"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 condition he returned to London. This opening sequence is the most interesting part of the book. Afterwards, Bond is perfunctorily de-brainwashed and sent, good as new, to hunt down "Pistols" Scaramanga, the deadliest gunman in the Caribbean….

The plot, as in several of Fleming's later books, contains little more than would make a respectable short story, and both its setting and some of...