Doctor No (1962) | Music

Music is important in every movie, but especially with the James Bond films. That starts with the James Bond theme itself. Monty Norman composed the score for Dr No, but Saltzman and Broccoli weren't into what he came up with for the main theme. They hired jazz musician John Barry to quickly come up with something short and sweet that they could fit into the title track, but he didn't even have time to watch the movie, so he just modified some of his own stuff. The result was the crazy popular, now classic theme.

As the Bond series went on, the Bond theme got used more and more sparingly, but it's everywhere in Dr No. It's playing when he first introduces himself and then keeps showing up: when he leaves the casino, when he arrives at the airport in Jamaica, when he's walking across the hotel lobby, and when he's driving to Miss Taro's. Dr No cements the association between the character of James Bond and this music, even when he's not doing anything especially exciting. But it's used in a couple of cool, dangerous moments too. It's playing when he surprises Miss Taro by showing up at her door; then a brass variation on it plays when he murders the follow up guard in the river on Crab Key. That kind of thing is what the theme eventually becomes known for, so I'm looking forward to tracking that as we go through the series.

Back to the credits though, what's interesting about them - and sort of jarring - is that the Bond theme is only one of three pieces that play over the opening credits, the other two being a section of just tropical drumming and then "Three Blind Mice," which leads right into the first scene. It's not even a very well arranged medley; each piece just fades and dissolves into the next one without anything to bridge them. But it does introduce the tone and setting for the movie: the Bond theme is dangerous and exciting, then the other two create images of the Caribbean where the movie takes place. One of the other things I'll be looking at in this project is how well the opening titles and music suggest the movies' themes and settings. As clunky as the transitions are, the Dr No titles and music do that very well.

The credits themselves were designed by Maurice Binder. He'd been designing titles for a few years by that time on films like Indiscreet, The Road to Hong Kong, and The Grass is Greener. The Dr No titles are fun, but not especially unique. That kind of animated sequence was super popular in the late '50s and early '60s, with Saul Bass being one of its most successful users. It wasn't until an accident during the production of From Russia with Love that Binder [oops, it was Robert Brownjohn] found the style that would define the rest of the Bond series. For Dr No though, he begins with a lot of meaningless, but exciting flashing dots and squares, then transitions to silhouettes of island dancers during the drumming and the "three blind mice" themselves during that song. It's all fun imagery and makes the music changes less awkward.

Top Ten Theme Songs

1. Dr No
2. TBD
3. TBD
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Top Ten Title Sequences

1. Dr No
2. TBD
3. TBD
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Doctor No (1962) | Villains

Dr No tones down its main villain from Fleming's version in understandable, but somewhat disappointing ways. It leaves the character Chinese, which is great (No was inspired by Fu Manchu, but isn't himself a true example of Yellow Peril fears in action), but loses the pulpier details. The literary No glides when he walks. With his bald head, he reminds Bond of a giant worm with claws for arms. The movie No replaces the claws with metal hands that are still odd, but - for better or for worse - not as visually striking. The result is an unusual, but believable villain. It's unfortunate that they cast a white actor instead of a Chinese one (as they also did with Miss Taro), but race aside, Joseph Wiseman does an excellent job creating a creepy, memorable antagonist for Bond's first film.

No's tactics are also de-pulped somewhat from the book, but less successfully. Book No has created a labyrinthine obstacle course for the express purpose of testing enemies like Bond. That's too silly for Movie No (and would require an expensive squid battle at the end), so the film loses the obstacle course angle and just has Bond navigate a weird series of air ducts to escape his cell. Stripped of their original purpose, the ducts make no sense with their hot sections and being randomly used to transport water for some reason. (No's plan for Honey is also modified from the novel, but at least it's rational.)

Another change from the novel is No's political allegiance. In the book, he's dabbling in rocket toppling with an eye on offering his services to the Soviets. That's almost an afterthought though and No's real motivation is simply to be left alone with his illusion of sovereignty. In the film, toppling is the focus of his operations and he's working for SPECTRE. It's how Movie Bond learns about that group and one of the things I love most about the Connery (and Lazenby) movies is how they form a saga of Bond's uncovering and fighting that organization. In Dr No, SPECTRE is nothing but a name and that's very cool.



Another thing I like about Dr No is its creation of Professor Dent. He's a lousy liar and a worse assassin, but as ineffectual as he may be, he's wonderful in his slimy patheticness and he's a memorable henchman.

Dent also represents one final thing I want to point out about Doctor No. I'm stealing this idea from the James Bonding podcast, but even though they came up with it, they rarely carry it out so I feel it's fair game. In just about every Bond movie, there's a moment when the villain could easily get rid of Bond and win the day. So as we go through the series, I'm going to point that out and talk about how the bad guy might have succeeded in his plans.

Doctor No tries to kill Bond a few times long distance on Jamaica, but his assassins are mostly ridiculous. A gang of hitmen try to shoot Bond once and are so frightened by some passing headlights that they never try again. Then there's No's own plan to murder Bond with a poisonous spider, which has the benefit of looking like a natural death, but is super unpredictable. At least No is trying though and he almost succeeds a couple of times first by trying to run Bond over a cliff and then by sending Dent to murder Bond in person. Bond gets out of those by his own wits and skill, which is awesome.

Where No fails is on Crab Key. He's already seen that Bond is talented and resourceful, so he offers Bond a place in SPECTRE and when Bond refuses... he locks Bond up? In a cell with giant air ducts. And then totally ignores him. Doctor No gets great marks in style and creepiness, but loses points for being ineffective and kind of dumb. As a henchman, Professor Dent has the same issues as his master.

Top Ten Villains

1. Doctor No
2. TBD
3. TBD
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Top Ten Henchmen

1. Miss Taro
2. Professor Dent
3. TBD
4. TBD
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Doctor No (1962) | Women

I'm a little uncertain about how I want to approach this aspect of the Bond films, so I may make some changes as we go through the series. I know I want to talk about a couple of things pertaining to the main female character in each film, but I'm not sure how much focus to give to other women in the movies. I'll keep talking about Moneypenny in the Story and Bond sections, but I'm less interested in characters like Sylvia Trench and Miss Taro.

For example, Trench was created merely to be a running gag through the series, but was dropped the first time actor Eunice Gayson's friend Terrence Young wasn't the director. The humor in Bond's trying to maintain a regular girlfriend in London is extremely limited, so it's no loss that that plotline fell by the wayside. As an alternative, the film series could have done some dramatically interesting things with that relationship, but that was never the intention and would have clashed with the overall tone of the series.



As for Miss Taro, she's little more than a plot device. She's a bit character in the novel who was expanded in the film to add some color and detail to No's operation in Jamaica. She doesn't have much personality and her "romance" with Bond is forced and unbelievable, but even though she's just there to pad out the film I kind of like her. It's fun to watch her and Bond try to manipulate each other, even though I know she's never going to get the best of him.



You know who I really like though? The photographer who tries unsuccessfully a couple of times to get Bond's picture and ends up in an uncomfortable meeting with Bond, Quarrel, and Felix. She's got no bigger role in the film than she does in the book, but Margaret Le Wars sells it with the perfect combination of hatred and fear. I want to know more about her, which is the highest compliment I can pay to an actress of a bit character like that.



Then we come to Honey Rider. Out of all the women in the Fleming novels I've read so far, she's my favorite (keeping in mind that I just started On Her Majesty's Secret Service). It was always going to be tough to create a film version of Honey that lived up to the character from the novel. And sure enough, they didn't. Ursula Andress is drop dead beautiful and conveys Honey's innocence pretty well, but she doesn't get at the character's competence and self-sufficiency.

That's largely a script problem. Movie Honey doesn't get to save herself from Dr No, much less Bond, but also her back story has been revised from Book Honey's so that she hasn't been living on her own as long. Instead of losing her parents in a tragic fire as a young teenager, Movie Honey lived with her scientist father until he was killed (she suspects) by Dr No. The timeline isn't specific, but including Dr No makes it seem like it only happened in the last couple of years or so. She simply hasn't had as much time as Book Honey to become tough.

Adding to the issue is Andress' looking way more mature than Honey is described in the book. In the novel, Honey's innocence is all about her youth and lack of social training. Andress was only 25 or 26 when Dr No was shot, so it's not that she was too old to play Honey. The problem is that she's a bombshell and when she acts childlike, she comes across more simple than innocent. And unfortunately, I think she comes across that way whether you've read the book or not.

My Favorite Bond Women

I'll finish this section each time with a running list of my Top Ten favorite female characters from the Bond movies. As new favorites get added with each film, less favorite characters will drop off. (I'll do the same for gadgets and opening stingers once the movies start having those too. And for bad guys and music, but that's tomorrow and Friday.)

1. Honey Rider
2. The Photographer from Dr No
3. Miss Taro
4. Sylvia Trench
5. TBD
6. TBD
7. TBD
8. TBD
9. TBD
10. TBD

Doctor No (1962) | Bond

Actors and Allies

As I mentioned yesterday, Dr No goes for a deliberately lighter tone than the novels. That leads to lots of quipping by James Bond, but there's also a gleam in his eye that just doesn't exist for the literary version. Sean Connery was a perfect choice to play this version. He's able to switch effortlessly from bemused to deadly and then back again.

That has a lot to do with sheer confidence. Every time Connery's Bond enters a room, he owns it. Whether it's a hotel lobby, a government office, or the villain's lair, he looks completely at ease and in control. In contrast, the literary Bond is filled with self doubt that ramps up the tension, but he always overcomes it. That would be impossible to put on screen without making Bond a weak character, so Dr No swings the pendulum way to the other side. Viewers know that Bond's in trouble, but he rarely seems to.

Because I don't have a better place to put it, I'm also going to use this section for each film to also talk about Bond's allies and how they're cast and portrayed. I mentioned the Armorer and Moneypenny a little yesterday and don't have much to add about the Armorer except that he's admirably played by Peter Burton (A Clockwork Orange) as professional and humorously disparaging of Bond's preference in firearms.

As for Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell does a great job making her flirtatious, but not completely over the moon about Bond. When he asks her, "What gives?" and she replies, "Me, given an ounce of encouragement," she delivers the line with a melodramatic flourish that reads like kidding to me rather than a true, hopeless crush. Maybe I'm choosing to read it that way, but I prefer to think of Moneypenny and Bond as knowing that any kind of romantic relationship is inappropriate and impossible, but finding each other attractive enough to pretend about it anyway. That may become harder to do as the movies roll on, but let's see how long I can hang onto that interpretation.

The other big ally that needs mentioning is Felix. Jack Lord is possibly my favorite Felix ever, but he's not much like the literary version. Fleming's Felix was a lighter version of Bond and part of his role was to balance out Bond's dark side. Connery's Bond doesn't have a dark side, so Felix kind of struggles to find a new purpose in Dr No. He ends up being mostly just a plot device and a way to comment on Bond's womanizing, but Lord has a great look and tons of charisma, so I love the character anyway.

Finally, I just want to call out Louis Blaazer as Pleydell-Smith, mostly because the character is one of my favorites in the novel. Dr No is Blaazer's only movie credit, so I don't know his story, but he does a fine job making Pleydell-Smith a pleasant ally even if the script doesn't give him as much to do as the novel did.

Best Quip



I don't know if you count this as a quip or not, but thanks to Connery's delivery of it, it's the line that consistently gets a legitimate laugh from me every time I hear it. It's when Pleydell-Smith tells Bond that a package has arrived for him and Bond picks it up. His grin and voice are a childish mixture of excitement and embarrassment as he explains, "Present from home." It's an unexpected reaction and that's what always gets me.

Worst Quip



"I think they were on their way to a funeral."

Oh, James, you're not even trying.

The Gadgets

Though gadgets had become a thing in the novels (Bond's heel-knife was standard enough equipment by this time that Fleming didn't even need to explain it whenever it showed up), Dr No doesn't really have any. The closest is the geiger counter, his "present from home," but that's really just equipment.

Bond’s Best Outfit

I know nothing about fashion, but I know what I like and what I don't, so for each movie I'll pick a favorite outfit and one that makes me groan. My favorite for Dr No is this lightweight suit that's perfect for looking great while walking around a tropical island.



Bond’s Worst Outfit

One of the few rules I do know about fashion is that you don't match the color of your shirt exactly to the color of your pants. Faux pas, James.

Doctor No (1962) | Story

So Fleming got his wish and James Bond finally made it onto the big screen. I'm not going to talk much about behind-the-scenes stuff with the movies except where it directly influences the finished product, but Fleming spent such a long time trying to get a Bond series made - either on television or film - that it's worth mentioning that Dr. No's producers were equally passionate about it. Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli had both tried separately, but unsuccessfully to get Bond films made, but it was only together that they were able to make it happen. There are plenty of books and online resources to get the whole story, so I won't repeat it here, but I especially recommend the documentary Everything or Nothing, which chronicles the whole film series up to Skyfall.

I'm taking a much different approach to the films than I am with the novels. For the literary Bond, I've been curious to track Bond's growth as a person, but that's foolishness with the movies. The films sometimes care about building their own continuity, but they're mostly uninterested in character development. I'll certainly point it out when they do build on previous films, but I can't make that the focus as I write about them.

Instead, I'm going to take the movies on their own terms, while also acknowledging the debts they owe to Fleming's books. To make it easier, I'll divide each film up into five sections: Story, Bond, Women, Villains, and Music with subcategories under each one. Today is all about Dr. No's overall story, then tomorrow we'll look at how it presents James Bond, and so on through the rest of the week. Cool? Cool.

Influences

Ian Fleming's Dr. No
Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love (reference to previous mission where Bond was almost killed)
Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (Bond uses a couple of spy tricks from that novel in his hotel room)
Contemporary issues with US rockets' going astray

Plot Summary

Same as the novel. Bond investigates the disappearance of a couple of British agents and follows up on their final investigation, which leads him to Crab Key and Dr. No.

How Is the Book Different?



To make all the sex and violence palatable to censors and audiences, Saltzman and Broccoli made sure their adaptation had a lot of humor. We'll get into that more tomorrow when we talk specifically about Dr. No's depiction of James Bond, but while the film doesn't go so far as to wink at its audience, there's certainly a twinkle in its eye.

Plotwise, the film makes a much bigger deal out of missile toppling than the novel did. In the book, rocket interference is something that Dr. No seems to be just getting into. The villain is mostly interested in defending his autonomy and sovereignty, but Fleming seemed to realize that that didn't make him threatening enough and sort of tacked on the toppling as an easy way to raise the stakes.

In the film, that's the whole deal. The Jamaica assignment is never the cake assignment that it's supposed to be in the book. M knows from the start that Strangways was investigating stray missiles; he just doesn't know what Strangways' investigation has uncovered. No one believes Strangways ran off with his assistant and there's an ominous feeling around the mystery right from the beginning.

Incidentally, it was Dr. No's missile toppling aspect that made the filmmakers pick it as the source for the first film. They originally had their eye on Thunderball, but the legal dispute around that made them back away. Since there was a real problem in the news at the time with US missiles going astray, the movie Dr. No would have the benefit of tapping into popular interests. That's something that the rest of the series would also be known for.

Making Dr. No the first in the series created some challenges though. For one thing, the novel builds off of Live and Let Die and From Russia with Love in major ways. Strangways and Quarrel were both introduced in Live and Let Die, but the film has to work around that. Bond's never met Strangways as far as we can tell; his loyalty to the dead man is simply as a fellow agent. And Bond has to meet Quarrel for the first time, which is actually pretty great since screenwriters Richard Maibaum, Joanna Harwood, and Berkely Mather give Quarrel reason to distrust Bond at first. That also goes for Felix Leiter, whom Bond too has to meet for the first time.

Finally, there are some other roles that the Dr. No movie either expanded from the novel or completely created, but we can talk about those through the rest of the week.

Moment That’s Most Like Fleming



This is hard to pick, because Dr. No is so faithful to its source material. There are whole scenes right out of the novel. For that reason, I started looking for scenes that didn't directly adapt something Fleming wrote, but managed to capture something important in Fleming's version. There are a couple, but what I settled on was the moment when Bond and Quarrel are setting out to visit Crab Key. Quarrel's nervous, but Bond says, "For me Crab Key's going to be a gentle relaxation."

"From what?" Felix asks. "Dames?" (Felix is kind of grumpy from waiting two hours for Bond to show up.)

"No," says Bond. "From being a clay pigeon."

That's Blunt Instrument talk right there and we see it still in action later when Bond goads Dr. No with insults all through dinner. He's had it with the investigation and just wants to force a confrontation and get this over with.

Moment That’s Least Like Fleming



If you'd asked me before I re-read Fleming what the most Fleming-like moment in Dr. No is, I would've said it's when Bond kills Professor Dent in cold blood. That would have been me reacting against the soft, fluffy Bond that sometimes pops up in Roger Moore movies. I love the cold, hard, "You've had your six" Bond.

But making Bond ruthless doesn't automatically make him faithful to Fleming. Fleming went to great lengths to show that his Bond is uneasy with killing in cold blood. Fleming's Bond has a dark side; it just doesn't include murdering unarmed people. That's not to say that I prefer Fleming's to what we see in Dr. No. I actually don't. But it does mean I'll quit holding up that moment as an example of what the "real" Bond should be like.

The Stinger

Starting with From Russia with Love, I'll use the Story section to talk about and grade the pre-credits stingers on each film. There's not one in Dr. No though.

Movie Series Continuity



I mentioned above that the movie builds on elements of the novel From Russia with Love as well as Live and Let Die. It does that in the briefing scene when M mentions that Bond was just laid up for six months after his Beretta failed him. That's right out of the novel Dr. No and is a reference to From Russia with Love which immediately preceded Dr. No in the book series. In the movie series we'll never learn more about that mission, but the effect is the same and Bond gets a Walther PPK. Because of that, the Walther is Bond's signature gun from the very beginning of the film series.

We also meet Q for the first time, though he's not called that. He's simply the Armorer, which leads some to believe that he's a different character, especially since he's played by a different actor from the most famous Q. But M calls him "Boothroyd" (right from the novel), which - according to the film version of The Spy Who Loved Me - is also Q's name. From that as well as Q's official introduction in From Russia with Love, I think it's clear that the series intends the Armorer and Q to be the same person.

Just before the briefing, Bond enters Moneypenny's office and tosses his hat onto the coat rack from across the room. That becomes a thing through most of the early movies. And speaking of Moneypenny, there's some mild flirtation between her and Bond that before the novel Thunderball I would have said is borrowed from the literary Bond and his secretary Lil. But Thunderball sadly introduces to the books that Moneypenny has a crush on Bond, so this - like "Bond, James Bond" and "shaken not stirred" are right out of Fleming.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights | "The Living Daylights"

"The Living Daylights" was first published in 1962 as part of a color supplement for The Sunday Times. The Times was a rival to the Daily Express, which had been serializing and adapting Bond stories for about six years by that point, so the Express was naturally upset. In fact, "The Living Daylights" created a big rift between Fleming and the Express to the point that the Bond strip was abruptly ended part way through the adaptation of Thunderball. More about that on Thursday, though. "The Living Daylights" was also published in the United States a few months later in Argosy magazine.

I have a lot of praise to gush on the movie The Living Daylights, which I'll do at the proper time, but one of the things I love about it as that it adapts its short story pretty faithfully, but with a twist that propels the rest of the movie. In the short story, Bond is called to Berlin to assassinate the person who has in turn been assigned to assassinate someone escaping to the West. In the short story, the escapee is a returning double agent instead of a defector, but Bond is still supervised by a tiresome liaison and still changes his shot when he discovers that his target is a woman. And not just any woman, but a cellist he's been watching and fantasizing about as she's come and go from a nearby building over a few days.

One of my favorite lines in the movie version is when Bond lashes back at his annoying supervisor by exclaiming that the worst that can happen is that M will fire Bond, but that Bond would "thank him for it." I've always associated that with Bond's attitude at the end of Casino Royale, but re-reading "The Living Daylights" reminds me that it's yet another element right out of the short story. Bond is uncharacteristically sulky in this story and grumbles a couple of times about not minding if he gets kicked out of the Double-O section.

The best explanation that I have for that is that Bond is changing as a person. He's become less and less selfish since Dr No and has apparently become a happier person for it. Certainly his sense of humor has improved in Goldfinger and Thunderball. There's even a bit in "The Living Daylights" where he acknowledges to someone that the Bentley is a "selfish car." That kind of awareness is remarkable and important. It shows that while Bond still loves his car, he's also a little embarrassed about what it says about his past self. He sees that past selfishness and is able to comment on it, which I don't think he would've been able to do in the early books.

As Bond continues to change, it makes sense that he's becoming less patient with the uglier aspects of his job. His current mission is outright, cold-blooded assassination. He's never been super fond of that (as we saw in From Russia with Love), but it seems to be really getting at him now. The only time he's seemed okay with it was in "For Your Eyes Only," but that was more about his compassion for M than about willingly taking another person's life. My theory about Bond's attitude in "The Living Daylights" is that the assignment has got him especially down and is creating a bad attitude about his job and life in general. If it pops up again over the next few assignments, I'll adjust that theory, but it works for now.

One last thing that bothers me (not about Fleming's writing, but about Bond's mindset) is that Domino doesn't come up at all. From a storytelling perspective, I don't actually expect her to, but from a fannish, continuity-exploring perspective, I wish that there was more fallout from that relationship than just Bond's fantasizing about a pretty cellist. I fantasized myself about Bond and Domino's forming a mature relationship, so it hurts a little that she's just disappeared over the last couple of stories. There may be good, extratextual reasons for that (McClory?), but again, I'm just talking about continuity. Something apparently happened between Bond and Domino to sour things and I want some closure. I don't expect Fleming's next full novel, The Spy Who Loved Me to explain it, but I wish it would. And if not, I'm perfectly willing to come up with something on my own.

[Argosy cover found at Galactic Central]

"Dr No": The Comic Strip

For the "Dr No" adaptation, the Daily Express had writer Peter O'Donnell fill in for Henry Gammidge. O'Donnell would go on to create the Modesty Blaise strip three years later, but he's already doing interesting things with his time on Bond. For starters, he drops the first person narration that Gammidge introduced and relies more on dialogue and short captions to tell the story.

As with the other strips though, "Dr No" jumps into the action as quickly as possible. Bond's convalescence after being stabbed with a poison shoe-knife was a one-panel epilogue in "From Russia with Love," so by "Dr No" he's ready to go. M doesn't explicitly refer to the Jamaica mission as a holiday, but Bond still sees it as a cake assignment and is grumpy about it.

That's just lip service to the book though, because the strip dives so quickly into the plot of "Dr No" that it doesn't feel like an easy assignment at all. There's more lip service paid to everyone's thinking that the two Jamaican agents ran off together, but really everyone knows that the agents were looking into Dr No and it's taken for granted that Bond will start his investigation there.

I've avoided naming the missing agents so far, because the strip does too for a good while. That's weird, because Strangways appeared in the strip version of "Live and Let Die," so it's not like O'Donnell is trying to fix a continuity issue, but maybe he wasn't aware of how the earlier story had used Strangways. Whatever the case, O'Donnell ignores the fact that Bond has a previous relationship with the missing agent, even when characters start referring to him as Strangways later in the story.

Once Bond's in Jamaica, the strip adapts the book closely, though Honey Rider is a bit more of a scaredy cat than she is in the novel. She still ends up rescuing herself though and O'Donnell plays a nice trick by intercutting between her being tied up on the rocky beach and Bond's navigating No's obstacle course. Whenever we see Honey, she's frantically worried and wondering to herself about how Bond is doing. If you don't know the story, you might think that she's hoping he'll free himself and rescue her, but she's actually just legitimately concerned for him. She's going to be fine. That's more clever and artful than I'm used to seeing from Gammidge.

It's great to see the end of the book brought to life accurately. I'm so used to the film version that those images are the ones I've always imagined when thinking about the story. But John McLusky's Dr No is perfect and I love that the obstacle course ends the way it's supposed to: with a giant squid fight. That's not a surprise considering how faithful the other strips have all been, but it's especially welcome with this story. McLusky draws some mean tentacles and a way cooler dragonmobile than the movie comes up with.

Dr No by Ian Fleming

When I wrote about From Russia with Love, I repeated the common myth that Ian Fleming was growing tired of the Bond series by then and wanted to kill off his main character. Turns out, that's not entirely accurate. Fleming was certainly experimenting when he wrote From Russia with Love, but not out of desperate boredom. He was simply interested in improving the series and was willing to take risks to do so.

Part of the myth of Bond's death is that Raymond Chandler is the one who talked Fleming out of making it permanent. But according to one Bond FAQ, Chandler's advice to Fleming was simply to criticize Diamonds Are Forever (I agree that it's a weak book) and suggest that Fleming could do better. Fleming took that to heart and From Russia with Love was the result. But there's other evidence - also dating back to Diamonds Are Forever - that implies Fleming always intended for Bond to live beyond From Russia with Love.

Shortly after Diamonds Are Forever was published, Fleming received a now-famous letter from a fan named Geoffrey Boothroyd who was also a gun expert. Boothroyd criticized Bond's use of the .25 Beretta as inappropriate and recommended the Walther PPK as a superior choice. Fleming also took this advice to heart, but was already too far into writing From Russia with Love to make the change for that book, so he replied to Boothroyd that he'd include that idea in the next one, which turned out to be Dr No. Apparently, the intention was never to leave Bond dead after From Russia with Love, but simply to end on a cliffhanger and get readers buzzing for the next installment. The myth could be the result of people getting Fleming confused with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who did grow tired of Sherlock Holmes and killed him off before later changing his mind.

As Dr No opens, Bond is still recuperating from Rosa Klebb's poison and M is nervous about sending 007 back into action. He discusses the agent's shelf life with the neurologist who's been watching over Bond's recovery and we get some insight to M's thoughts on pain in general and how much he expects his agents to be able to take. He doesn't want to coddle Bond and risk softening him up, but M is also aware that Bond's been through a rough time and doesn't need to be thrown up against another threat like SMERSH right away. Instead, M has a gravy assignment in mind for Bond; what M calls a "holiday in the sun."