Opens with a kind of pre-titles chapter in which we meet a dentist who is smuggling diamonds out of a British diamond mine in Sierra Leone by paying the black workers to smuggle uncut stones out of the mines in their teeth. He pays the miners cash, takes the stones, assembles them into a package and every month drives out to remote part of the desert to rendezvous with a helicopter. He flashes a code phrases (A, B, C) before the chopper lands, hands over the pack of diamonds to the pilot, and is assured payment has gone through to his bank account in London.
London
Cut to the Secret Service building overlooking Regents Park (p.55), where M briefs Bond about the significant losses to British diamonds caused by smuggling. The FBI have helped identify a ‘pipeline’ which goes from the mines in Africa, to London, and on to America. Has he heard of the ‘House of Diamonds’, an up-market retailer in Hatton Garden, run by a man named Rufus B. Saye? (p.20) Might be something to do with it. His mission is to track down the gang responsible. As part of this:
1. Bond goes for a briefing with Assistant Commissioner Vallance of Scotland Yard, who we first met in Moonraker (p.25). Vallance gives Bond further details about the scale of the smuggling and the seriousness of the American gangs. Despatches him with a plain clothes man to interview Saye, at the ‘House of Diamonds’ office. Saye turns out to be a big, very hard American who listens to their ‘enquiries’, then rudely turfs them out (p.37).
2. The plan is to drop Bond into the pipeline as the courier of a package they know is waiting in London to be carried to America. Each month it’s a different courier, but Scotland Yard have their eye on the ‘escort’ who often accompanies them, an attractive woman named Tiffany Case. This month she’s expecting a certain Peter Franks to be the courier (p.25) and be paid $5,000. The Yard will pick up Franks and Bond will impersonate him, courier the diamonds into New York, then try to inveigle his way into the gang, and get evidence against the top people.
So Bond goes to the Hotel and meets Tiffany, the hotel room door opening to reveal her at her dressing table wearing only bra and panties (p.40). Despite this promising beginning, she insists their relationship is purely professional. She suggests Bond pose as a tourist going on a golfing holiday, with a bag of clubs etc, and her people will get the diamonds inserted into golf balls, easy to smuggle. He’ll be collected from the airport and taken to meet Michael ‘Shady’ Tree, who’ll take the stones and pay him. Later, Tiffany makes a call to someone she only knows as ABC, who confirms the golf balls plan, though she herself doesn’t know who she’s speaking to or where the call is taken.
Back at the hotel which he’s checked into as a cover (the Ritz!) Bond receives a hand-delivered letter from M with more information (p.52). Further research has shown that Rufus Saye is none other than Jack Spang, twin brother of Seraffimo Spang, joint controller of ‘the Spangled Mob’, a well-known American crime gang. They bought ‘the House of Diamonds’ five years earlier and there’s every suspicion that it’s a front for the smuggled stones.
Next day a driver turns up to collect Bond, tips the contraband golf balls in amongst all his other balls, then drives him to the airport for his flight to New York. (There’s a long description of checking in and the joys of international jet travel – Fleming is very aware of flying; cf the description of Bond’s momentary panic on the flight to Jamaica in Live and Let Die – maybe it was still a rarity in 1956 and therefore had exotic interest for his readership. He certainly describes the flight to New York in great detail, and then again the flight from New York to Las Vegas, p.160).
New York
Bond gets through Customs and is met by a New York gang member who drives him into the City and to meet Michael ‘Shady’ Tree, who turns out to be a fierce, red-haired hunchback (p.68). Bond carries on playing the part of a mercenary courier and asks for his money. Tree says they’ll pay him some in cash but then arrange for the rest to be paid tax-free and innocently with a scam. Tree gives him the name of a horse to bet on in an upcoming race at Saratoga, the famous racing track in upstate New York. It’s a dead cert; he’ll get his money. Bond has to agree.
Out on the street, Bond becomes aware he’s being tailed and then is gripped by the neck and a hard object shoved in his back. After a tussle there’s a burst of laughter, and his assailant is revealed as Felix Leiter, his buddy from the CIA, who we last saw having been half eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, swathed in bandages and barely alive. Here he is on the streets of New York, now working for the Pinkerton Agency, limping heavily from his artificial leg and using an artificial arm with a metal hook (p.82).
They banter a lot in a free and easy way which is still appealing 60 years later – ‘you old Limey bastard’ etc, while Leiter explains that he’s been tasked by the Pinkertons to cover corruption up at Saratoga. Ie he’s going to the same race meeting Bond was told to attend by the red-haired hunchback. As M did, Leiter warns Bond that these gangs may have garish silly nicknames – Shady Tree, the Spangled Mob – but they are seriously hard men.
Saratoga
Bond has a day to himself to groom, eat and sleep – cold showers, padding his room naked, ordering steak and champagne. Next day Leiter picks him up and they banter about cars, women and criminal gangs as he drives them 200 miles north to Saratoga. Fleming has done his research: he captures the atmosphere of this horse town, both by quoting a long passage by sports writer Jimmy Cannon (as he previously quoted long passages by Leigh Fermor to describe Haitian Voodoo in Live and Let Die) and by his own sections of bravura description (p.109). Bond and Leiter check into a motel then stroll around soaking up the vibes, watching the horses and owners and jockeys, listening to the accents.
Now, the diamond smugglers had told Bond to bet on an outside horse named ‘Shy Smile’ to win one of the races. They’ve fixed for him to win by the simple expedient of killing the real ‘Shy Smile’ and replacing him with another much faster horse, made up to look like him. But it turns out that Leiter (in an everso slightly enormous coincidence) has been briefed by the Pinkertons to stop ‘Shy Smile’ winning. He’s been told to bribe the jockey – ‘Tingaling’ Bell – to throw the race by committing a brief but decisive foul in the final stretches. Fleming well conveys the noise and excitement of the big track and of the race and, sure enough, Tingaling throws it, resulting in an official foul and ‘Shy Smile’ being disqualified.
In another improbable twist, Leiter asks Bond to deliver Tingaling’s bribe to him, at the Acme sulphur spring and mudbath outside town. In a sequence which reeks of being a documentary description of a place Fleming had really visited, Bond describes every detail of the hot spring/mud bath establishment in Saratoga, the half-hearted attendants, the concrete walkway into the big mud room itself, the disgusting smells, the ominous tall smokestack louring over it all. Here, yet again, he must strip naked before being encased in a coffin-shaped box filled with ‘healing’ hot mud. It is while trapped in this device that he witnesses two hooded hit-men enter the mud room, locate the bribed jockey Tingaling, slap him about a bit with the usual sadistic banter and then – with typical Fleming cruelty – pour a tub of super-boiling mud over his face, thus burning and melting his flesh. Then they go.
After the cops have arrived and sorted everything out, and after Bond has given his testimony as an innocent bystander, showered and returned to his hotel – he describes it all to Leiter who immediately identifies the two men, Wint and Kidd as well-known hoodlums working for the Spangled Mob. Bond phones the hunchback in New York, still playing the part of an aggrieved small-time crooked courier, saying, ‘Hey that horse didn’t win, I lost all my money’. So the voice tells him to go to Las Vegas, check into a specific hotel (the Tiara) and be at a specific blackjack table at a specific time and make a specific bet and he’ll get his money.
Continuing the stream of coincidences, Leiter tells Bond that he has also been ordered to Las Vegas – he’ll arrange for Bond to be collected by a cabby he knows and trusts – and so there’ll be more buddy-buddy hanging out together. Why bother too much about plausibility…
Las Vegas
Another plane journey – New York to Las Vegas – and Fleming giving us a detailed description of the view out the window as the plane turns over the Pacific and heads through a pass in the Sierras into the Martian landscape of the desert before coming in to the unexpected green urban island of Las Vegas.
The heat hits him like a punch, and he’s collected by the friendly cabby Leiter’s assigned him – Ernie Cureo (p.152) – who gives Bond (and the reader) a useful update on Vegas’s recent history ie organised crime has moved in and taken over everything. Ernie indicates the extent of the control – for example, Bond will have been photographed at the airport with a secret camera and the photos will be being scanned against the mob’s databases as they speak. If he’s carrying a gun, Bond will be shadowed by an unseen armed escort. His every move will be followed, especially at the gambling tables. Note the use of modern overhead lighting in all the gambling halls. But note also, how half the light sockets are empty. They’re the one with the cameras recording everything everyone does. Nothing is left to chance. Bond is impressed by the total efficiency of the gangs.
Bond has another day in hand in a luxury hotel to swim, eat well, sleep. Finally he dresses for his appointment at the blackjack table, as arranged by the hunchback in New York. Once again there is a very good, very atmospheric account of Vegas, of the hotel and of the coercive design, sound and behaviour in the massive gambling hall packed with slot machines and ringing to the continual shouts from the crap game tables. Bond is at the appointed table at the appointed time to find the croupier is none other than Tiffany Case! They play it dead straight – she deals him five sets of winning cards and he collects the $5,000 owed him and walks away.
But Bond is irked at having to play this dumb role. He was warned to leave the gambling hall and leave town so instead he walks straight over to a roulette table where he makes four risky bets in a row, winning and raising his takings to $20,000. He notes the hard men standing around with guns barely concealed. As his stakes go up a hard man appears at the dealer’s side with the same cold eyes and black hair styled en brousse; must be Seraffimo Spang, brother of Jack. His cigar points at Bond like a gun, while Bond wins the last turn of the wheel and quits while he’s ahead. But he’s made his mark.
Spectreville
Next evening Ernie picks Bond up in his cab for a cruise round town and this turns out to be the beginning of the climax of the book. While Bond is reminiscing about unnerving Jack Spang in person with his unscripted gambling win the night before, Ernie gives Bond (and the reader) some background about Jack Spang’s hobby. He has bought an abandoned mining town some way from Vegas, fully restored it and the one-track railway line that used to service the mine, along with a vintage locomotive. It is Spang’s (eccentric and garish) hobby to take his gang, associates and girls on champagne trips to this fake Wild West town and make everyone dress up for the weekend.
Ernie notices they’re being followed and Bond, itching for some action, encourages him to try to give the tail the slip. Cue a high-speed chase, in which Ernie shunts the following car, then swerves into a side alley so Bond can get some shots off at the other following car, crash bang! Then they go hide out in a drive-in movie but a) Bond discovers Ernie was injured in the shooting b) the tail follows them, arriving with guns poking through the cab’s doors. Bond is pushed at gunpoint into the baddies’ car and driven out to Spectreville.
Here, as he’s pushing open the swing doors of a fake saloon, he takes the opportunity to jump his two gunmen (McGonigle and Frasso, p.200), badly hurting both of them, before a voice says, ‘Put the gun down’ and – in a stock scene – he realises Jack Spang and some associates in ominous black hoods, and Tiffany Case (!) have been watching all along. The new tough guys manhandle Bond out into the station platform, to view the astonishingly beautiful vintage locomotive, The Cannonball (p.207), then up the stairs and into the luxuriously-appointed Pullman carriage. The characters sit. Bond is fixed a drink. Then his blood runs cold as Spang reveals he’s received a telegram from London saying the real Peter Franks is in police custody. Bond plays the aggrieved innocent so Spang casually tells his associates to put on football boots and kick the crap out of Bond.
In the next chapter Fleming brilliantly describes Bond’s sensations as he slowly, painfully recovers consciousness. The boys kicked him unconscious, left him in a side room, ate dinner and went to bed. Tiffany tiptoed downstairs in the early hours and is now trying to revive him. They are near the railhead and she points out a railroad handcar ie one of the small open machines engineers use to putter up and down lines. Tiffany has planned their escape. But first Bond just about manages to empty petrol cans all over the wooden building and lights it Whoosh! Then onto the handcar and off they go.
Out into the cold desert as Bond’s senses slowly return, he checks that no bones are broken and realises his passport and money are still in his jacket pocket. Phew. But then they sense a rumbling on the line, which gets louder: The Cannonball is after them, and it’s going to catch them.
At just that moment the handcar engine goes put-put and runs out of gas. Great. But Tiffany thinks they’re not far from a railroad junction where a spur of track headed off towards the old mine, they could switch the points, push the handcar down it, then switch the points back. Better still, suggests Bond, go beyond the junction and switch the points so the Cannonball itself is sent hurtling down the sidetrack towards the old mine.
Which is what they do after much straining with the rusty old points. And, moments later, the Cannonball comes hurtling towards them, then hits the points with a judder and is violently switched to the spur line. Not before there are shots from the engine house and – just as it flashes by – Bond carefully looses off the four bullets remaining in his gun and has a split-second impression of Jack Spang’s body lifted and spread-eagled against the side of the cab, then it’s flashed by. Moments later it is out of sight behind the start of the low hills and moments after that – Bang, Crash, BOOM! as the huge locomotive hits the mine railhead at 60 miles an hour, derails, crashes and explodes with a melodramatic fireball. So much for Seraffimo Spang.
Exhausted, Bond collapses, and he would have died then and there in the desert if Tiffany hadn’t guided him and supported him the couple of miles to the nearest desert highway. Here she flags down the only car passing at that time of the morning to discover – and here the coincidence-ometer explodes – the mop of sandy hair and hawk-like features of Felix Leiter! (p.226) who had heard about his pal Ernie being taken into hospital, got the story of Bond’s abduction, driven out to Spectreville to find it going up in flames, got the story from a surviving hoodlum of Bond’s escape on the handcar, and driven out into the desert looking for his old buddy.
All very convenient. Leiter drives Bond to California where they get him patched up by a doctor, checked into a hotel and cleaned up with new clothes. – It is notable how throughout the process Tiffany cradles his wounded head, looks after him but then how, as he slowly revives, she returns to being distant and cold. Much earlier, Leiter had told Bond her life story. Daughter of a single woman who ran a brothel, Tiffany grew up in a harsh environment and then one fateful night was gang-raped by her mother’s customers. Since when she has been a hard and professional survivor. And yet Bond finds himself falling in love with her (p.232).
Leiter books them on a flight to New York, and then onto none other than the luxury cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth, which is steaming back to England. – Note the chasteness and prudery of the 1950s – Leiter books them into separate cabins, a distinction they themselves maintain throughout the voyage.
The Queen Elizabeth
Here there is a lot of low key relationship stuff between Case and Bond. Dinner, conversation, getting to know each other as Bond falls deeper in love with her but has to overcome the reluctance caused by her brutal past. They discuss marriage and even having children (pp.240-246). Bond says that once in London she can put up in the spare room of his little flat and be looked after by his adorable housekeeper, May. It is a love affair. They are falling in love. They attend an auction for charity where guests in the big ship dining room bet on how long it will take the ship to reach the UK. An odd couple of men take the bidding unusually high and bet it will take much longer than anyone else is predicting.
Bond looks at them, an uncomfortable fat man and a good-looking blond man, and something nags in his memory but at that moment he is distracted by Tiffany’s hand on his. They go walk along the deck, admiring the sea and the moon and the reflections etc and then back to his cabin where they, finally, make sincere and deep love, after which Tiffany kisses him goodnight before tiptoeing back to her cabin and Bond falls into a deep sleep.
He’s awoken by room service with a telegram. It’s a coded message from M in London that they raided the ‘House of Diamonds’ – Jack Spang having fled the country, probably into Africa – and discovered telegram exchanges with a Mr Winter aboard the Queen Elizabeth and Saye/Spang sending orders to ‘despatch’ Case. Jumping into the shower then pulling his clothes on Bond races along to Tiffany’s room to find it empty and ransacked. Christ. Christ, the reader is on tenterhooks because Fleming has led us right into a gentle, loving, tender place only to yank us back into the brutal world of sudden death. Remember how Bond fell in love with Vesper but she died, in Casino Royale.
Bond quickly goes through the ship’s manifest that is given to every passenger and discovers Wint and Kidd are in the cabin directly below Tiffany’s. If he tried to break down the door chances are they’d kill her before he got in. In a desperate expedient, he ties together sheets from her bed and attaches one end to a bulkhead, then swings out the porthole and lets himself slowly, painfully down the ship’s side, trying to forget the immense size of the ship, the fact it is steaming at speed, the way he could probably die from the impact if he fell into the sea, or by sliced to pieces by the ship’s four massive screws.
Now he’s at the porthole of the cabin below, and hears a slap and a girl cry out and with no more prompting swings through the porthole and rolls into the middle of the room, to his feet with his gun in his hand. Tiffany is naked, pinioned by Kidd who is slapping her. Both men turn to face him, ready to draw. Bond tells Tiffany to get up and go into the bathroom and lock the door. Nobody moves while she goes. There is a very intense moment of delay, released when Wint shouts American football numbers for a ‘play’ and both men move in different directions and pull their guns. Bang! Bond shoots one in the head then turns to the other just as his hand reaches for his ankle and twists up. Bang! Bond shoots the other dead, but not before he gets off a cunning throw and Bond looks down to see a knife sticking out of his ribs (p.290).
Complete silence. Bond extracts the knife then moves carefully, staggering, arranging everything so it looks like the two fell out over a card game, he throws Kidd out the porthole and arranges the gun to look like Wint killed himself. It’s not much, but it should delay or puzzle the ship’s authorities. Then he gets Tiffany from the bathroom, they return to her room and tidy up, then she takes him back to his room and tends his wounds.
Epilogue
Bond is in the desert with troops from the nearest British Army garrison and a Bofors gun. They have followed the smuggling dentist out from the mine and are now camped silently half a mile away. Bond remembers the phone call he had with M once the Queen Elizabeth docked at Southampton. a) He put Tiffany into a Daimler taxi to London, to drop her at his flat and into the care of May. b) The police are enquiring into a double murder aboard the ship, does Bond want M to cover it up? Yes. c) Vallance has raised the possibility of prosecuting the girl. Should they? No. d) Will Bond catch an RAF jet to the desert to track down the last link in the pipeline, the missing Spang? Yes.
The helicopter arrives but instead of the German pilot it is – as expected – Jack Spang himself. He takes the dentist’s pack of diamonds, listens to his feeble whining, then shoots him dead. At that moment the loudspeaker from Bond and the army’s truck tells him to freeze. But he jumps back into the helicopter and takes off. Bond in person tracks him with the Bofors gun and lets off a series of shots, one of which hits bull’s eye and the chopper collapses and crashes back to earth with a big explosion. The pipeline is closed. Thank God he can go back to London and the warm arms of his beloved.
Death is forever. But so are diamonds. (p.289)
Themes
Organised crime
The text goes to great lengths to emphasise the breadth, the scale and the ruthlessness of American organised crime. You’d have thought readers were aware of this from the well-publicised lawlessness of the 1930s, featuring Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd among many others, and all those Jimmy Cagney, George Raft film noirs.
But apparently it needs to be explained all over again, so Fleming has M explain in person and then in a hand-written note, and Leiter telling him several times, and then the cabby in Las Vegas explaining once again, that the Organised Crime gangs of America are well organised and ruthless. At least twice, characters refer to the Kefauver Report (p.159) for a full understanding of the breadth and depth of organised crime’s grip on American society, and this turns out to be a very contemporary reference.
Fascinating to learn that these Senate Committee hearings into organised crime feature in fictionalised form in The Godfather part II. My understanding was that the Godfather books and movies trace the transition of Mafia operations from explicitly criminal activities like bootlegging, blackmail, extortion etc, into ‘legit’ businesses, specifically on the move from New York-based crime into the gambling operations in Las Vegas – precisely the setting of the second half of Diamonds.
Enjoyment
Bond enjoys life and his enjoyment is infectious.
It was a beautiful day and Bond enjoyed absorbing the Saratoga idiom, the mixture of Brooklyn and Kentucky in the milling crowds, the elegance of the owners and their friends in the tree-shaded paddock, the efficient mechanics of the parimutuel and the big board with its flashing lights recording the odds and the money invested, the trouble-free starts through the tractor-drawn starting-gate, the toy lake with its six swans and the anchored canoe and, everywhere, that extra exotic touch of the negroes who, except as jockeys, are so much a part of American racing. (p.125)
The cold showers, the luxurious hotels, the very good food, the cocktails prepared just so, his own superb physique – Bond is an instrument through whom we feel the vicarious enjoyment of being alive in such a diverse and interesting world.
Naked
It’s a little detail, in a way, but it’s very symptomatic of the sensuality of the books and their continual physical hyper-awareness, that Bond is frequently naked. He is visiting America in high summer of August, so that New York, Saratoga and – especially – Las Vegas are blisteringly hot. And so it is that Fleming describes Bond’s routine of (generally ice-cold) showers – one day he has four – and then moving around his luxury hotel suites naked. At the mud bath he strips naked and stands like one of the thoroughbred horses, on display to all the other customers in his physical prowess.
Bond stood naked in front of him (p.137)
Bond himself, Fleming, and the reader, are all invited to savour the sight of Bond’s hard, suntanned body – not all the time, but at regular intervals, just often enough to keep us alert to his persistent sensual self-awareness. At the Tiara hotel after his long flight, Bond
took off his clothes and threw himself naked on the bed. (p.169)
Self consciousness
In my reviews of other thrillers from the period, I point out the almost compulsory reference that authors make to the hamminess of their own plots, the often cartoon nature of their own characters, and the way so many of the baddies are acting a tough guy part they’ve learned from the movies.
Typical, thought Bond. Mike Hammer routine. These American gangsters were too obvious. They had read too many horror comics and seen too many films (p.65)
Pissaro looked like a gangster in a horror-comic. (p.121)
Bond is struck throughout by the wacky names and cartoon behaviour of the thugs. His most penetrating comment is that they are overgrown teenagers, kids with guns.
Bond remembered cold, dedicated, chess-playing Russians; brilliant, neurotic Germans; silent, deadly, anonymous men from Central Europe; the people in his own Service – the double-firsts, the gay soldiers of fortune, the men who counted life well lost for a thousand year. Compared with such men, Bond decided, these people were just teenage pillow-fantasies. (p.122)
… he] might then, if he found favour in the eyes of Mr Spang, be given regular work with the rest of the teenage adults who made up the gang. (p.175)
So that was the end of one of the Spangs, one of the brutal, theatrical, overblown dead-end adults who made up the Spangled Mob. He had been a stage-gangster, surrounded by stage properties, but that didn’t alter the fact that he had intended to kill Bond. (p.225)
Attitudes to homosexuals and women
In this novel homosexuality is mentioned for the first time in the series and when it is, it’s a description of the killers Kidd and Wint. Leiter reckons they shack up together, are what we today would call an item, and comments:
‘Some of these homos make the worst killers.’ (p.147)
Later the good-hearted cabbie, Ernie, is given some lines about gay gangsters.
‘I know them guys. Detroit Purple Mob. Couple lavender guys. You know, pansies. Golf ain’t there game. The only irons they can handle are in their pockets.’ (p.190)
In his 1966 essay on the Bond novels, the structuralist literary critic Umberto Eco patronisingly comments from his lofty left-wing point of view that Bond is not a fascist or a racist (interesting to learn that these insult weasel words were being thrown around as long as 50 years ago). He is obviously conservative, but with ‘a cautious middle-class chauvinism’. Race Mr Big is obviously a black criminal mastermind but Live and Let Die is full of characters bending over backwards to say how much they like and admire black people (or ‘negroes’, as Fleming writes, in the terminology of the day). In this book Fleming comments ‘Bond had a natural affection for coloured people’ (p.134). Anti-Semitism I can only remember one Jewish character in these first four novels, and he is a diamond merchant in Hatton Gardens where, I imagine, lots of merchants in the 1950s were Jewish. Sexism His women are in fact more feisty and resistant to his charms than I remembered, and if he has patronising attitudes towards them, then they were the attitudes of his day.
As Eco sums it up, neither Fleming nor Bond display the obsessive hatred of blacks or Jews or women which should really be what we mean by racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and so on. Instead he displays:
‘an art of persuasion that relies on endoxa, that is, on the common opinions shared by the majority of readers’.
For me it seems pointless sticking the same old labels on the Bond books (reactionary, racist, sexist, misogynist and all the rest) and thinking you’ve achieved something. You are merely echoing the stock beliefs of today, as Fleming was echoing the stock beliefs of his day; you are as much in thrall to contemporary values as Fleming was to his.
I think it’s more thought-provoking to take Fleming as a popular writer who wanted to make money from his work and so simply echoed the accepted beliefs of the time. Seen from this perspective, his views actually seem a little progressive. Rereading the novels, I am particularly struck by how independent and feisty his women are. There is actually very little sex in the Bond novels but a great deal of thinking about emotions and feelings and respect. It takes the whole novel for Bond to fall in love with Tiffany Case and to win her over, by which stage he really respects her body and soul. When they finally sleep together (just once in the whole story) it is the climax of a very slow process of learning about each other, rescuing each other from peril, getting to know and respect each other as people. They discuss the possibility of Bond leaving the Service to marry her. They even discuss the possibility of having children (Bond says, Yes, he’d love to have children, but not before he’s retired).
Most people who think about Bond think about the crass, vulgar movies. When my teenage daughter has watched any of the old ones, she is repelled by Bond who she finds ‘rapey’, with his casual expectation that he will have sex with every pretty girl he meets. And the movies are creepy, chauvinist and sexist. This makes it all the more surprising to go back to the source novels from the early and mid-1950s and realise that society’s attitudes were actually more respectful of women, as real people with agency and the ability to rebuff men, as decision-makers and owners of their destinies, before the Swinging Sixties turned them into Playboy dolly birds.
As to homosexuality, we know that Fleming mixed on friendly terms with the gays of his day, for example Noel Coward, who owned a seaside villa just down the coast in Jamaica from him. If Fleming has Leiter comment on the particular creepiness of the two gay killers a) this is a character talking; characters have views different from authors b) Leiter is expressing some of the anti-gay prejudice of his day, no more no less. To us his opinion seems nonsensical: he spends most of the novel warning Bond how psychopathic the American gangs are, and Bond meets plenty of brutal heterosexuals. Why either of them should single out gay killers as being particularly more or less brutal is, to us nowadays, hard to fathom. But it was obviously significant then. It obviously added an extra frisson to think that a pair of killers not only killed, but ‘shacked up’ together – made their criminality more creepy, somehow. And these kind of vanished opinions add to the social historical interest of the books, as windows into a vanished world, with its vanished technologies, attitudes, simplicities and reassurances.
Bond’s breakfasts…
… and lunches and dinners. Bond’s meals are a continual punctuation mark in the texts, far more so than car chases, shootouts or sex (of which there is actually precious little). We are treated to descriptions of:
- Lunch with Leiter: smoked salmon and Brizzola (beef, straight-cut across the bone, roast and broiled), then half an avocado with French dressing and an Espresso (p.80-84)
- Dinner with Tiffany: caviar, cutlets, pink champagne (p.88) the cutlets accompanied by asparagus with mousseline sauce (p.94). As apéritif Bond orders Martinis, shaken but not stirred (p.89), the first time that phrase has appeared. As liqueurs to follow the meal, they have Stingers made with crème de menthe (p.94).
- Lunch by himself at Voisin’s: two vodka Martinis, oeufs Benedict and strawberries (p.99)
- Lunch with Leiter: at a roadside diner they have scrambled eggs, sausages and Miller Highlife beers (p.102).
- At the race track: bourbon old-fashioneds and a cheap chicken dinner (p.110).
- With Leiter: broiled Maine lobster with melted butter and a very dry Martini made with Cresta Blanca Vermouth (p.151).
- Waiting to go gamble, Bond has a dozen cherrystone clams and a steak, washed down with a Vodka dry Martini (p.175).
- On the Queen Elizabeth Tiffany sends Bond a room service meal of four small slivers of steak on toast canapés, and a small bowl of sauce Béarnaise (p.248)
Credit
Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming was published in 1956 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
- Diamonds Are Forever (novel) on Amazon
- Diamonds Are Forever (movie) Amazon
- Ian Fleming website
- Diamonds Are Forever Wikipedia article
- Narrative structures in Fleming by Umberto Eco
Other thrillers from 1956
The Bond novels
1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.
Books & Boots 