Warning: Here be spoilers.

Ian Fleming, for reasons unknown, filtered almost everything that made Casino Royale so enjoyable right out of Live and Let Die. The examination of James Bond's mental machinery, the intrigue, and the excitement have all evaporated and, even worse, been replaced mostly by casual racism and a tussle with an octopus.

Live and Let Die orbits around a fictional 1950s African-American underworld, which means it's infused with the sad and obsolete idea that black people are inherently different from white. Thankfully it's not a theme, just an assumption by an aristocratic English author born in 1908, one apparently made so subconsciously that it zipped from his brain and out his fingers onto the page as readily as his assumption that Florida's full of oldsters. And so Fleming treats Bond's visit to Harlem to track down the criminal mastermind Mr. Big as if he's infiltrating an unknown village deep in Papua New Guinea. 007 acts like an interloper among the indigenous, nervously feeling his way through the dangerous wilderness of Manhattan Avenue and Cathedral Parkway. The book's emphasis on African-Americans as an alien nation of others makes it profoundly uncomfortable to read. "Negress" is not a word one likes to stumble upon, especially not every five pages. The willies only get worse as Fleming builds his plot around the idea that all black Americans deeply believe in Caribbean voodoo, a stereotype as embarrassing for its ignorance as its general nuttiness.

That said, as racist as Live and Let Die makes Fleming seem, it also makes clear that the author's racism didn't equate to hate. Fleming has the nasty habit of treating black people as a group rather than individuals, but he seems to go out of his way to portray them favorably. When Felix Leiter serves as 007's tour guide through Harlem, he says, "Personally, I like Negroes." Force your way beyond the prejudicial ickiness dripping from that sentence and consider the context, and it shines favorably on Fleming. For the Bond audience, mid-1950s working class British men picking up a novel for a few hours of escape, Harlem might as well have been New Guinea. Fleming knew the pervasive distaste for non-whites among his readers, and you can see him trying at least a little to wipe it away. When he takes the time to develop a few black characters as individuals, he plays them against expected type. He portrays Mr. Big, while vicious and likely insane, as someone brilliant and cunning enough to command a criminal enterprise beyond the scope of any existing cartel. Bond's Cayman Islander sidekick, a fisherman named Quarrel, (Made somewhat famous by his appearance in the first 007 film Dr. No.) is brave and knowledgeable. He trains and tutors Bond, who Fleming makes a point of noting "liked him immediately." (Fleming seems more enlightened than the creators of the movie version of Live and Let Die a full two decades later. The film's a disastrous minstrel show that not only stereotypes its African-American and West Indian characters but also works under the assumption that every black person in New York knows each other. The only redeeming quality of that utterly egregious bullshit is that it leads most viewers to spoon out their eyeballs before the appearance of cornball Sheriff J.W. Pepper, an abomination on par with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or maybe even Star Trek V.)

Fleming certainly had much more exposure to black culture than most of his contemporary readers. He spent much of his time in Jamaica and wrote all his Bond novels there. That also explains why he set the conclusion of the exceptionally uninteresting story on the island, where Mr. Big attempts to smuggle out pirate treasure to fund his Soviet pals. (For fuck's sake, pirate treasure? Clearly MI-6 took this case because the Hardy Boys were unavailable.) It's under the Jamaican waters where Bond faces his greatest challenge of the tale: a presumably either drunk or Trotskyite octopus that tries to drag him down to his death.
Okay fine, there are some bigger set pieces in the book, but the unintentionally hilarious octopus skirmish is one of the few in which Bond actively rescues himself. Most of the action in Live and Let Die takes place around Bond while he either avoids it or is saved by happenstance. A bomb goes off in his hotel room, but all it does is make a mess. He avoids assassins on a train by getting off before his stop. Even when he and the French-Haitian psychic babe Solitaire (A character so thoroughly pointless that in comparison Jane Seymour's blando filmic version seem like something from Eugene O'Neill.) climactically fall into the clutches of Mr. Big, Bond wins out by lying around and waiting for stuff to blow up.

That might all be forgivable if Fleming fleshed out his lead character with the intricacies he crafted for Casino Royale, but Live and Let Die's James Bond is a epicurean hunk of drywall who for the most part could've been renamed Banes Jond if Fleming had decided he didn't want to write a series. Bond is so neglected that much of the book is handed over to the human vanilla skim soy smoothie, Felix Leiter, the one character who seems to know what's going pn. Leiter, unlike the reader, at least gets the pleasure of being fed to a shark. (A storyline, 007 film fans will remember, that Albert R. Broccoli and co. dredged up for the Fleet bisacodyl enema of a Bond movie, 1989's Licence to Kill.)