Book info

• Title Live and Let Die
• Author Ian Fleming
• Year 1954
• Genre Thriller

Meet James Bond, the world's most famous spy.James Bond is not a superstitious man, but it's hard not to feel unnerved in the presence of Mr. Big. A ruthless Harlem gangster who uses voodoo to control his criminal empire, he's also one of SMERSH's top American operatives. Mr. Big has been smuggling British pirate treasure to New York from a remote Jamaican island - and funneling the proceeds to Moscow. With help from Solitaire, Mr. Big's beautiful and enigmatic Creole fortune teller, and his old friend Felix Leiter, 007 must locate the crime lord's hideout, sabotage his operation, and reclaim the pirate hoard for England. From the jazz joints of Harlem to the shark-infested waters of the Florida Everglades, Live and Let Die sends Bond headlong into the exotic.

Thoughts

I listened to the audiobook of this, read by the excellent Rory Kinnear, who embodied the spirit of Bond really well. The clipped way the story is told is at first a little jarring but it soon gets you into the protagonist’s head - Bond has to live his life like that, constantly surveying, assessing danger, short, sharp movements to stay alive.

I found this book particularly brutal, not that the previous outing was any gentler - we all remember that torture scene in Casino Royale! - but it felt like the stakes were even higher and the depths of despair Bond dipped to even lower than before.

I was always profoundly disappointed that Felix suffered the same torment in the books that he did in the films, that’s one thing that really upset me about the film series and it came right from the source. He disagreed with something that ate him, indeed. A dated book, that can be slightly uncomfortable in this more enlightened period, but still a great read/listen.

Rating: 4 / 5