By “weird” I mean “racist.” Yet because it was Fleming’s second novel, and more of a crime story than a spy story, I wondered if maybe it, too, was an exception. L and Let D was also deeply weird, though, for its presentation of black Americans as a conspiracy along the lines of international communism. This conjecture was disproven, however, by Live and Let Die, which starts with Bond on page one and, except for short bouts of third-person omniscient, sticks with him throughout. Maybe the whole gimmick was that Bond appeared as a kind of secondary character, or as the instrument that obliterates the people we meet in the first act. From Russia was the first 007 novel I read, so I wondered if this odd choice was a feature of the series. Pretty much the whole first act is about people who have been selected by the Soviet government to kill Bond. Your boy Ben al-Fowlkes was about 90 pages into From Russia, With Love when he texted me to note that James Bond had not yet appeared.
