The Man With The Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
A couple of years ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing more than 75 vintage science-fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 71.
James Bond is dead. Or so it would seem at the outset of The Man With The Golden Gun, Ian Fleming’s final James Bond novel. (If it counts as a Fleming entry, that is. More on that below.) After he disappeared at the end of You Only Live Twice, the world thinks he’s an ex-007. Yet there he is showing up for duty at the opening of the novel, asking to see M as if nothing had happened, but not quite seeming himself.
What’s going on? I’m not exactly sure. The Box Of Paperbacks has been generous in providing Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels—there are even a couple of miscellaneous Bond and Fleming items still to come—but it skipped a couple, providing neither The Spy Who Loved Me nor You Only Live Twice. But it isn’t hard to put two and two together. Having fallen into the hands of the Russians, Bond has been subjected to some Manchurian Candidate treatment and sent back home to take out M. It’s a clever notion, modified and recycled in the opening of 2002’s Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as Bond. (It has a thrilling opening, but quickly turns into one of the worst of the recent Bond movies.) Unfortunately, all that brainwashing seems to have made Bond a much duller character than ever before.
Gone are the glimpses of Bond’s increasingly tortured psyche. Gone, even, are elaborate discussions of his consumption habits. Instead, we’re left with a fairly flat adventurer who wouldn’t be out of place in a lesser novelist’s adventure tale, but doesn’t seem much like Bond. He even takes on a generic adventurer’s nom de action for much of the novel: Mark Hazard, a name better suited to a long-running, little-read daily comic strip than an iconic super-spy.
So what’s going on? Opinions vary. Published a year after Fleming’s 1964 death, Gun has led some to wonder how much of the book belongs to the pen of Bond’s creator. Here’s a breakdown of the various theories:
a) Fleming finished The Man With The Golden Gun but hoped to rework it.
b) Fleming finished The Man With The Golden Gun but his editor, William Plomer, polished it.
c) Fleming didn’t finish The Man With The Golden Gun, but vocal Bond admirer Kingsley Amis—who definitely wrote the first post-Fleming Bond novel, Colonel Sun, published in 1968 under the name Robert Markham—did.