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What inspired Ian Fleming to write TMWTGG (1965) (and create Francisco Scaramanga)?
Dragonpol
https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
Lately I've been thinking about what it was that inspired Ian Fleming to write what was to be his last James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, written in 1964 and published posthumously in 1965. We know it is one of Fleming's shortest novels (alongside The Spy Who Loved Me, 1962). It seems that this final Bond novel from Fleming seemed to be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration more than ever before for the author but the (at least) skeleton inspiration for the story must have come from somewhere. I have one idea from the annals of True Crime that I think might have inspired the story about golden guns. I won't share it here just now as it's part of an upcoming blog article I'm writing about this. I may be completely wrong about this anyhow and deep down I suspect that I probably am, but the possibility of the idea intrigues me nonetheless.
Having read the relevant letters on The Man with the Golden Gun novel in Fergus Fleming's excellent book The Man With the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming's James Bond Letters (2015) I can confirm that there is sadly very little help there in what inspired the idea of the golden gun, Scaramanga and the plot to disturb the sugar industry in Jamaica on behalf of Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Of course Kingsley Amis was the first (and no doubt not the last) to point out the weaknesses of The Man with the Golden Gun from an inspiration and originality point of view. In his influential literary Bond study The James Bond Dossier (1965) Amis stated that he thought The Man with the Golden Gun was "very thin", seemingly being based on reworks of earlier Fleming Bond novels, those being the Hood's Congress in Goldfinger (1959) and the steam train action sequence first seen in Diamonds Are Forever (1956). One could certainly add to this by pointing to the Scaramanga dossier M reads at Blades was almost certainly an idea cribbed from Fleming's first Bond novel Casino Royale (1953) where there was a very similar dossier for the destruction of the villainous Le Chiffre. Besides this, Amis noted that Francisco Scaramanga and Mary Goodnight hardly qualified for their roles as as the Bond villain and Bond girl respectively.
Others have commented (on the Bond forums generally) that The Man with the Golden Gun represented a new and exciting departure for Fleming as Blofeld and SPECTRE had clearly been vanquished and Bond as a character seemed to be returning to an even keel again after the trauma of losing his wife of one day Tracy Bond, getting revenge on Blofeld and then being brainwashed by the Soviets to assassinate his chief M. Some say Fleming created a new type of independent and more self-employed villain with Scaramanga (albeit with links to Castro). In fact, Scaramanga is the first henchman type to be the main villain in a Bond novel since Horror and Sluggsy in The Spy Who Loved Me. There is also a return to a wider realism not seen since perhaps Casino Royale and Live and Let Die with a myriad of plots emanating from Scaramanga's employer - Castro's Cuba. The more stripped down plot of saving the free world's sugar industry is certainly a far cry from the more fantastical Fleming plots of the past - zeroing in a nuclear rocket on London in Moonraker (1955) or stealing two atomic bombs in Thunderball (1961)!
Obviously, as Fleming was ill and tired at the time of writing The Man with the Golden Gun he didn't get any chance to travel to new and exciting locations for what was to be his final literary work. Though the Panama Canal was apparently considered as a location for the novel (at least according to his friend Richard Hughes) Fleming instead returned to his old haunting ground of Jamaica and focused on the new elements of the culture of the Rastafarians, Jamaican brothels and the mangrove swamps. Fleming had already of course used his home from home, Jamaica, in the novels Live and Let Die, Dr. No and the short stories 'For Your Eyes Only' and 'Octopussy'.
These are just some ideas that come to my mind onThe Man with the Golden Gun. We also know from a letter to William Plomer that Fleming (who was quite literally dying at the time) said that the novel represented his last work as he had run out of both puff and zest and that he found the writing difficult and a lot slower than was usual. It's likely the published novel was Fleming's first draft edited as usual by William Plomer at Jonathan Cape.
Well, that's more than enough from me now. What do you think inspired Fleming's last Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun and his creation of the main villain Francisco Scaramanga? I'm all ears! :)
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Comments
Thank you @Birdleson. I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking that TMWTGG is a very neglected Fleming Bond novel in terms of research.
"Jamaica" ?
Yes, that's a big part of it I think. I added that into the OP along with some other things.
Uncomfortable place for research. :)
And yes, I definitely see The Man With The Golden Gun a story Fleming perhaps wanted to churn out as one more Bond novel in order not to leave Bond in the unsituated and lost state after the events of You Only Live Twice. But, given all the circumstances, Fleming did put the best of his efforts despite his condition to deliver a fantastic story. Yes, I do love the Golden Gun novel.
And on a side note, he had a surprisingly important influence in the movies: I have seen elements of it in LTK and SF, maybe more than in the movie of the same name.
Mention of The Man With the Golden Typewriter should also remind us that Fleming shared Scaramanga's fascination with gold-plated objects. He merely needed to exchange a typewriter for a pistol. The plot elements of ganja-cultivation and sugar industry turmoil were surely derived from Jamaican news items that he took in during his last visit to island, either through newspapers or chatting with locals. Alas, while such a plot is realistic, it's also the most boring one in Bond history.
TMWTGG is lumpy book because it uneasily combines new and startling elements with tried-and-true ones. The opening chapters exemplify the new elements. Since Fleming had sent Bond to Russia in the last book, he had to resolve that plot, and in his Counterpoint interview he mentions the Russians being "up to their old tricks" and assassinating people with cyanide-filled water pistols. That certainly helped suggest Bond's assassination-attempt on M. But the rest of the book, aside from the final chapter, is a return to the familiar and reads exactly like the work of an author low on energy. Bond's mental anguish gets wiped away by shock therapy (which in reality helped drive Hemingway to suicide), and after Spectre Bond is back to fighting the Russians. Scaramanga, as Hendricks reminds us, kills for the KGB.
One minor item I find of interest: the authorship of the dossier on Scaramanga. Fleming says it was written by:
Someone on another board suggested that C.C. is based on Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1957–1980. He was also a member of the Secret Intelligence Service during World War II (an experience that allowed him to write the classic Last Days of Hitler) and a friend of its head, Dick White. Lastly, he was one Ann Fleming's recurring dinner guests, so he almost certainly knew Fleming. He seems to be a plausible model for C.C.
Catalan? Catania?...
I have to say I'm not a big fan of TMWTGG and I agree with most of what @Revelator said above. It comes across as a padded out short story and apart from the opening with M and the finale in the swamp there's not much to get the juices flowing.
Reading this post, though, I am struck by a far more daring idea for the book:
My big idea is:- not to write it at all.
Given how little it adds to the series it wouldn't be the greatest loss but the most important thing is it would elevate the end of YOLT into a shattering conclusion.
An amnesiac Bond wandering off to Vladivostok with no conception of who the Soviets are and who he is and that's your lot folks!!!
A simply staggering cliffhanger and the irony of the greatest opponent of SMERSH innocently strolling into the belly of the beast it so much better an ending than just killing him off.
Bond would exist in a Schroedinger's cat limbo; both alive and dead at the same time. Yes it would be maddening for fans but a perfect ending. Just look at the Italian Job. You can't improve on that and although I've always yearned for a sequel I'm also glad they didn't because the ending is so perfect.
For me TMWTGG badly diminishes this gut wrenching ending we could have had and the book we got isn't good enough that I couldn't lose it to preserve the finale of YOLT for eternity.
Of course you could say Fleming didn't know he was dying so was just carrying on business as usual but I think his correspondences from the time suggest he had a fair inkling. The books were a success, the films were starting to bring him serious money; he had no real need to write it, especially when he was so ill.
I think I'd have preferred Bond to have mirrored his creator and gone out in style ('I'm terribly sorry to bother you chaps') than just fade away in this unsatisfactory, half finished effort.
As for the continuity of the story, I could imagine TMWTGG as a new birthing process for Bond, resulting in more novels featuring Bond V2.0. In TMWTGG Bond returns somewhat ot form, yet his past has still left some marks on him. This could be the basis for a slightly altered character, thus perhaps giving Fleming new inspiration. I understand that Fleming already by the time of TB confessed to have run out of steam. However that didn´t keep him from delivering one of his best novels with OHMSS shortly after.
If Fleming had an inkling that he wasn´t going to be here for very much longer, he might have thought about different possible outcomes, for his life, mirroring in Bond´s life.
And I would have to disagree that the plot is boring. It is not as outlandish or large scale than some of them, but where else could he have gone after YOLT? Actually, after all his novels since DN and excluding TSWLM? The plot had to be of smaller scale and more spy thriller than the travelogue to Pandemonium Bond lived with YOLT. Yes, TMWTGG needed a lot of rework and it is a half finished novel, but even if Fleming have had energy and time, I still think the novel would have been and should have been smaller scale and somewhat bare comparatively of other ones.
That made me start thinking--what if Fleming had only written the first section of TMWTGG and ended it with Bond being dragged away from M's desk, foaming at the mouth, his entire survival and future with the service in doubt? That would have certainly been "a simply staggering cliffhanger."
As his wife said, "Ian should certainly not have written the last book. I implored him to rest. The doctors warned him time and again. It was far too much strain for a man who had suffered a bad coronary attack...He didn’t need the money. But with publishers, film-makers, the press and the public all seemingly insatiable, the writing of the next Bond fantasy, and then the next, became a compulsion. Bond was his Frankenstein's monster."
You might be alone there--TB is the least messy of the books, probably because Fleming had help with the plot (his usual weak point), and Kissy is one of his best heroines; her story about Hollywood and David Niven is utterly charming.
Fleming had a definite inkling. His health was shattered and he continually refused to take his doctor's advice. He was determined to burn out, not fade away. But illness had also reduced his writing time by half and disrupted the routine that produced the earlier Bond books. So it's no surprise that TMWTGG reads like the product of an author working at half-capacity and unable to fully explore his story.
I agree. I think one of the major problems with TMWTGG is that it sets up but fails to resolve its opening plotline of Bond losing his mind, disgracing himself with the service, and having to find a way back to becoming his old self. Instead of showing Bond becoming Bond again, Fleming skips forward to rebooted Bond versus Scaramanga. Fleming was tired and decided to skip what would have been harder to write. But it would have been more interesting to intertwine Bond's gradual recovery with his new assignment. There's a vestige of this in Bond's inability to kill Scaramanga in cold blood, but Fleming doesn't explore the idea, so Bond ends up looking stupid in the climax. What if Bond throughout the book had been haunted by the continually-building suspicion that he could no longer kill in cold blood like a proper assassin, that he was reaching the limit of his life as an executioner?
He'd planned to go to Panama Canal--presumably the story would have involved someone trying to destroy it. That's vastly interesting idea than sugar futures. Fleming's earlier novels set in Jamaica had plots of much greater interest. Everyone's interested in pirate treasure and rocketry. Who gives rat's booty about sugar futures?
Why? YOLT had a few outlandish elements, but the actual plot--killing a man who runs a suicide garden--was pretty small-scale. Furthermore, Fleming had already read the script of the film of Goldfinger, and had he lived beyond its release, he probably would have felt pressure to devise bigger plots.
But let's say that TMWTGG needed a small-scale plot. If so, why couldn't Fleming have made it about Scaramanga trying to assassinate someone? That's his job after all. The book tells us what a fantastic killer Scaramanga is, but we never see him at work. Tanner says Bond could never defeat Scaramanga, but the rest of the book fails to suggest why. We keep expecting a tense game of cat-and-mouse but all we get are too many scenes in that damn hotel and a wheezy train ride.
Another under-explored element: Scaramanga's supposed homosexual tendencies. Why did Fleming bring this up and then completely drop it? Amis might be roughly correct in supposing that Fleming chickened out on having Scaramanga lust for Bond. If so, he missed a chance to ratchet up the tension and make the book more interesting. It could have gone in so many other, better directions.
My suggestions, had I been William Plomer, would have been the following: keep the attempted assassination attempt of M, but skip the electro-shock cure-all. Have a scene with Bond being painfully head-shrunk by Sir James Molony and reminded of who he is, then have M ruthlessly decide to send Bond to Cuba to assassinate Scaramanga. Mary Goodnight is assigned to further Bond's rehabilitation, by training him and helping him remember his old working methods. Bond chases Scaramanga through Cuba, but fails to kill him via sniper rifle, because he's still rusty and he realizes he might not be able to kill in cold blood anymore. Bond follows Scaramanga into Jamaica, where the Queen (or some other important person) is scheduled to visit, and realizes she is his next target. Pretending to still be a brainwashed double-agent, Bond asks to work for Scaramanga. The latter is suspicious but sexually attracted to Bond and hires him. The you're set up for a climax where Bond, still unsure of his ability to kill, absolutely has to kill Scaramanga, to protect the important person targeted for assassination. Perhaps in the end it could be revealed that Scaramanga fatally delayed his best chance to kill Bond because he was still hoping to get him in bed...
The james Bond after YOLT almost kills his own boss and is essentially given a second chance to succeed of to die in the attempt but only this time in the service of his country. The job is essentially a 00 job as it is in essence the killing of Scaramanga, even M is not sure his 007 is up for the job. While the story is small in importance it does rebuild James Bond into the man he was before with his history given a place in his life, which he says in the last paragraph in the book.
I find the closure of the whole Spectre affair through this book well done. It showed that James Bond is only a man and not the superspy from the movies. For me TMWTGG is a sad promise of the new series which was sadly never accomplished by Fleming.
Oh and thinking about it I don't mind Fleming recycling things from earlier books, he had done so in the past on numerous occasion (see the backgrounds of Le Chiffre, Hugo Drax and Goldfinger for instance).
Oh, that sounds very like the plot of John Gardner's Never Send Flowers (1993) and its villain David Dragonpol's plot to assassinate Princess Diana and her sons at EuroDisney. Perhaps Dragonpol was a more developed version of Scaramanga. They're in effect both serial killers so there is that link there...
I think Gardner also followed it up in his second Bond novel, For Special Services (1982), with villain Markus Bismaquer fancying Bond and bringing him out of his drugged state at a critical moment in the plot. That was Gardner effectively doing what Fleming might have wanted to do himself in TMWTGG but then reneged on.
Naturally, I approve, @Revelator!
I completely agree.
The points and hypothesis that they have raised has inspired me to re-read TMWTGG.
It is one of only two Flemings that I have only read once - the other being DAF - and the fact that I've ploughed through the others on a multiplicity of occasions speaks to my disappointment.
My only reading was in '65. I was in mourning for Fleming at the time and remember being distinctly unimpressed by the title - I thought it was corny and lacked originality and the cover art - I thought it was the weakest of Chopping's fabulous designs. Those things mattered to me back then. As they do today.
Beyond that, I can remember being completely knocked out by the beginning but it went down hill like the proverbial bob sleigh on the Cresta run after that. Indeed, the only other part that sticks in my memory is the swamp finale.
Dysfunctional would be the descriptor that comes to mind when summarising the book after only one reading.
Given what I thought back then, I think the perfect scenario would have been for Fleming to finish by writing a short story that finished after the attempted assassination of 'M'.
How to finish it would have been the key question. Perhaps Moneypenny could have played a role because I loved the finale mention of Bond in the diaries.
I will re-read this and return with a more up to date appreciation.
Only twice Draggers? I imagine you've read NSF more times than that.
TMWTGG is poor but it's not in NSF's league of awfulness.
I agree with your points on the title - Fleming's worst and not very imaginative.
I don't think I can agree on having the start of TMWTGG as a short story and then leaving that as the cliffhanger.
Having Bond heading off to Vladivostok and leaving us to imagine what happens is a far more powerful ending and, crucially, a better way for our hero to bow out than a lunatic attempting virtual patricide who is then dragged off to a cell.
I have one theory on what might have inspired Ian Fleming to create Scaramanga for his last Bond novel, but it is only a theory. I don't want to spoil my upcoming article by revealing it here but it'd be nice to hear the thoughts of other literary Bond fans on this topic. :)
I think Fleming lacked time to develop the character, hence there are things in his dossier that don't show up elsewhere. I would also add the Spangs as villains with no class, or very little. TMWTGG seems to me a novel, like DAF and TSWLM, that is very influenced by American hardboiled crime fiction.
Scaramanga had perhaps no class but was still a decent target for any government sanctioned assassin, which Bond was again at that time. His job was simply killing another assassin. While doing so Bond was reborn and chooses to return to live. Scaramanga was the mirror image of Bond a Russian trained assassin with no ties to anybody but his latest paycheck. Bond is supposed to be his alter ego but yet lost after the damage suffered in the Spectre trilogy.
I kinda liked TMWTGG as it was a return of the pre-Blofeld 007.
Yes, due to illness, Fleming's daily writing routine was cut in half. Though Fleming had completed the book, he wasn't satisfied with the results and made an unprecedented request to delay publication by a year, in order to revise it.
True. But whereas the Spangs and Sluggsy and Horror fit within books set in America, one expects something different from a Spanish-born villain working in Cuba. Scaramanga is an American-stereotype rather than a Latin one, which feels strange.
In terms of jobs, yes. But in terms of character Scaramanga is the inverse of Bond, one is vulgar, mercenary, and fundamentally cruel, the other is sophisticated, patriotic, and ultimately chivalrous.
The Bond of TMWTGG is practically a pre-Drax OO7--he has very little personality.
Check this: https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/8484/where-was-francisco-scaramanga-born/p1
I'd really love to hear members' take on the origins of the literary Scaramanga and what exactly inspired Ian Fleming to create this character for his final Bond novel, TMWTGG. :)