“In the last analysis, life wasn’t all that dismal.”

Missing and presumed dead after the events of You Only Live Twice, an amnesiac James Bond is scooped up and brainwashed by the Russians, then sent back to M16 to assassinate his superior, M. After being cured of his ailment, Bond is thrown back into the field and tasked with tracking down and eliminating Francisco Scaramanga, a Cuban assassin who has taken out several double-o agents.

Adopting an alias, Bond quickly locates Scaramanga in Jamaica and finds himself hired on as a “kind of personal bodyguard” while the hitman hosts a secret criminal meeting at a half-built tropical resort. The meeting concerns myriad interests—the intentional sabotage the sugar industry, drug running into America, smuggling prostitutes across the border, and so on—but it only really matters insofar as it helps convince Bond that “The Man with the Golden Gun” is indeed worthy of a bullet. Felix Leiter and Mary Goodnight return to the action as Bond spends several days dithering over his assignment, showing off his marksmanship, and (for the first time?) not having sex.

It would be unfair to call The Man with the Golden Gun unfinished, and yet, the fact that Fleming sadly died after only a first draft is quite apparent. This stems from the author’s methodical writing style, which saw him breeze through a rough draft and then take a slower second pass to add intrigue, flesh out conversations and relationships, and fill the margins with verisimilitudinous details. The polish of revision is lacking here, and its absence exposes a thin plot, a weak villain, and a subdued hero.