"ENDIT": this single cablese word, prophetic and appropriate, is the title of the last chapter of the last James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. From the hospital bed where he lies recovering from bullet wounds, Bond cables M, refusing the knighthood which a grateful government has offered him. In You Only Live Twice we left Bond, bemused from the holocaust which closed his duel with Blofeld, heading blindly for Vladivostok. We now learn what happened to him there, and in what strange...

[The Man with the Golden Gun is] a sadly empty tale, empty of the interests and effects that for better or worse, Ian Fleming had made his own. Violence is at a minimum. Sex too…. And there's no gambling, no gadgets or machinery to speak of, no undersea stuff, none of those lavish and complicated eats and drinks, hardly even a brand-name apart from Bond's Hoffritz safety razor and the odd bottle of Walker's de luxe Bourbon. The main plot, in the sense of the scheme proposed by th...