Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Doctor No.
(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 34.)
When we last saw James Bond, he was dead. He's feeling much better now. Kicked by a poison boot at the end of From Russia With Love, Bond begins its follow-up, Doctor No, at the tail end of his recuperation. Seems that poison wasn't as fast-acting as everyone thought. At least Doctor No opens with some concern for Bond's health. M seems reluctant to send him off on another dangerous mission, particularly after he gets some strong chiding from one of Bond's doctors. In fact, the mission at the heart of Doctor No is supposed to be easy. M's man in Jamaica has disappeared, apparently taking a fetching female co-worker with him wherever he's gone. It looks like love has made them go AWOL. M doesn't buy it, nor does Bond. So off to Jamaica he goes. Fleming knew the setting well. Bond got his name from the ornithologist "James Bond," a friend of Fleming's who let him use his place in Jamaica as a writing retreat. After the initial success of the Bond thrillers, Fleming made Jamaica his home, living on an estate called "Goldeneye." All that plays into Doctor No, which requires Bond to pose as an ornithologist investigating a rare bird outpost of the Audubon Society on the island inhabited by the villainous Doctor No, after spending some time soaking in the sights and sounds of Jamaica, and the opinions of colonial residents who probably don't yet suspect that their days running the place are numbered. We'll get to that. First, Bond has to be a little humiliated. In his first meeting with Major Boothroyd, the armorer from the Q division who will become simply "Q" in the film series, Bond has his weapon of choice, the Beretta .25, dismissed as a "ladies' gun" and replaced by a Walther PPK, which will become a Bond trademark. Then it's off to the islands, where he's reunited with Quarrel, the Cayman Islander who whipped him into fighting shape in Live And Let Die. Quarrel isn't not his only ally, either. Bond has a talk with the Colonial Secretary, who explains the way things are in Jamaica:
It's like this [] The Jamaican is a kindly, lazy man with the virtues and vices of a child. He lives on a very rich island but he doesn't get rich from it. He doesn't know how to and he's too lazy. The British come and go and take easy pickings, but for about two hundred years no Englishman has made a fortune out here. He doesn't stay long enough.