Live and Let Die (James Bond, #2)

by Ian Fleming

He was reminded to ask for the ‘check’ rather than the ‘bill’, to say ‘cab’ instead of ‘taxi’ and (this from Leiter) to avoid words of more than two syllables. (‘You can get through any American conversation,’ advised Leiter, ‘with “Yeah”, “Nope” and “Sure”.’)

It is true today many Americans mostly speak and read words of two-syllables only.

Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter. ‘In my job,’ he said, ‘when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s “live and let die”.’

‘Everybody’s nearly dead in St Petersburg,’ explained Solitaire. ‘It’s the Great American Graveyard. When the bank clerk or the post-office worker or the railroad conductor reaches sixty he collects his pension or his annuity and goes to St Petersburg to get a few years’ sunshine before he dies. It’s called “The Sunshine City” The weather’s so good that the evening paper there, The Independent, is given away free any day the sun hasn’t shone by edition time.

St. Petersburg in Florida.

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.

The first tears since his childhood came into James Bond’s blue-grey eyes and ran down his drawn cheeks into the bloodstained sea.