Bond. James Bond. Is there a name more synonymous with spying, tuxedos, and shaken cocktails than the British secret agent? Join me as I read all of the James Bond books in 007 Case Files, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s potential spoilers ahead.
When I first started watching James Bond movies as an impressionable young lad, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER was one of my favourites. If for no other reason, it has the wonderful exchange between Bond and Plenty O’Toole, who Bond suggests is “named after her father perhaps.”
Fleming wrote the novel at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica some sixteen years earlier after reading an article about diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone. Casino Royale and Live and Let Die were already on the market, and Moonraker was already undergoing its editorial process. Fleming, writing to his friend Hilary Bray, described his approach to writing wonderfully:
“…every single method of escape and every variety of suspenseful action that I had omitted from my previous books—in fact everything except the kitchen sink, and if you can think up a good plot involving kitchen sinks, please send it along speedily.” – from Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica
It really is one of the strongest Bond outings since Casino Royale with Fleming possibly reinvigorated by by this stage we start to see a fully-formed version of the super spy we’ve come to love over the years. His misogyny, casual racism, and bizarrely flippant homophobia notwithstanding, it’s almost the most human we’ve seen Bond since his ill-fated relationship with Vesper Lynd.
After literary opening set in the diamond mines of Sierra Leone, Bond settles in for a decidedly American adventure. Fleming has been widely praised for his authenticity in regards to the US (particularly the Las Vegas) setting, and this is definitely some of his finest descriptive writing to date. There’s a sense of outlaw alienation to his view of the States, and this extends to Bond as well.
Bond comes across as alternatively scornful and dismissive at the start of the story: of the mob’s influence, of the casino games, and of love-interest Tiffany Case as well. Yet he’s given a more rounded character arc, and with the rape victim Case, first entertains the idea of marriage. It’s progress for the man who cynically ended his first adventure with the immortal line “The bitch is dead now.”
What ultimately lets DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER down is the weak resolution, one that never sat well with me in the 1971 film adaptation either. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of spy fiction, and has reinvigorated my love of the character. It certainly reinvigorated something in Fleming too: the following year he published a non-fiction work called The Diamond Smugglers. I guess diamonds are a boys best friend as well.
My 007 Case Files will return…in From Russia with Love.
