Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

If Fleming’s first Bond book, Casino Royale is regularly and unabashedly sexist, then Live and Let Die slacks back on the sexism in order to make room for lashings of racism. Of course, it’s a book of its time and it shouldn’t be judged by the standards of the 21st Century, indeed beneath the lazy stereotyping and abject terror or patronising disdain with which each black person seems to be treated, one can almost wonder whether Fleming is actually just more intrigued than anything else by black culture, and in some way, this is his tribute to it.

Whichever way you want to swing it, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that on page after page you will come across descriptions of black people very much rooted in the past. Indeed the plot revolves around the notion that pretty much every black person in the whole of the US and the Caribbean are all under the control of one man, and that that man is using the suggestion of voodoo in order to perpetrate an array of crimes.

If you work very hard to ignore the repeated references to race, then underneath is a reasonably enjoyable story, written well, with a plot that moves at a great pace. You really do have to work hard though.

(Live and Let Die on Amazon)