“You are right, Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the artists, the philosophers, the religious leaders –all maniacs” (169).
Ian Fleming’s sixth James Bond novel Dr. No takes a turn away from the quasi-realistic Cold War espionage thrillers which dominated the start of the series (excluding Moonraker), and instead Dr. No presents a larger-than-life pulp fiction tale complete with a megalomaniacal villain operating from a secret lair buried inside a private island. It is the kind of fantastical tale we are more accustomed to seeing in the Eon James Bond films. Before Dr. No, Fleming initially had the idea of killing off everyone’s favorite gentleman spy during a poisoning at the end of From Russia, with Love. However, he was persuaded to continue the book series at the recommendation of his friend and fellow author Raymond Chandler. At this point in time, Fleming was already in the midst of writing a TV series called “Commander Jamaica” in 1956 but when the show fell apart in pre-production, Fleming simply re-used elements from the script for his sixth James Bond novel.
Dr. No begins on Richmond Road in Jamaica in “the social Mecca of Kingston.” It is a reprieve from the “hot, vulgar sprawl” of the city where “many diseased people” lie scattered about on the streets. At number 1 Richmond Road sits the Queen’s Club, an ornate casino which will likely not survive long in modern Jamaica –perhaps soon it may have its windows smashed or be burned down according to Fleming. Throughout Dr. No, Fleming’s trademark brand of arrogant prejudice for other cultures rivals his legendary racism as proudly displayed in the second Bond novel Live and Let Die. At any rate, at the Queen’s Club, the regional control officer for the Caribbean (or less discreetly, the local representative of the British Secret Service) the eyepatch-wearing Commander John Strangways (whom we had previously met “on that treasure business about five years ago” in Live and Let Die) is gambling at the Queen’s Club when he leaves to make his daily call home to section iii, his controlling authority in London. If he misses his first call, there will then be a “blue call” which will be followed by a “red call.” However, Strangways is “a man of iron routine” and so his whereabouts are easily anticipated. On this particular night, three blind “Chigroes” (or what Fleming calls “Chinese negroes”) disguised as beggars pull out revolvers and shoot Strangways dead in the street. His body is then quickly shoved into a coffin inside a hearse while his secretary Miss Trueblood is also assassinated, and both bodies are dumped into the Mona Reservoir.
Meanwhile, back in London James Bond is in good health after being poisoned by the sadistic SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb at the end of From Russia, with Love (Klebb is now apparently dead without explanation). Recall that Bond had been knocked out by Klebb’s boot knife laced with fugu poison, but he was quickly rescued by his French counterpart René Mathis. All of this is discussed by Sir James Molony, a neurologist who consults for MI6 (the character was named after Fleming’s dentist). Since Bond was very nearly killed and risked ruining the whole mission, M remains disappointed with 007. Thus, he is assigned to a soft mission under the “pretence of a job, mixed with a good rest” as “deferred punishment for having nearly got killed on his last job.” This cushy new assignment is a kind of humiliation for Bond –“Bond thought: He’s got it in for me over the last job. Feels I let him down. Wont trust me with anything tough” (22).
Bond is sent to Jamaica (his second visit to the country since Live and Let Die) to investigate the disappearance of Commander Strangways and his secretary Miss Trueblood. M believes the two have quietly disappeared and eloped together, but Bond skeptical. Strangways had been in the midst of investigating a troubling situation in which the whiny but powerful American lobbying group, the Audubon Society (cue the Fleming jabs at America), was able to remove an atom bomb test site because it sat too close to a collection of rare bird nests. The Roseate Spoonbill is an endangered bird thought only to reside in Florida but it started turning up on the island of Crab Key located between Jamaica and Cuba where it has flourished. Years ago, a mysterious man bought the island of Crab Key for ten thousand pounds in 1943 primarily for its valuable guano factory business, but now the guano industry has taken a dip and activists hope to preserve the native bird population. The man’s name is Dr. Julius No –a half-Chinese, half-German businessman who desires to live like a recluse. Strangways was investigating Crab Key when members of the Audubon Society recently turned up dead –and now there are local stories about a fire-breathing dragon that lives on the island. M dismisses it all as a load of nonsense, another instance of Americans with “stacks of money” needlessly complaining about birds, but when Bond arrives in Jamaica, he quickly discovers that something is indeed amiss –Strangways had stumbled onto something that got him killed.
When he touches down, Bond recalls the natural beauty of Jamaica –the Arawaks once called it “Xaymacac” or “The Land of Hill and Rivers” and “Bond’s heart lifted with the beauty of one of the most fertile islands in the world” (33). Posing as an “Import and Export Merchant” for Universal Export, Bond reconnects with his old friend from Live and Let Die, the turtle-fisherman Quarrel. But Bond’s alias quickly goes out the window when he is accosted by a Chinese reporter named Annabel Chung at the airport who seems to know all about him (she claims to be a freelance photographer for The Daily Gleaner). This is followed by a minor car chase en route to the Blue Hills hotel, along with further badgering in the evening (Annabel Chung ominously shouts, “he’ll get you, you bastards!”), and there is an attempt to assassinate Bond with a deadly centipede placed in his bedroom at night. It crawls up his unflinching body while beads of sweat drop down his face (in the film, it is a tarantula rather than a centipede) –this is a bit of foreshadowing for what befall Honey later in the book– and there is another attempt to kill Bond when a cyanide-laced fruit basket is delivered to his room with enough poison “to kill a horse.” Naturally, Bond outmaneuvers these two plots. Bond speaks with the corrupt, stubborn Acting Governor of Jamaica followed by the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Pleydell-Smith, whose secretary Miss Taro is notably of Chinese descent, and therefore she is a suspicious traitor in Fleming’s world.
Eventually, Bond and Quarrel manage to sneak away, and after a rigid training regimen, they take a canoe at night out to Dr. No’s fifty square mile Island, Crab Key –a “bad luck place.” In these moments, Bond is full of memories when he is reminded of Morgan’s Harbour and the Isle of Surprise from Live and Let Die –“Bond stood looking at it and thinking of Solitaire, the girl he had brought back, torn and bleeding, from that sea. He had carried her across the lawn to the house. What had happened to her? Where was she?” (74). Bond and Quarrel quietly manage to outmaneuver Dr. No’s radar by simply floating undetected toward Crab Key where they spend the night in the sand. However, when Bond awakes, he spots a beautiful nude woman collecting shells along the shoreline. She turns out to be a playful blond-haired, blue-eyed, crooked-nosed, twenty-year-old shell diver named Honeychile “Honey” Rider –Bond says she is reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus and her naturalism is also compared to Man Friday from Robinson Crusoe (Fleming based the character’s name on American actress Patricia “Honey Chile” Wilder, whom he had met through her husband, Prince Alex Hohenlohe):
“It was a naked girl, with her back to him. She was not quite naked. She wore a broad leather belt round her waist with a hunting knife in a leather sheath at her right hip. The belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic.” (82)
While singing “Marion” she is shocked to find James Bond standing nearby, but rather than covering her naked body, she is conceals her crooked nose. Apparently, she regularly risks visiting this island because of a rare patch of “venus shells” which can be sold in Miami for $5 apiece. Who is Honey? She has lived her whole life at Beau Desert on Jamaica’s north coast near Morgan’s Harbour. There, she has developed a child-like love and understanding of animals. Her family, the Riders, were once a prominent family in Jamaica, they were given the Beau Desert lands by Oliver Cromwell after signing King Charles’s death warrant. Honey’s parents were then killed while she was young, and their plantation house was burned down. She currently lives in the ruins of the big house and she was raised by her black nanny who died five years ago when Honey was fifteen. She cannot recall her true birth name since her parents died when she was so young, so she just uses the name her nany called her. Her backstory is tragic (it is somewhat reminiscent of Tiffany Case’s tragic backstory from Diamonds Are Forever) –while still young, she was sexually assaulted by a white overseer who hit her in the face and broke her nose before raping her. As recompense, some time later she decided to sneak into his room while he slept and place a black widow on his stomach which yielded a lengthy, painful death (this echoes what very nearly happened to Bond in his hotel room). At any rate, in diving for shells Honey has been trying to save up enough money to travel to America where she can work as a call girl, posing as a nurse or secretary, in order to hopefully earn enough money to receive plastic surgery on her nose before moving back to Jamaica where she can buy back her beloved family home in Beau Desert, then find a husband and start a family.
At any rate, Honey becomes swept up in this wild mission with Bond and Quarrel when Dr. No’s men chase them off the beach and into the surrounding lush mangroves where they face a survivalist test and are confronted with the “dragon” –a giant mechanical vehicle that allows Dr. No’s men to fire flamethrowers out its windows. Sadly, at this low point of the book, Quarrel is roasted alive by the “dragon” and killed. It is a tragic end for a twice loyal ally of James Bond. Bond and Honey are then handcuffed and taken to Dr. No’s ornate lair which is ordained with fine artwork (ballet sketches by Degas), red carpet, mahogany desks, and everyone seems to wear kimonos. Bond and Honey are greeted by an unsettlingly warm and friendly cohort of female employees –Sister Lily, Sister Rose, and May– who curiously welcome their new “patients.” Bond and Honey enjoy a luxurious experience in which Bond claims he is John Bryce of the New York Audubon Society (he chooses to smoke a Turkish, rather than an American, cigarette), but the ruse quickly evaporates when Bond and Honey are invited to dinner with Dr. No inside his high-ceilinged library under the sea.
“What would be the answer to the riddle of Doctor No? What was he hiding? What did he fear? Why was privacy so important to him that he would murder, again and again, for it? Who was Doctor No?” (114).
When we finally meet Dr. Julius No in the last two-thirds of the book, it is revealed that he has mechanical steel pincers for hands, and he almost seems to glide rather than walk with a straight immovable poise (he stands six inches taller than Bond) —“the bizarre, gliding figure looked like a giant, venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil, and Bond would not have been surprised to see the rest of it trailing slimily along the carpet behind” (163). Dr. No wears contact lenses, and he uses a walkie-talkie, he has eyes hard as an onyx under a “billiard ball forehead.” He claims he has a mania for “power” whereas people with a dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, and lack of follow-through are encumbered by the vices of the “herd.” When Bond lightly taunts Dr. No about how exposed and vulnerable his little operation on Crab Key truly is (i.e. that he will be betrayed by the Russians, or the Chinese, or any number of his minions, not to mention MI6 or the FBI –though Fleming is careful to note the FBI will likely be the “least painful” circumstance, delivering yet another jab at Americans), Dr. No cites Clausewitz’s first principle as a secure base, and he declares that with Stalin being dead, Dr. No is now the most powerful person in the world, ruling his own island like a dictator (Fleming based aspects of Dr. No on Sax Rohmer’s “Fu Manchu” series).
In the course of the conversation, we learn that Dr. Julius No was the only son of a German missionary and a Chinese woman from a good family. He was born in Peking, but had no parental love and so he was brought up by his mother’s aunt, and worked in Shanghai before he got involved with the Tong Chinese gang and their illicit activities –“they represented a revolt against a father figure” who had betrayed young Julius. He was then smuggled to America with the Chinese gangs, and became caught up in gang warfare and police raids. He escaped having to serve prison time and then robbed the Tongs who promptly sent hitmen to torture him. They cut off his hands and shot him through the heart but he survived thanks to a rare genetic defect in which his heart is actually located on the right side of his body. Dr. No managed to recover from this through sheer willpower and then traveled to Milwaukee to study medicine (or ‘hide in academia’). Now, he plans to develop Crab Key into the “most valuable intelligence centre in the world” (184). He has developed technology which allows him to routinely cause the failure of U.S. missile tests (he ‘bends the beams on which rockets fly’), and working in partnership with the Russians, Dr. No intends to sabotage American missiles in order to instill general chaos throughout the free world.
From here, Dr. No proceeds to orchestrate the elaborate torture of his two “patients” in order to test how much pain the human body can endure for the benefit of science (he compares his experiments to the Nazis). Honey is tied down to a rock where she will be eaten alive by black crabs, while Bond is sent through an assault course which will likely kill him. Thankfully Bond manages to secretly confiscate a steak knife from dinner as well as a lighter –both of which ultimately save his life. Bond is sent into a scalding ventilation shaft, then a heated metal chamber, then a cage filled with giant tarantulas, and finally down a chute that leads out to the ocean where he battles a giant squid while scaling a huge fence. Consider the following passage as Bond first realizes he is gazing down at a giant squid:
“Below him the water quivered. Something was stirring in the depths, something huge. A great length of luminescent greyness showed, poised far down in the darkness… two eyes as big as footballs slowly swam up and into Bond’s vision. They stopped, twenty feet below his own, and stared up through the quiet water at his face… Bond stared down, half hypnotized, into the wavering pools of eye far below. So this was the giant squid, the mythical kraken that could pull ships beneath the waves, the fifty-foot long monster that battled with whales, that weighed a ton more” (212).
In the end, Bond brutally stabs the squid and it empties its ink sac before retreating down to the depths. Bond then escapes and commandeers a crane which he uses to dump a huge pile of guano upon Dr. No, killing him in the most laughable manner possible inside “the silence of the stinking tomb” (223). Honey is rescued (she managed to survive her torturous experience thanks to her intimate knowledge of wildlife) and they commandeer the infamous “dragon” buggy together which they now use to mow down Dr. No’s henchmen before fleeing the island in Bond’s canoe back to Jamaica where they plan to have some “slave-time” in Honey’s burned-out mansion.
One of Fleming’s more polarizing novels, Dr. No received a great deal of negative reviews upon its initial release in 1958 (in particular there was a notoriously scathing review by Paul Johnson in The New Statesmen in which he labeled Dr. No “without a doubt one of the nastiest books I have ever read”). Dr. No was a clear departure for the series, it has very little to do with the paranoid Cold War espionage narrative established in Casino Royale, and instead it shares more in common with the Eon films. The villain, Dr. No, is a textbook megalomaniacal terrorist in search of power (though he curiously does not seem to be affiliated with SMERSH as far as I can tell). And as per usual Dr. No displays Fleming’s characteristically racist view of the world –according to Fleming, Chinese people are untrustworthy, as are “Chigroes,” and non-white people are received with skepticism, especially non-Anglo cultures which are portrayed as uncivilized, bestial, and lazy. Consider the following passage from Mr. Pleydell-Smith: “The Jamaican is a kindly lazy man with the virtues and vices of a child. He lives on a very rich island but he doesn’t get rich from it. He doesn’t know how to and he’s too lazy” (59).
At least Fleming’s passion for bird-watching and his knowledge of Jamaican topography come across stridently throughout the novel. And we get to learn a great deal more about a few of the figures behind the curtain in MI6, such as the Chief of Staff (Bond’s best friend at headquarters), and Major Boothroyd, the MI6 Armourer who outfits Bond with his trademark new gun, a Walther PPK 7.65 mm, instead of his .25 Beretta that he previously used for 15 years until it became jammed at the end of From Russia, with Love. Apparently, a firearms expert named Jeffrey Boothroyd wrote to Fleming and had requested that Bond be outfitted with a better weapon which Fleming then incorporated into the next book –even though Bond regularly notes how much he misses his Beretta in Dr. No. Lastly, I gleaned a handful of minor details about Bond’s life in Dr. No, especially that he once fought in the Ardennes which is revealed while he is struggling to survive on Crab Key.
All things considered, Dr. No is a terrific, fun installment in the James Bond series –I really enjoyed this survivalist novel which features a fantastical, larger-than-life villain, regardless of whether or not it makes a great deal of sense –a man with pincers for hands, whose heart sits on the right side of his chest, situated on a private island covered in guano, seeking to sabotage American missile launches, and hoping to study the limits of human suffering… It’s all a bit of a farce and it unfolds like one of the classic pulp fiction novels of yesteryear, but it sure is a lot of fun. But what happened to Tatiana “Tania” Romanova after the end of the previous novel From Russia, with Love? As far as I can tell, she has simply disappeared. And in the end, I would have appreciated seeing M’s reaction to Bond being caught up in another wild case, especially since he initially assigned Bond to Jamaica as a gently punitive measure for nearly blowing up the previous mission.
Fleming, Ian. Dr. No. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1958 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.
Thank you for another reminder of how novel versions can be more interesting than movie versions. Certainly in James Bond’s case.