Dr. No is the sixth novel by the English author Ian Fleming to feature his British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the novel in early 1957 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 31 March 1958. The novel centres on Bond's investigation into the disappearance in Jamaica of two fellow MI6 operatives. He establishes that they had been investigating Doctor No, a Chinese-German operator of a guano mine on the fictional Caribbean island of Crab Key. Bond travels to the island and meets Honeychile Rider and later Doctor No.
The novel began as a 1956 screenplay for the producer Henry Morgenthau III for a proposed television show entitled Commander Jamaica. When those plans foundered, Fleming adapted the ideas as the basis for a novel, provisionally titled The Wound Man. The book's eponymous villain was influenced by Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories.
Dr. No was the first of Fleming's novels to face widespread negative criticism in Britain; Paul Johnson of the New Statesman dismissed the book as one of "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism". When released on the American market it was received more favourably. Dr. No was serialised in the Daily Express, first in an abridged story form and later as a comic strip. The story was adapted in 1962 as the first film in the Bond series, with Sean Connery in the lead role; in 2008 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a version with Toby Stephens as Bond.
Plot
After recovering from serious poisoning inflicted by the SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb (in From Russia, with Love) the Secret Service agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, on an undemanding mission to the British colony of Jamaica. He is instructed to investigate the disappearance of Commander John Strangways, the head of MI6's Station J in Kingston, and his secretary. Bond is briefed that Strangways had been investigating the activities of Doctor Julius No, a reclusive Chinese-German who lives on the fictional island of Crab Key and runs a guano mine. The island has a colony of roseate spoonbills at one end while local rumour is that a vicious dragon also lives there. The spoonbills are protected by the American National Audubon Society, two of whose representatives died when their plane crashed on No's airstrip.
On his arrival in Jamaica, Bond soon realises that he is being watched. His hotel room is searched, a basket of poisoned fruit is delivered to the room—supposedly a gift from the colonial governor—and a deadly centipede is placed in his bed while he is sleeping. With the help of an old friend, Quarrel, Bond surreptitiously visits Crab Key to establish whether there is a connection between No and the disappearance of the MI6 personnel. Bond and Quarrel meet Honeychile Rider, who is there to collect valuable shells. Bond and Rider are captured by No's men after Quarrel is burned to death by the doctor's "dragon"—a flamethrowing, armoured swamp buggy designed to keep away trespassers. Bond and Rider are taken to a luxurious facility carved into the mountain.
No tells Bond that he is working with the Russians and has built an elaborate underground facility from which he can sabotage US test missiles launched from Cape Canaveral. He had previously been a member of a Chinese tong, but after he stole a large sum of money from their treasury, he was captured by the organisation. The tong's leaders had No's hands cut off as a warning to others, and then shot him. Because No's heart was on the right side of his body, the bullet missed it and he survived.
Interested in the ability of the human body to withstand and survive pain, No forces Bond to navigate his way through an obstacle course constructed in the facility's ventilation system. Bond is kept under observation as he suffers electric shocks, burns and an encounter with large, venomous spiders. Bond's ordeal ends in a fight with a captive giant squid, which he defeats by using improvised weapons. After his escape he encounters Rider, who had been pegged out to be eaten by crabs; they had ignored her and she managed to escape.
Bond kills No by taking over the guano-loading machine at the docks and diverting the flow of guano to bury him alive. Bond and Rider then escape from No's complex in the "dragon" buggy, sail back to Jamaica and notify the colonial authorities.
Background and writing history In June 1956 the author Ian Fleming began a collaboration with the producer Henry Morgenthau III on a planned television series, Commander Jamaica, which was to feature the Caribbean-based character James Gunn. When the project foundered, and Fleming could not fashion a new plot for his next Bond novel, he used the idea as the basis for Dr. No. By January 1957 he had published four Bond novels in successive years from 1953—Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever. A fifth, From Russia, with Love, was being edited and prepared for publication. That month Fleming travelled to his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica to write Dr. No. He followed his usual practice, which he later outlined in Books and Bookmen magazine: "I write for about three hours in the morning ... and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day." By the time he returned to London in late February, he had completed a 206-page first draft, which he initially titled The Wound Man.
Although Fleming did not date the events within his novels, John Griswold and Henry Chancellor—both of whom wrote books for Ian Fleming Publications—have identified different timelines based on episodes and situations within the novel series as a whole. Chancellor put the events of Dr. No in 1956; Griswold is more precise, and considers the story to have taken place that February and March.
As with his four previous novels, Fleming originated the concept of the front cover design; he considered Honeychile Rider to have a Venus-like quality when introduced in the book and wanted this emphasised on the cover. When commissioning Pat Marriott to illustrate the cover, he instructed that she was shown on a Venus elegans shell.
Prior to the release of Dr. No—and unconnected with the book itself—Bernard Bergonzi, in the March 1958 issue of Twentieth Century, attacked Fleming's work as containing "a strongly marked streak of voyeurism and sado-masochism" and that the books showed "the total lack of any ethical frame of reference". The article also compared Fleming unfavourably to John Buchan and Raymond Chandler in both moral and literary measures. The writer Simon Raven, while appreciating Bergonzi had produced a "quiet and well-argued article", thought the critic's conclusion was naïve, and asked "Since when has it been remarkable in a work of entertainment that it should lack a specific 'ethical frame of reference'?" Raven continued, saying Fleming "by reason of his cool and analytical intelligence, his informed use of technical facts, his plausibility, sense of pace, brilliant descriptive powers and superb imagination, provides sheer entertainment such as I, who must read many novels, am seldom lucky enough to find".
Development
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. The colony was of dense mangrove swamp and salt flats, home to flamingos, egrets and roseate spoonbills; the location inspired Crab Key. 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.
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. 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; other devices from Rohmer's novels included Doctor No's secret lair and the use of the mad scientist trope.
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. Boothroyd suggested that Bond should swap his Beretta for a Walther PPK 7.65 mm, an exchange that made it to the novel.
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.
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. 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".
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. 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. 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. 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.
Characters
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. M orders Bond to use a new gun and sends him on a holiday assignment, which Bond resents. 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.
Honeychile Rider is one of three women in the Bond canon who have been scarred by rape. This follows a pattern where the women Bond comes across are somehow different to the norm, although the cultural historian Jeremy Black points out that this gives Bond an opportunity to help and save both Rider and the others. Other female characters in the Bond series have flaws, and Rider has a broken nose—the result of the rape she suffered. 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'." 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?"
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.