The publishers Jonathan Cape passed the manuscript to the writer and Bond aficionado Kingsley Amis for his thoughts and advice on the story, although his suggestions were not used.
The novel was serialised in 1965, firstly in the Daily Express and then in Playboy; in 1966 a daily comic strip adaptation was also published in the Daily Express. In 1974 the book was loosely adapted as the ninth film in the Eon Productions James Bond series, with Roger Moore playing Bond and Fleming's cousin, Christopher Lee, as Scaramanga.
Plot
A year after James Bond's final confrontation with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, while on a mission in Japan, a man claiming to be Bond appears in London and demands to meet M, the head of the Secret Service. Bond's identity is confirmed, but during his debriefing interview with M, Bond tries to kill him with a cyanide pistol; the attempt fails. The Service learns that after destroying Blofeld's castle in Japan, Bond suffered a head injury and developed amnesia. Having lived as a Japanese fisherman for several months, Bond travelled to the Soviet Union to learn his true identity. While there, he was brainwashed and assigned to kill M upon his return to England.Now de-programmed, Bond is given a chance to again prove his worth as a member of the 00 section following the assassination attempt. M sends Bond to Jamaica and gives him the seemingly impossible mission of killing Francisco Scaramanga, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed several British secret agents. Scaramanga is known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt.45 revolver, which fires silver-jacketed, gold-cored dumdum bullets.
Bond locates Scaramanga in a Jamaican bordello and manages to become his temporary personal assistant under the name "Mark Hazard". He learns that Scaramanga is involved in a hotel development on the island with a group of investors that consists of a syndicate of American gangsters and the KGB. Scaramanga and the other investors are also engaged in a scheme to destabilise Western interests in the Caribbean's sugar industry and increase the value of the Cuban sugar crop, running drugs into America, smuggling prostitutes from Mexico into America and operating casinos in Jamaica that will cause friction between tourists and the locals.
Bond discovers that he has an ally who is also working undercover at the half-built resort, Felix Leiter, who has been recalled to duty by the CIA and is working ostensibly as an electrical engineer while setting up listening devices in Scaramanga's meeting room. They learn that Scaramanga plans to eliminate Bond when the weekend is over. Bond's true identity is confirmed by a KGB agent and Scaramanga makes new plans to entertain the gangsters and the KGB agent by killing Bond while they are riding a sight-seeing train to a marina. Bond manages to turn the tables on Scaramanga and, with the help of Leiter, kill most of the conspirators. Wounded, Scaramanga escapes into the swamps, where Bond pursues him. Scaramanga lulls Bond off-guard and shoots him with a hidden golden derringer. Bond is hit but returns fire and shoots Scaramanga several times, killing him.
Background and writing history
By January 1964 Ian Fleming had published eleven books of the Bond series in eleven years: ten novels and a collection of short stories. A twelfth book, You Only Live Twice, was being edited and prepared for production; it was released on 1 April 1963. Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January and February 1964, completing it by the beginning of March. His declining health affected him badly during the writing process and he dropped from his usual rate of two thousand words in four hours a day to a little over an hour's worth of work a day. Fleming's wife, Ann, was concerned about the effect it was having on her husband, and wrote to her brother that "it is painful to see Ian struggle to give birth to Bond". Fleming based his title on Nelson Algren's 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm; he also considered Goldenrod and Number 3½ Love Lane.Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964 and wrote to his friend and copy editor William Plomer saying it needed a lot of rewriting. He also told Plomer "This is, alas, the last Bond and, again alas, I mean it, for I really have run out of puff and zest". By 10 May 1964 Fleming had been working on proofreading his manuscript and had corrected the first two-thirds of the book; he wrote to Plomer that he had not decided "whether to publish in 1965 or give it another year's working over so that we can go out with a bang instead of a whimper". He said he "would personally like to take it back to Jamaica and paint the lily next year". He went on that as it was his final Bond novel, he did not want "to short-weight my faithful readers on the dernier service". He became increasingly unhappy with the book, but was persuaded by Plomer that the novel was fit for publication. Five months after returning from Jamaica, on the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack. His obituary in The Times noted that he "had completed and was revising a new novel, The Man with the Golden Gun".
Despite Plomer's original thought about the state of the manuscript, Fleming's publishers, Jonathan Cape, were concerned enough about the story to pass the manuscript to the writer Kingsley Amis to read on holiday. He was paid £35 15 shillings for his thoughts and advice, although his subsequent suggestions were not used by Cape. Cape had taken the step because they thought the novel was not up to Fleming's usual standard. Raymond Benson, the author of the continuation Bond novels, has noted that the novel is missing the rich detail and descriptions which are normally present in Fleming's work; he suggests that these details were normally worked into the second draft by Fleming, but their absence shows that no such additional work was done on this occasion. The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously, eight months after its author's death.
Although Fleming did not date the events within his novels, John Griswold and Henry Chancellor—both of whom wrote books for Ian Fleming Publications—have identified timelines based on episodes and situations within the novel series as a whole. Chancellor put the events of The Man with the Golden Gun in 1963; Griswold is more precise and considers the story to have taken place between November 1963 and the end of February 1964.
Development
Inspirations
As with his previous novels, Fleming used events from his past as elements in his novel. While in Kitzbühel, Austria, in the 1930s, Fleming's car, a Standard Tourer, had been struck by a train at a level crossing, dragging him fifty yards along the track. From that time on he had associated trains with death, which led to their use as a plot device not just in The Man with the Golden Gun, but also in Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia, with Love. Chancellor also considers that one of Fleming's earlier novels, Goldfinger, was an influence on The Man with the Golden Gun, with the conference of gangsters from different gangs being used in both stories; in both novels—and in Moonraker—Bond, in an undercover capacity, acted as a male secretary to the villain.As well as using events from his past, Fleming also used names of individuals he knew for some of his characters. The editor of The London Magazine, Alan Ross, had provided Fleming with details about the effects of the electroshock therapy that Bond went through and, by way of thanks, the novel's SIS station chief in Jamaica, Commander Ross, was named after him. Fleming used the name of the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club, Nick Nicholson, for the novel's CIA representative at the hotel. Tony Hugill, the sugar planter mentioned in the book, was named after a member of 30 AU—the commando unit formed by Fleming during the war—who managed the Tate & Lyle plantations in the West Indies after the war. The book's main villain, Francisco Scaramanga, was named after George Scaramanga, an Etonian contemporary of Fleming's; the pair are said to have fought at school. Fleming also used the surname of his friend, Morris Cargill, a columnist on The Gleaner, as the name of the Justice of the Jamaican Supreme Court at the end of the book.
The effects of the two Eon Productions Bond films released before the writing of the novel—Dr. No and From Russia with Love—were reflected in the novel through the increased number of gadgets used. One of these was the poison gun used in the attempted assassination of M. The idea was taken from the story of Bohdan Stashynsky, who defected from the Eastern Bloc to the West in 1961. Stashynsky was put on trial for the murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera and stated that he had used a poison-spray gun to do it.