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4.0 out of 5 stars
Bond's first and (as far as I know) only gay assassins?, Jun 1 2004
Yes, film fans, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd do appear in this book; and although, as always, the book is vastly different from the movie, it is easy to see some of the points of inspiration (the exchange in the desert; the ship at the end).
The characters are different also. If you've read the books or any of the reviews I've written on the first 3, you know the characterization variences of Bond himself (He actually gets beaten up in this one; though he does have his first superhuman moments in "DAF", beating the tar out of two adversaries on two seperate occasions), but some of the supporting characters bear notice:
Tiffany Case is in no way the ditz portrayed in the movie. In the book she's a "hard-boiled broad" as Spillaine or Chandler might put it.
Wint and Kidd are more thuggish and not the Dickensian villains most are familiar with.
Felix Leiter with hook and wooden leg returns!
Finally, SPECTRE has nothing to do with this novel save for the fact that the ghost town hideout of one of the primary antagonists is called "Spectreville." And NONE of the bad guys are our boy Ernst (You're gonna have to wait a few novels for him).
The story is basically about 007's efforts to close a diamond smuggling pipeline to the United States (And not a doomsday device lazer beam in sight!)
I did take some points off from this novel because, toward the end, Fleming seemed to develop a penchant for run-on sentences ("He went into the room and lit a cigarette and sat down and started to write. . . ."); but this is just something that I, as an english major, found grating.
All in all, enjoyable.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Fleming finding his groove, April 13 2004
This is the fourth of the Bond books. This book shows why it is best to read the books in their order of publication. There are too many references to earlier stories that would puzzle the reader and lessen the appreciation for the book. This book was best known for being turned into the last of the Sean Connery traditional Bond movies. As other reviewers mentioned, the book is far superior to the movie. The movie introduced the kind of comical sequences that Roger Moore was to make his trademark Bond. The book, however, is of interest to me since it seemed to have been Fleming's first attempt at a lengthy Bond novel. The other books maintained central figures and were easier to follow the action. This book was actually overburdened with the author's attempt to become more complex. Lacking in this book was the kind of chief, evil character that was found in Live and Let Die, and to a lesser extent the Moonraker character. The evil characters in the Diamonds' book were several, and the final guy was barely known. This probably reflected Fleming's attitude toward the American Mafia. However, his characterizations of the two expert hit men more than made up for this oversight. I understand that he returned to a central evil character in his next book From Russia With Love. I was also pleased to see that Fleming displayed better self control over his racial attitudes. I hope this reflected a personal enlightenment, rather than wanting to avoid criticism that most likely accompanied his Live and Let Die book. Finally, the character, Tiffany Case, had more of a significance in this story than the women in the previous books. It seemed to me that Bond so strongly reacted to Tiffany Case because she was a strong, self sufficient personality. She also gave the author an opportunity to better expose Bond's intimate side. I suppose that the author will inform the reader in the Russia with Love book as to what became of Ms. Case.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Bond, Detective Bond, Aug 21 2003
For his fourth 007 novel, Fleming drew inspiration from a real-life international diamond smuggling ring which would also be the subject of a non-Bond book, The Diamond Smugglers, a year later. The premise here is that an American mafia family is running an elaborate operation to smuggle diamonds out of the British colony of Sierra Leone (it didn't win independence until 1961), the British don't like it, and Bond is inserted as a courier to try and discover who's behind the scheme. While this setup remains exceedingly topical almost 50 years later (indeed, the latest Bond flick features the laundering of diamonds from Sierra Leone), however it's not likely to engender much enthusiasm in the contemporary reader. Hmm, someone is smuggling diamonds out from the under the noses of the imperialist colonizing British, gee, that's too bad... so why does this warrant sending a government assassin into the mix?However, if one is willing to overlook the rather small potatoes of the setup, there's a decent enough potboiler to found if you don't examine it too carefully. The pages turn quickly enough as Bond is partnered with the hard-boiled beauty Tiffany Case (like so many of Fleming's women, an underdeveloped character with lots of potential), and then heads to the horse races at Saratoga, the casinos of Las Vegas, a desert ghost town, and the staterooms of the Queen Elizabeth. There are some nice set pieces (especially the mud bath scene and the casino action), but Bond seems to be distracted the whole time. One could mark it down to his being overconfident about his Mafia adversaries, but he's throughout the book he's missing clues, botching basic spycraft, and most importantly, impatient and sloppy. In several places it's hard not to think that if he were this bad an agent, he'd have been killed long ago. It also doesn't help that the Mafia dons Bond is up against are totally generic and unmemorable, and more than a little ridiculous as major villains. The semi-climactic railroad chase scene is borderline farcical for example. Nor are matters aided by Felix Leiter rather improbably crossing Bond's path as a Pinkerton's agent. Still, the homosexual hitmen, Wint and Kidd are memorable characters who bring a great deal of menace and (for the time) exoticism to the story. More of a detective story than a spy thriller, it's not your normal Bond book.
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