Big’s spell because they all must believe in voodoo. Big is African American and all of his agents are as well, but Fleming makes a curious assumption that all black people are impressionable enough to fall under Mr. Ian Fleming makes some positive, forward thinking comments about black people in the course of the book but damn if most of the book isn’t accidentally terribly racist. Live and Let Die is essentially just as fun as Casino Royale, but it definitely feels more dated from a cultural perspective. Big’s base of operations in Jamaica, stop his fiendish plot, and rescue the girl. Except things don’t go much better in the Sunshine state: Solitaire is kidnapped and Leiter is brutally maimed and left clinging to life after Mr. They end up hightailing it for Florida to check out Mr. Big’s gorgeous psychic Solitaire, who turns to them for protection. Big in Harlem, it becomes very clear that Bond and Leiter got more than they bargained for-even with an assist from Mr. Big is up to and put an end to his money laundering, it will kill off one of SMERSH’s main sources of funding.īond eagerly heads to NYC, where he’s greeted with the royal treatment thanks to his CIA buddy Felix Leiter. Big, head of a vast underground criminal empire based in Harlem, New York City, has been laundering gold coins from a pirate treasure in Jamaica to help finance Soviet espionage (which means SMERSH). Good thing, because M has a new mission for him and it indirectly involves SMERSH.

He’s all healed up from his wounds and ready to go and fulfill his new goal of beating down SMERSH wherever possible. Now that we’ve been introduced to the world of James Bond, 007, Ian Fleming gets right to the point in the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die. The events of Casino Royale don’t seem to have had much of an impact on Bond aside from having a skin graft on his hand to cover the scar a SMERSH agent deliberately carved into place. “In my job … when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto.

Casino royale novel summary