When it comes to early James Bond movies, generally people’s favorites starring Sean Connery seem to be Dr. No, Goldfinger, and From Russia with Love. Among Roger Moore movies they’re usually Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. When we wanted to read another Bond novel (we blazed through Casino Royale several years ago), and wanted one based on an iconic early movie, that left us with five choices. We went with Ian Fleming’s posthumous 1965 effort The Man with the Golden Gun. You see a dust jacket above illustrated by John Richards. The yellowish color is true—it’s not a scanner issue. You might assume the book is expensive, and it sometimes is, but we saw copies of this edition going for fifteen dollars. It was an easy buy.
Perhaps you’ve heard that the filmmakers took extraordinary liberties in adapting the novel. Well, we hadn’t—and liberties is an understatement. The villain Francisco Scaramanga remains, though he’s more urban than urbane in the book. The plot is wildly different. There’s no scheme to sell advanced solar technology to the highest bidder, no gun duel, no private island, no Herve Villechaize-like character; instead there’s a mundane desire to con a group of money men into investing in a Jamaican hotel. Bond insinuates his way into Scaramanga’s employ as an assistant/security guard. Can you imagine, in any of the movies, Bond being a security guard?
The book is of extremely limited scope in comparison to the movie. We find that fascinating because back then movies were constrained in what they could depict. Sets, models, and special effects could achieve only so much, but authors’ imaginations were theoretically unlimited. Yet moviemakers were consistently more imaginative than authors—at least outside the realm of sci-fi/fantasy. The Man with the Golden Gun the movie makes The Man with the Golden Gun the novel feel underdeveloped, but that’s no fault of Fleming’s. No 1960s authors could have conceived of moments like the movie’s spiral car leap across a river. Even so, the book is quick and entertaining. There’s a reason Fleming became a pop literature giant, and it shows here.
