This is the third part of series of reviews. Previously: Casino Royale; next: Moonraker.

Live and Let Die is one of my favourite Bond movies, so I was naturally curious about the source material. I was not sure, though, that I wanted to read another novel as dated as Casino Royale. Fortunately, Live and Let Die turned out to be a considerably more accessible and accomplished book, even though it was written only a year later. It’s longer, the writing is more polished; the descriptions are more detailed and the story is more complex. In places, Fleming waxes lyrical (to good effect), in contrast to the mostly functional prose of Casino Royale.

Bond has also evolved: he’s tougher and more resourceful, and driven as much by a personal desire for revenge as by his ostensible mission, to break a Caribbean smuggling racket which is financing Soviet espionage. The other characters are also drawn more clearly: Mr Big and Solitaire present a suitably charismatic baddie and love interest respectively. [spoiler] Felix Leiter’s reappearance is handled skillfully enough for his unpleasant fate to come as a genuine shock – all the more so to a reader brought up with a franchise mentality that admits little change to major characters [end spoiler].

The milieus are handled well, too: there’s relatively little of the period-novel feel that permeated Casino Royale. Much of the physical description sounds so contemporary that it’s jarring when the reader is occasionally reminded that this book is more than fifty years old. The same goes for Bond’s gadgetry and techniques: I wondered why Fleming was belabouring the working of an aqualung before realising that it would have been a considerable novelty to readers of the time.

But book’s age is most relevant when it comes to its most intriguing and controversial aspect: its setting in the African-American community and underworld. Primed by Casino Royale’s, er, “old-fashioned” attitudes to race and sex, I had expected large parts of Live and Let Die to be highly offensive by modern standards. Are they?

To some extent. Fleming’s takes on jazz and voodoo undoubtedly make for scintillating reading, but do draw on old stereotypes of black people as simple-minded, animalistic and easily-led. But my impression was more of unquestioned attitudes than overt racism, and Fleming throws out some patronising, but seemingly sincere, compliments as well. Ultimately, the extent to which this mars the book will inevitably vary from reader to reader – Live and Let Die is not so old that its racial content seems irrelevant, and not so new that it seems inexcusable. For my part, in the main, I found it to be an “ignorable” shortcoming of an otherwise entertaining book.