Plot inspirations
In March 1956 Fleming and his friend Ivar Bryce accompanied Robert Cushman Murphy (of the American Museum of Natural History) and Arthur Stannard Vernay (of the Flamingo Protection Society) on a trip to a flamingo colony on Great Inagua in the south of the Bahamas.[8][15] The colony was 100 square miles (260 km2) of dense mangrove swamp and salt flats, home to flamingos, egrets and roseate spoonbills;[8] the location inspired Crab Key.[16][17] Much of the travel overland on Great Inagua was by a swamp vehicle, a Land Rover fitted with over-large tyres that became the model for the "dragon" used in the story.[18]
Fleming's inspiration for the Doctor No character was Sax Rohmer's villain Dr Fu Manchu, who featured in books Fleming had read and enjoyed in earlier years.[2] Aspects of the plot were influenced by Rohmer's work, and Winder observes that the use of the centipede was "a straight steal" from a Fu Manchu novel;[19] other devices from Rohmer's novels included Doctor No's secret lair and the use of the mad scientist trope.[20]
After Diamonds Are Forever was published in 1956, Fleming received a letter from Geoffrey Boothroyd, a Bond enthusiast and gun expert, who criticised the author's choice of firearm for Bond.[21] Boothroyd suggested that Bond should swap his Beretta for a Walther PPK 7.65 mm, an exchange that made it to the novel.[22]
I wish to point out that a man in James Bond's position would never consider using a .25 Beretta. It's really a lady's gun—and not a very nice lady at that! Dare I suggest that Bond should be armed with a .38 or a nine millimetre—let's say a German Walther PPK? That's far more appropriate.[23]
Boothroyd also gave Fleming advice on the Berns-Martin triple draw shoulder holster and a number of the weapons used by SMERSH and other villains.[24] In thanks, Fleming gave the MI6 Armourer the name Major Boothroyd in Dr. No and M introduces him to Bond as "the greatest small-arms expert in the world".[22]
As he had done in his previous novels, Fleming borrowed names from his friends and associates to use in his book; Ivar Bryce's housekeeper, May Maxwell, became Bond's Scottish "treasure" May.[25] One of Fleming's neighbours in Jamaica, and later his lover, was Blanche Blackwell: Fleming named the guano-collecting ship in Dr. No as Blanche.[25][b] His friend Patricia Wilder found that her nickname of Honey Chile was used for the novel's main female character, and John Fox-Strangways—a friend from the gentlemen's club White's—saw part of his surname being used for the name of the MI6 station chief in Jamaica.[27] Fleming also used the physical descriptions of people he knew; Quarrel, who previously appeared in the novel Live and Let Die, was based on a Jamaican fisherman who often took Fleming shark fishing.[2]
Characters
James Bond is the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel Herman Cyril McNeile (aka "Sapper") and the Richard Hannay stories of John Buchan. His genius was to repackage these antiquated adventures to fit the fashion of postwar Britain ... In Bond, he created a Bulldog Drummond for the jet age.
William Cook in the New Statesman [28]
In Dr. No, for the first time in the Bond novels, there is friction between Bond and M, brought about because Bond was nearly killed by the SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in From Russia, with Love.[29] M orders Bond to use a new gun and sends him on a holiday assignment, which Bond resents.[30] The writer Raymond Benson—who later wrote a series of Bond novels—sees M at his most authoritarian in Dr. No, punishing Bond in terms of both stripping him of his gun and then sending him on what both Bond and M considered at first to be a "soft" assignment.[31]
Honeychile Rider is one of three women in the Bond canon who have been scarred by rape.[c] This follows a pattern where the women Bond comes across are somehow different to the norm,[32] although the cultural historian Jeremy Black points out that this gives Bond an opportunity to help and save both Rider and the others.[33] Other female characters in the Bond series have flaws, and Rider has a broken nose—the result of the rape she suffered.[34][d] The cultural historians Janet Woollacott and Tony Bennett, in their analysis of the roles of women in the Bond novels, consider that Rider is "not archetypically feminine", but is "constructed according to the formula 'equal but yet subordinate'."[35] Rider is described in the book as having buttocks like a boy, which brought a response from Fleming's friend Noël Coward that "I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile's bottom was like a boy's. I know that we are all becoming more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap what could you have been thinking of?"[36]
Black, reviewing all the villains in the series, wrote:
Fleming did not use class enemies for his villains, instead relying on physical distortion or ethnic identity ... Furthermore, in Britain foreign villains used foreign servants and employees ... This racism reflected not only a pronounced theme of interwar adventure writing, such as the novels of [John] Buchan, but also widespread literary culture.[37]
Dr. No is physically disfigured, like many of Bond's later adversaries;[38] No is 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) tall, with steel pincers for hands and has dextrocardia.[29][39] Bond describes him as "a giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil".[40] Benson considers that No is "a wickedly successful villain",[29] the best since Hugo Drax in Moonraker,[41] while Time thought No to be "one of the less forgettable characters in modern fiction".[42]
Quarrel was Fleming's idealised concept of a black person, and the character was based on his genuine liking for Jamaicans, whom he saw as "full of goodwill and cheerfulness and humour".[43] The relationship between Bond and Quarrel was based on a presumption of Bond's superiority.[44][45] Fleming described the relationship as "that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility".[40] Winder considers the scenes with Quarrel to be "embarrassingly patronising but nonetheless hypnotic".[19]
