James Bond investigates a diamond smuggling operation run by American gangsters that stretches from (the British Crown Colony) Sierra Leone to the United States. Disguised as a courier, Bond infiltrates the organisation, allying himself with croupier Tiffany Case.
I enjoyed Diamonds are Forever. The style is slightly different from the previous three Bond novels, and felt at times more like a pulp crime novel, especially during the gangster scenes in New York and Las Vegas. The horse racing sequence was vividly written and almost on a par with the brilliant bridge-playing scene in Moonraker.
Bond as a character develops in interesting ways during the book. We see a side of him that seems to be at least thinking about a life outside the Service, brought to the fore by his interest in Tiffany Case. I also appreciated his disdain, almost contempt, for the amateurish ways of American gangsters, highlighting a very British sense of superiority! ‘There’s nothing so extraordinary about American gangsters,’ he says, very early in the novel. From that point on, he never loses his confidence and the story is not so much ‘will he win’ as ‘how will he win?’
Tiffany was probably my favourite ‘Bond girl’ so far. Her origin story felt more filled in and her personality more complex. I also liked the fact that during one key scene, I wasn’t sure where her loyalties lay. The main antagonists were slightly underwhelming. After the dastardly Hugo Drax in Moonraker, the Spang brothers of Diamonds are Forever came across as two-bit villains. The henchmen Wint and Kidd were more alive on the page, and I had the sense Ian Fleming enjoyed writing their scenes. They were extremely creepy and unpleasant characters!
All in all, despite the slight tonal shift, this is one of my favourite of the 007 novels so far, with the Spang Brothers’ ineffectual sense of menace outweighed by Tiffany Case’s complexity and Bond’s character development.
Rating: 80%
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