Dr. No by Ian Fleming

Quarrel had smelled his death.  Yet he had followed Bond unquestioningly.  His faith in Bond had been stronger than his fear.  And Bond had let him down.  Would Bond also be the death of the girl?

At the end of From Russia, With Love, James Bond, the world's greatest secret agent, loses consciousness and collapses because he has been poisoned by Rosa Klebb, the world's most dangerous lesbian and the Soviet Union's expert on torture and murder!  I thought From Russia, With Love the best of the first five 007 novels--let's hope the sixth, Dr. No, can match it!  I am reading a 2012 printing of the 1958 novel that I borrowed from the Baltigore County Public Library.  This copy has illustrations by, presumably, the child of somebody who borrowed it before I did.

In my early teens I read Dr. No in the Pan edition with the spiderweb cover, which I think I found in my paternal grandparents' house and which I guess is probably still someplace in my parent's house or my brother's apartment.  Unlike Live and Let Die, which I read in my youth and almost completely forgot about, I actually remember many key scenes from Dr. No.  I am curious to see if my memory of various things is accurate or has been distorted by the passage of time and exposure to the cinematic version of Dr. No.

In Live and Let Die, James Bond, while pursuing Soviet agent and smuggler Mr. Big, worked with John Strangways, the top British agent in the Caribbean.  In the first chapter of Dr. No we find ourselves in Jamaica, where we witness Strangways, and his No. 2, Mary Trueblood, get murdered by four "Chigroes," men with both Chinese and African ancestors.  The men use revolvers with silencers (which people who know about firearms will tell you weakens the credibility of the story) to kill the British spies, and then bundle them into a hearse and burn down their HQ, destroying all their documents.

It is common in military and espionage fiction for the protagonist to despise his superiors and for him to be portrayed as a better person and a better fighting man than those in charge.  The commander or the politicians are always sending him off on foolish operations or starting immoral or unwinnable wars, and it is made clear that the protagonist is more brave, is a better leader, and is a better strategist and tactician than those higher than he in the hierarchy.  We don't really get too much of that in James Bond.  Rather than seeing M as an old man who sends young men off to die pursuing the interests of the bourgeoisie, James Bond loves and respects M, with Fleming comparing their relationship to a marriage.  The first scene of chapter 2 of Dr. No, in which veteran naval officer M talks to his driver, a veteran sailor, demonstrates M's concern and care for his subordinates and his good relationship with them.

If you've been in a marriage, you know there are rough spots.  Well, 007 and M are going through just such a rough spot.  M is irritated that 007 almost got himself killed by Rosa Klebb, and he blames Bond's irrational affection for the .25 Beretta.  So he makes Bond start carrying around the Walther PPK 7.65 mm and a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver.  Then he sends Bond to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of Strangways and Trueblood.  The "Chinese negro" killers expertly covered their tracks, so everybody thinks that Strangways and Trueblood were lovers and ran off together, and M figures he is sending Bond on an easy job that will allow him to get back in the groove after his months of hospital time following the Klebb episode.  Bond, however, resents being given a "cushy assignment," seeing it as a humiliating punishment.

Call me old-fashioned, but if you are
going to put an attractive woman on the
cover of your book, I think you should show
her face.

Bond is only in Jamaica about ten minutes before it is clear that this is no easy job, that lots of people, Chinese women, to be specific, are keeping an eye on him.  And it is only a few hours before it seems likely that Strangways and Trueblood were murdered by a mysterious half-German, half-Chinese, guy who owns Crab Key, a guano- and jungle-covered island thirty miles north of Jamaica.  Jealous of his privacy, this joker, name of Dr. Julius No, uses radar and machine guns to keep people away from his island.  Many of the clues that point to No come from Quarrel, a character from Live and Let Die with whom Bond reunites, a charming and courageous native of the Cayman Islands and an expert swimmer and sailor.  Like so many of the characters in the Bond novels, Quarrel is of mixed race, a black man with the grey eyes of some adventurous English ancestor--Bond speculates that Quarrel is descended from a pirate or a Cromwellian soldier.  As a well-liked working-class black man, Quarrel knows all kinds of things that Bond's white contacts in Jamaica, like the Governor and the Colonial Secretary, with whom he spends much of chapters 5 and 6, don't know.

While he's in Kingston, Dr. No's agents try to murder Bond with poisoned fruit and a centipede (always with the poison!) and by driving his car off the road and down a cliff.  Cleverly, Bond and Quarrel are not in the car as it careens down the cliff to destruction--they hired a beggar and a clerk who did the books for a whorehouse to impersonate them and it is these gentlemen who go to hell in our heroes' stead.  I think this is the most ruthless and cold-blooded thing Bond has done thus far in six novels.

Bond and Quarrel move to the north shore of Jamaica, where Quarrel trains Bond, getting him back into shape.  Then, under cover of night, the two men canoe to Crab Key, where they meet a beautiful teen-aged blonde with a crooked nose who is also trespassing on the island, Honeychile Rider--Rider is collecting rare shellfish she sells to somebody in Miami via the mails.  In between hiding from, fleeing, and fighting Dr. No's half-Chinese, half-black henchmen, Rider tells Bond all about her strange, Edgar Rice Burroughs-style life.  (Bond thinks of her as "Girl Tarzan.")  Her family was among the wealthy Jamaican elite for centuries, but had fallen on hard times by the year of her birth.  Orphaned by a fire, Honeychile lived in the ruins of the family home with her black nanny.  Because she tamed the snakes and scorpions and other animals that infested the decayed estate, the local blacks thought she had magic powers ("obeah") and avoided her.  Her nanny died when she was fifteen, and Honeychile was pursued by a white man, an overseer, who got drunk one night and knocked her unconscious, breaking her nose, and proceeded to rape her.  She achieved her revenge by sneaking into his house and putting a black widow spider in his bed, which killed him.

Eventually Bond and Rider are captured by some of Dr. No's thugs who ride around the island in a wheeled, armored vehicle decorated so that gullible and superstitious blacks will think it is a dragon and avoid the island.  (This Scooby-Doo stuff makes no sense--rumors of a dragon would attract attention from intrepid educated people, like journalists, scientists, and hunters, just the kind of people Dr. No would want to keep away from his island.)  Poor Quarrel is burned to death by the vehicle's flame thrower; 007 and the teenager who is already falling in love with him are handcuffed and given a lift on the dragon back to Dr. No's underground lair, which is done up like a luxury hotel or spa, complete with a staff of pretty and attentive Chinese women who call the prisoners "patients."

Bond and Honeychile have dinner with Dr. No, who tells them his biography (one career highlight: as a young criminal in a New York "tong," some other criminals chopped off his hands, so he now has metal pincers for hands) and describes his operations on Crab Key--not only does he sell the guano, but he is working with Moscow to jam the signals of American long range guided missiles and even take control of the missiles.  He could, he claims, redirect US missiles fired during tests or in war to land back in the US or in British Caribbean territories.  Finally, he explains why he has allowed 007 and the sea shell collector to get a good night's rest and eat a healthy meal--Dr. No is studying pain and human endurance, and he wants to test Bond and Rider to the breaking point.  He recently fed a black woman to an army of crabs (Jamaican "land crabs" or "black crabs.")  This "negress" expired after three hours exposure to the crabs--she died of fright.  Dr. No wants to see how a white woman's endurance compares to that of the black woman's.  When he realizes Dr. No is going to feed Honeychile to crabs, Bond calls Dr. No all kinds of names and says he will "fry in hell for this" but doesn't have the presence of mind to inform the doctor that his sample size (just two women!) is going to be way too small to yield reliable results.  I personally wouldn't take Dr. No's research results seriously until he had fed ten women of African ancestry and ten women of European ancestry to these crabs.

As for Bond, Dr. No tells him he has the honor of being the first man sent through his brand new "obstacle race, an assault course against death."  Over the course of two chapters, Bond crawls and climbs through this maze, tortured by electric shocks and broiling heat, forced to fight hand-to-hand against a swarm of tarantulas and, at the end of the course, a giant squid.  When he busts out of the death maze he finds he is near the island's dock, where Dr. No is supervising the loading of a ship with tons and tons of guano.  Bond assassinates the guy manning the crane that is directing the guano-disgorging tube, grabs the controls, and then buries Dr. No in guano, drowning the maniac in bird shit.  Then he reunites with Honeychile, who has escaped the crab horde--she knew something about crabs that Dr. No didn't know, that they don't really eat live people and, being Girl Tarzan, lover of creepy crawlies, she was not in the least bit scared of them.  While Bond was battling the tarantulas and the giant squid, Honeychile was slowly freeing herself from her bonds.  (Dr. No's experiments don't make any sense, because nobody was watching Bond or Honeychile with a stop watch and a rifle to see how long they survived or to catch them if they managed to overcome their invertebrate opponents.  Who the hell builds a death maze and doesn't bother to watch the contestant fight the level boss?)

Bond shoots down several "Chigroes," seizes the dragon, and chauffeurs Honeychile to the south end of Crab Key, where Quarrel's canoe is hidden, and they escape to Jamaica.

Dr. No is not bad--the sex and violence and espionage elements are good enough--but it is far weaker than From Russia, With Love.   Quarrel is a decent character, but not as interesting a doomed friend of James Bond as Darko Kerim, and Honeychile Rider is OK, but no better a character than Tatiana Romanova.  (Romanova, with whom I thought Bond was in love, isn't even mentioned in this book.  I wonder what kind of life she is leading in the West.)  As for the villains, next to the terrific Red Grant and Rosa Klebb, Dr. No is kind of underdeveloped.  (By the way, M tells a guy who asks that Klebb is dead, but I hope he was lying!)

Then we have setting and atmosphere; compared to Fleming's sinister depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain and in anarchic Istanbul in the fifth 007 novel, the Jamaica of the sixth book is a bore.  It's hot and there are bugs?  Come on, man!  You can do better than that!  Maybe Fleming should have explored the underworld of the "Chigroes," the way he explored the African-American underworld in Live and Let Die, or included more "yellow peril" stuff--the enemies are all Chinese, but Fleming didn't make use of any specifically Chinese cultural or historical characteristics in the story that I can remember.  This is a sad contrast to Moonraker, where there was plenty of "Germans are robots" stuff, Diamonds Are Forever, in which Bond unleashed a barrage of hilarious slander against Italian-Americans and harsh criticism of Las Vegas, and of course Fleming's masterpiece From Russia, With Love, which is full of specific observations of Russian communists, Turks and gypsies.

I can't deny that my interest in James Bond has waned a little bit.  It may be a while before we check out the next 007 novel, Goldfinger.