List of James Bond Allies in The Man With The Golden Gun - Background

Background

Ian Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January and February 1964, completing it by the beginning of March. His health affected him badly during the writing process and he dropped from his usual rate of two thousand words a morning to a little over an hour's worth of work a day.

As with his previous novels, Fleming used events from his past as elements in his novel. Whilst at Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Fleming's car, a Standard Tourer, had been struck by a train at a level crossing and he had been dragged fifty yards down the track. From that time on he had associated trains with death, which led to their use as a plot device not just in The Man with the Golden Gun, but also in From Russia, with Love.

As well as using events from his past, Fleming also used names of individuals he knew for some of his characters. The editor of The London Magazine, Alan Ross, had provided Fleming with details about the effects of the electroshock therapy that Bond went through and, by way of thanks, the novel's SIS station chief in Jamaica, Commander Ross, was named after him. Similarly, Fleming used the name of the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club, Mark Nicholson, for the CIA representative at the hotel. Tony Hugill, the sugar planter mentioned in the novel, was named after a member of Fleming's 30 AU unit who managed the Tate & Lyle plantations in West Indies after the war and the book's main villain, Francisco Scaramanga, was named after George Scaramanga, an Etonian contemporary of Fleming's: the pair are said to have fought at school.

The effects of the two Eon Productions Bond films released prior to the writing of the novel (Dr. No and From Russia with Love) were reflected in the novel through the increased number of gadgets used. One of these was the poison gun used in the scene of the attempted assassination of M. The idea was taken from the story of Bohdan Stashynsky, who defected from the Eastern Bloc to the West in 1961. Stashynsky was put on trial for the murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera and stated that he had used a poison-spray gun to do it.

Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964 and wrote to the copy editor of all his novels, William Plomer, saying it needed a lot of re-writing. As time went on Fleming became increasingly unhappy with the book and thought about re-working it in the spring of 1965, but was persuaded against it by Plomer, who considered the novel viable for publication. Five months after returning from Jamaica, on the morning of 12 August 1964, Fleming died of a heart attack. His obituary in The Times noted that he "had completed and was revising a new novel, The Man with the Golden Gun."

Despite William Plomer's original thought about the state of the manuscript, editors Jonathan Cape were concerned enough about the story to pass the manuscript to Kingsley Amis to read on holiday, paying him £35/15 shillings for his thoughts and advice, although Amis' subsequent suggestions were not used by Cape. Cape had taken the step because they thought the novel was thin and "feeble". Raymond Benson has noted that the thinness comes from a lack of the rich detail and descriptions which are normally present in Fleming's work, but which are missing from The Man with the Golden Gun; Benson suggests that these details were normally worked into the second draft by Fleming, but their absence shows that no such additional work was done on this occasion. The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously, eight months after its author's death.