Pun Salad

By coincidence, I read this short book concurrently with the (very long) novel Gone With the Wind. My copy of Live and Let Die has (according to Amazon's "Look Inside the Book" function) three occurrences of that N-word, including the original title of Chapter Five. Both books make heavy use of their black characters' dialect. ("Don' ack mad at me, honey. Ah was fixin tuh treat yuh tonight. Take yuh tuh Smalls Par'dise, mebbe. See dem high-yallers shakin' 'n truckin,")

Yeah. That sort of thing would not fly today, I'm pretty sure. Live and Let Die is from 1954, GWtW from 1936. Times change. That said:

Bond is tasked with tracking down Communist agent (and master criminal) "Mr. Big", who's financing Soviet spying activities in America with gold smuggled in from the Caribbean. Mr. Big is big in Harlem, and he keeps his criminal empire in line via voodoo and the extra-sensory perceptive powers of "Solitaire", a beautiful maiden Mr. Big keeps as his slave.

Bond teams up with CIA agent Felix Leiter to investigate. This works out not at all well for Felix. (The book's details on that were repurposed for a different Bond movie.) Bond survives a series of encounters with Big and his gang, but it's a near thing. (It doesn't help that Big really seems to have Bond outsmarted and outgunned nearly all the way through the book.) There is a slam-bang final encounter. Which, spoiler alert, Bond survives.