AUTOGRAPHS

Diamonds Are Forever – A Trip To America

Ian Fleming followed up Moonraker with Diamonds Are Forever, which had been entirely in the UK. Since several readers wrote to Fleming to complain that they missed the exotic locations they had become used to in the James Bond novels Fleming returned once more to North America, which in the days before transatlantic jets, was still a glamorous destination to many Britons.

In the second James Bond book, Live And Let Die, James Bond had already visited New York and shown around the jazz spots of Harlem by Felix Leiter. This time he takes him to Sardis for martinis and dinner before they bother take a road trip to Saratoga in Leiter’s “Studilac”, a Cadillac-Studebaker cross.

While in Saratoga Felix teaches Bond a few of the tricks used to fix horse races in the United States. He also introduced James Bond to bourbon and branch water, which he takes to like a fish to water.

As well as learning about racing, James Bond his mob connecrtions send him to Las Vegas to play the casinos. Of course it is fixed so he receives a payoff, but you get a sense of what Vegas would have been like in the 1950s when the book was written, with the bright lights of the hotels and casinos on the strip.

Bond is up against American mobsters called the Spangled Mob, but when suspicions fall on him he is taken to a privately owned ghost town owned by the gang, which comes with a steam train and saloon.

Bond is in real trouble, but manages to escape and he and Tiffany make the crossing to England on the Queen Elizabeth. However, two of the Spangled Mob heavies are also on the boat and James Bond has rather less than a comfortable voyage back home.

Diamonds Are Forever is one of the weaker James Bond books, but still has some worthwhile locations that are fun to read about and take the reader back in time.

Felix Jones highlights (Dash)