– Notes and Quotes –
Ian Fleming (1908-1964), James Bond Series
Casino Royale (1953)
Ch.1
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” (1)
“Doing all this, inspecting these minute burglar alarms, did not make him feel foolish or self conscious. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession. Routine precautions were to him no more unreasonable than they would be to a deep sea diver or a test pilot, or to any man earning danger money.”
Ch.2
“We therefore recommend that the finest gambler available to the Service should be given the necessary funds and endeavour to out gamble this man.”
Le Chiffre: “Dresses well and meticulously, generally in dark double breasted suits. Smokes incessantly Caporals, using a denicotinizing holder. At frequent intervals inhales from benzedrine inhaler.”
“SMERSH is a conjunction of two Russian words: ‘Smyert Shpionam’, meaning roughly: ‘Death to Spies’”
Goytchev: “During interrogation he committed suicide by swallowing a coat button of compressed potassium cyanide.”
Ch.3
“’I think I’ll keep you covered, Bond. Two heads are better than one and you’ll need someone to run your communications. I’ll think it over. They’ll get in touch with you at Royale. You needn’t worry. It’ll be someone good.’
Bond would have preferred to work alone, but one didn’t argue with M. He left the room hoping that the man they sent would be loyal to him and neither stupid, nor, worse still, ambitious.”
Ch.4
“’Some of this we knew because in France we are very clever. The rest we confirmed by unscrewing your electric fire a few hours before you got here.’”
“’First of all,’ and he inhaled a thick lungful of Caporal, ‘you will be pleased with your Number Two. She is very beautiful’ — Bond frowned — ‘very beautiful indeed.’”
“Bond was not amused. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ he said bitterly. ‘Do they think this is a bloody picnic?’”
“She is as serious as you could wish and as cold as an icicle.”
“What is more natural than that you should pick up a pretty girl here? As a Jamaican millionaire,’ he coughed respectfully, ‘what with your hot blood and all, you would look naked without one.’”
“And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.
‘Bitch,’ said Bond’ and then remembering the Muntzes, he said ‘bitch’ again more loudly and walked out of the room.”
Ch.5
“Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4½ litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers . . .”
“Bond felt her presence strongly. While he and Mathis talked, he turned from time to time towards her, politely including her in the conversation, but adding up the impressions recorded by each glance.”
“Bond took the cue and, as Mathis crossed the room to the telephone booth beside the bar, he said: ‘If you are going to be alone tonight, would you care to have dinner with me?’”
“He was quite honest to himself about the hypocrisy of his attitude towards her. As a woman, he wanted to sleep with her but only when the job had been done.”
“He smiled, ‘I don’t think Bond has ever been melted. It will be a new experience for him. And for you.’”
“’He is very good looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless in his . . .’
The sentence was never finished. Suddenly a few feet away the entire plate glass window shivered into confetti. The blast of a terrific explosion, very near, hit them so that they were rocked back in their chairs.”
Ch.6
“Between them there was a still smoking crater. Of the two men in straw hats, there remained absolutely nothing.”
“Certainly it was no longer just a case of holding Bond’s coat while he had his private battle with Le Chiffre in the Casino.”
Ch.7
“Since the night before he had lost the mood of the tables. He needed to re establish that focus which is half mathematical and half intuitive and which, with a slow pulse and a sanguine temperament, Bond knew to be the essential equipment of any gambler who was set on winning.”
“Bond had always been a gambler. He loved the dry riffle of the cards and the constant unemphatic drama of the quiet figures round the green tables.”
“Above all, he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared. Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued. But he was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck. When that happened he knew that he too would be branded with the deadly question mark he recognized so often in others, the promise to pay before you have lost: the acceptance of fallibility.”
Molotov Cocktail (The Vesper): “’A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’” . . . . “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.”
“’When I’m . . . er . . . concentrating,’ he explained, ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well made.”
“. . . Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.”
“Felix Leiter . . . . like the clothes of Frank Sinatra.”
Jack-knife quality of a falcon
“There was this impression also in his face, in the sharpness of his chin and cheekbones and the wide wry mouth. His grey eyes had a feline slant which was increased by his habit of screwing them up against the smoke of the Chesterfields which he tapped out of the pack in a chain. The permanent wrinkles which this habit had etched at the corners gave the impression that he smiled more with his eyes than with his mouth.”
Ch.8
PINK LIGHTS AND CHAMPAGNE
“There remained an hour in which to rest and compose his thoughts before he met the girl in the Splendide bar . . .”
“He slipped the case into his hip pocket and snapped his oxidized Ronson to see if it needed fuel. After pocketing the thin sheaf of ten mille notes, he opened a drawer and took out a light chamois leather holster and slipped it over his left shoulder so that it hung about three inches below his arm pit. He then took from under his shirts in another drawer a very flat .25 Beretta automatic with a skeleton grip, extracted the clip and the single round in the barrel and whipped the action to and fro several times, finally pulling the trigger on the empty chamber. He charged the weapon again, loaded it, put up the safety catch and dropped it into the shallow pouch of the shoulder holster. He looked carefully round the room to see if anything had been forgotten and slipped his single breasted dinner-jacket coat over his heavy silk evening shirt. He felt cool and comfortable. He verified in the mirror that there was absolutely no sign of the flat gun under his left arm, gave a final pull at his narrow tie and walked out of the door and locked it.”
Vesper Lynd (The Vesper Martini)
“’The trouble always is,’ he explained to Vesper, ‘not how to get enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it.’”
Ch.9
saboteurs, thugs, and so on
“Bond frowned.’ It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people,’ he said. ‘That’s all the meaning it has.”
“. . . he had suddenly turned to ice and had brutally veered away as if warmth were poison to him. She felt hurt and foolish. Then she gave a mental shrug and concentrated with all her attention on what he was saying. She would not make the same mistake again.
‘. . . and the main hope is to pray for a run of luck for me, or against him.’
Bond was explaining just how baccarat is played.”
“In the game that banker should be able to win by playing off one tableaux against the other and by first class accountancy.”
“I follow my intuition.”
Ch.11
“Mr Du Pont leant forward from the other side of his wife: ‘If one could be right every hand, none of us would be here,’ he said philosophically.”
“Bond guessed that [Le Chiffre’s right arm] would kill without interest or concern for what he killed and that he would prefer strangling. He had something of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but his inhumanity would not come from infantilism but from drugs. Marihuana, decided Bond.”
“Your luck can defeat the first and second tests, but when the third deal comes along it most often spells disaster.”
“. . . the hidden metronome of the Casino, ticking up its little treasure of one per cents with each spin of a wheel and each turn of a card — a pulsing fat cat with a zero for a heart.”
“Like snow in sunshine his capital had melted.”
“It was a good card, the five of hearts, but to Bond it was a difficult fingerprint in dried blood.”
“Bond was beaten and cleaned out.”
Ch.12
“’Marshall Aid. Thirty two million francs. With the compliments of the USA.’”
“At all costs a scandal must be avoided.”
Ch.13
“The whole secret lay in the reverse of the two pink backs where the pair of queens kissed the green cloth.”
“The big man fell back in his chair as if slugged above the heart.”
“This is the kill, thought Bond. This man has reached the point of no return. This is the last of his capital. He has come to where I stood an hour ago and he is making the last gesture that I made. But if this man loses, there is no one to come to his aid, no miracle to help him.”
“Bond smiled. ‘That envelope was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I thought I was really finished. It wasn’t at all a pleasant feeling. Talk about a friend in need. One day I’ll try and return the compliment.’”
“He reflected cheerfully how narrowly he had twice that day escaped being murdered. Would he have to sit up all that night and wait for them to come again . . .”
“. . . escape the eyes and the guns of SMERSH.”
“He gazed for a moment into the mirror and wondered about Vesper’s morals. He wanted her cold and arrogant body.”
Ch.14
“But he accepted her reserve.”
“She gave him a strained smile. ‘I’m afraid I don’t feel very good company this evening.”
“No Vesper. No Mathis.”
“Can you come out to the entrance hall for a moment? I have news for your companion.”
Ch.15
“. . . headlights boring a safe white tunnel, nearly half a mile long, between the walls of the night.”
“This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men.”
“He would have done his stuff — tried to rescue her before they got her off to some hideout — but if he didn’t catch up with them he would get back to his hotel and go to sleep and say no more about it.”
“In the back seat was the tall thin gunman. He lay back relaxed, gazing at the ceiling, apparently uninterested in the wild speed of the car. His right hand lay caressingly on Vesper’s left thigh which stretched out naked beside him.
“Apart from her legs, which were naked to the hips, Vesper was only a parcel. Her long black velvet skirt had been lifted over her arms and head and tied above her head with a piece of rope.”
Ch.16
“Bond’s Beretta”
“He was a man to make you afraid, an evil man. Bond hoped he might get a chance of killing him.”
“Noctambules”
“a torrent of lewd French”
Ch.17
“’Prepare him quickly. If he resists, damage him only a little.’”
“This is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed and the hero is given a medal and marries the girl. Unfortunately these things don’t happen in real life. If you continue to be obstinate, you will be tortured to the edge of madness and then the girl will be brought in and we will set about her in front of you. If that is still not enough, you will both be painfully killed and I shall reluctantly leave your bodies and make my way abroad to a comfortable house which is waiting for me.”
“If you hand the money over, so much the better. If not, I shall shrug my shoulders and be on my way.’”
“It was the supreme test of will, he had learnt, to avoid showing this form of punch-drunkenness.”
“Poor wretch to have been dragged into this. Poor little beast.”
“So that was the score, thought Bond, with a final sinking of the heart. The ‘unknown destination’ would be under the ground or under the sea, or perhaps, more simply, under the crashed Bentley. Well, if he had to die anyway, he might as well try it the hard way.”
“’Say good bye to it, Bond.’”
Ch.18
“’Shtop,’ had said the voice, quietly.”
“He tried desperately to read into Le Chiffre’s face what was happening behind him.”
“There was a sharp ‘phut’, no louder than a bubble of air escaping from a tube of toothpaste. No other noise at all, and suddenly Le Chiffre had grown another eye, a third eye on a level with the other two, right where the thick nose started to jut out below the forehead. It was a small black eye, without eyelashes or eyebrows.”
“holding a thin stiletto like a fountain pen”
Ch.19
“On the door of each room there is a small square of black plastic with the number of the room on it. On the corridor side, of course. When Leiter left me that night, I simply opened the door and unscrewed my number plate and put the folded cheque underneath it and screwed the plate back. It’ll still be there.’ He smiled. ‘I’m glad there’s something the stupid English can teach the clever French.’”
“. . . a torrent of heated French diminishing down the corridor.”
Ch.20
“He obviously thought he was being smart enough cutting his initial in my hand.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Mathis. ‘The doctor said the cuts looked like a square M with a tail to the top. He said they didn’t mean anything.’
‘Well, I only got a glimpse before I passed out, but I’ve seen the cuts several times while they were being dressed and I’m pretty certain they are the Russian letter for SH. It’s rather like an inverted M with a tail. That would make sense; SMERSH is short for SMYERT SHPIONAM — Death to Spies — and he thinks he’s labelled me as a SHPION. It’s a nuisance because M will probably say I’ve got to go to hospital again when I get back to London and have new skin grafted over the whole of the back of my hand. It doesn’t matter much. I’ve decided to resign.’”
“‘I got the Jap in the mouth as he turned to gape at the broken window.’”
“A Double O number in our Service means you’ve had to kill a chap in cold blood in the course of some job.”
“If [Le Chiffre] was here now, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I’m afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.’”
“I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance. There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.”
“We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.’
‘Bravo,’ said Mathis. ‘I’m proud of you. You ought to be tortured every day. I really must remember to do something evil this evening. I must start at once.’”
“Now about that little problem of yours, this business of not knowing good men from bad men and villains from heroes, and so forth. It is, of course, a difficult problem in the abstract. The secret lies in personal experience . . .”
Ch.21
“Bond didn’t like flowers and he told the nurse to give them to another patient. After this had happened twice, no more flowers came. Bond had not meant to offend her. He disliked having feminine things around him. Flowers seemed to ask for recognition of the person who had sent them, to be constantly transmitting a message of sympathy and affection. Bond found this irksome. He disliked being cosseted. It gave him claustrophobia.”
“[The doctor] had always told him that there would be no evil effects from the terrible battering his body had received.”
“. . . the certainty of impotence had been beaten into him and a scar had been left on his mind that could only be healed by experience.
“From that day when Bond first met Vesper in the Hermitage bar, he had found her desirable and he knew that if things had been different in the night club, if Vesper had responded in any way and if there had been no kidnapping he would have tried to sleep with her that night. Even later, in the car and outside the villa when God knows he had had other things to think about, his eroticism had been hotly aroused by the sight of her indecent nakedness.”
Ch.22
“With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola — sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness — was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play — the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.”
“‘Really, Vesper, you mustn’t think evil of the innocent.’”
Ch.23
“’My darling,’ he said.”
“. . . dumb with the storm which had passed through her.”
“. . . she brushed the black comma of hair back from his damp forehead.”
“Bond had always disliked pyjamas and had slept naked until in Hong Kong at the end of the war he came across the perfect compromise. This was a pyjama coat which came almost down to the knees.”
“He had intended to sleep with her as soon as he could, because he desired her and also because, and he admitted it to himself, he wanted coldly to put the repairs to his body to the final test. He thought they would sleep together for a few days and then he might see something of her in London. Then would come the inevitable disengagement which would be all the easier because of their positions in the Service.”
“And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape. Loving her physically would each time be a thrilling voyage without the anticlimax of arrival. She would surrender herself avidly, he thought, and greedily enjoy all the intimacies of the bed without ever allowing herself to be possessed.”
“It was only when he reached his pyjama coat and bent to pick it up that he realized he was still naked.”
Ch.24
“This too left a tiny question mark hanging in the air. It quickly dissolved as warmth and intimacy enclosed them again.”
“It was cold, but he took off his jacket and wandered naked along the edge of the sea to the point where he had bathed the evening before . . .”
“That day he would ask Vesper to marry him.”
Ch.25
“’Oh,’ she said breathlessly, ‘you made me jump.”
“Each day the atmosphere became more hateful.”
“When the man had turned his face towards them, Bond noticed that he had a black patch over one eye.”
Ch.26
“She drank a lot and when they went upstairs, she led him into her bedroom and made passionate love to him.”
“Either you must tell me what all this is about or we must leave.”
“’Come up quickly,’ she said. ‘I want you badly tonight.’”
Ch.27
“He turned the envelope over. Not long ago it was her warm tongue which had sealed the flap.”
“I am an agent of the MWD. Yes, I am a double agent for the Russians.”
“That was why they knew about you before you arrived and why they had time to put the microphones in.”
“. . . the man with the black patch in the Splendide . . .”
“I decided that we would have an affair and I would escape to South America from Le Havre. I hoped I would have a baby of yours and be able to start again somewhere.”
“The little shadows and question marks of the past four weeks, which his instinct had noted but his mind rejected, all stood out now like signposts.”
“He would take on SMERSH and hunt it down.”
“Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without any question, you will be hunted down and killed.”
“Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than to retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet would never miss.”
“He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy.”
“’This is 007 speaking. This is an open line. It’s an emergency. Can you hear me? Pass this on at once. 3030 was a double, working for Redland.
‘Yes, dammit, I said “was”. The bitch is dead now.’”
Live and Let Die (1954)
“. . . the exotic pungency of the road signs: SOFT SHOULDERS – SHARP CURVES – SQUEEZE AHEAD – SLIPPERY WHEN WET;” (2)
“. . . what startled Bond was that it had been a negress at the wheel, a fine-looking negress in a black chauffeur’s uniform . . .” (2)
Felix Leiter, Casino [Royale] job
ebullience – happy, enthusiastic
haberdasher – dealer of men’s clothing
“‘This case isn’t ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr. Big is “live and let live”.’ . . . . “’In my job,’ he said, ‘when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s “live and let die”.’ ( 9)
fine percale sheets – smooth fabric closely woven
nostrums (for bleaching the skin) – idea for solving problems, medicine unlikely to be effective
Mr. Big’s “The Boneyard”: “The whole scene was macabre and livid, as if El Greco had done a painting by moonlight of an exhumed graveyard in a burning town.” . . . . “It was hot and the air was thick with smoke and the sweet, feral smell of two hundred negro bodies.” (14)
G.G. Sumatra, stripping: “It was a sexy, pug-like face — chienne was the only word Bond could think of.” (chienne – bitch) (15)
“There was nothing now but a single black G-string. The drums went into a hurricane of sexual rhythm.” (15)
“The pistol he held trained lazily on Bond’s heart was very fancy.” (15)
“It had been a futile effort, but for a split second they had regained the initiative and effaced the sudden shock of capture.” (16)
“Bond smiled at Leiter. ‘Lucky we made a date for the police to meet us here at two,’ he said. ‘See you at the lineup.’” (16)
Bond meets Mr. Big: “Bond could imagine that so ghastly a misfit must have been bent since childhood on revenge against fate and against the world that hated because it feared him.” (16)
lemon-coloured gloves (17)
ferrule – rubber or metal protecting the end of a stick from damage
“You have a double-o number, I believe — 007, if I remember right. The significance of that double-o number, they tell me, is that you have had to kill a man in the course of some assignment. There cannot be many double-o numbers in a Service which does not use assassination as a weapon. Whom have you been sent over to kill here, Mister Bond? Not me by any chance?’” (17)
“The American Secret Service has no power in America — only abroad. And the FBI are no friends of theirs” (19)
“’I will explain to you briefly,’ continued The Big Man, ‘why it is that you are not dead; why you have been permitted to enjoy the sensation of pain instead of adding to the pollution of the Harlem River from the folds of what is jocularly known as a cement overcoat.’” (19)
acedia (accidie) – listlessness, torpor, uncaring, unconcerned
Mr. Big: “’Mister Bond, I suffer from boredom. I am a prey to what the early Christians called “accidie”, the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated, those who have no more desires.” (19)
Bond of Mr. Big: “’Those who deserve to die,’ he paused,’ die the death they deserve. Write that down,’ he added. ‘It’s an original thought.”” (20)
“He remembered Leiter’s injunction: ‘Shins, groin, stomach, throat. Hit ’em anywhere else and you’ll just break your hand..’” (20)
carom, caromed – billiards shot, rebound following a collision
Leiter’s escape: “When no instructions came from The Big Man they got bored and I got to arguing the finer points of Jazz with Blabbermouth, the man with the fancy six-shooter. We got on to Duke Ellington and agreed that we liked our band-leaders to be percussion men, not wind. We agreed the piano or the drums held the band together better than any other solo instrument — Jelly-roll Morton, for instance. Apropos the Duke, I told him the crack about the clarinet – “an ill woodwind that nobody blows good”. That made him laugh fit to bust.” (20-21)
Universal Export: “. . . one of the covers used by agents for emergency calk on open lines from abroad.” (22)
shirred eggs – baked eggs
Solitaire (Simone Latrelle, age 25): “He sensed a lonely childhood on some great decaying plantation, an echoing ‘Great House’ slowly falling into disrepair and being encroached on by the luxuriance of the tropics. The parents dying, and the property being sold. The companionship of a servant or two and an equivocal life in lodgings in the capital. The beauty which was her only asset and the struggle against the shady propositions to be a ‘governess’, a ‘companion’, a ‘secretary’, all of which meant respectable prostitution. Then the dubious, unknown steps into the world of entertainment.” (25)
Solitaire contemplating an explanation of Mr. Big’s power: “How can one explain to someone who hasn’t lived close to the secret heart of the tropics, at the mercy of their anger and stealth and poison; who hasn’t experienced the mystery of the drums, seen the quick workings of magic and the mortal dread it inspires? What can he know of catalepsy, and thought-transference and the sixth sense of fish, of birds, of negroes; the deadly meaning of a white chicken’s feather, a crossed stick in the road, a little leather bag of bones and herbs? What of Mialism, of shadow-taking, of the death by swelling and the death by wasting?” (27)
“Voodoo drink -a concoction of rum, gunpowder, grave-dirt and human blood” (27)
Allumeuse – tease (French: allumeur) (29)
“’Damn you,’ said Bond. ‘You…’
She put her hand over his mouth.
‘”Allumeuse” is the nice word for it . . .” (29)
“. . . one day when you’re playing your little game you’ll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly.’” (29)
“The great train snaked on through the dark, pounding out the miles through the empty plains and mingy hamlets of Georgia, the ‘Peach State’, the angry moan of its four-toned wind-horn soughing over the wide savannah and the long shaft of its single searchlight ripping the black calico of the night.” (29)
curetted tables – condiment container, small bottle used in communion
Solitaire: “. . . will you settle down with me and grow old gracefully in St. Petersburg?”’
Bond: “. . . I want a long time of disgraceful living with you first . . .” (31)
desiccated – dried, without vitality
“. . . the whole Gulf of Mexico stretched away, as calm as a mirror, until the heat-haze on the horizon married it into the cloudless sky.” (32)
Piz Gloria – Blofeld’s mountain lair in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
pince-nez (pinch nose) – style of spectacles without earpieces
jalousies – slatted window covering
Bond laughed. ‘What an organization!’ he said.
stained white singlet – light sleevless shirt, undergarment (A-shirt, wife-beater)
hyphenating – code for sex
Leiter: “I use my ears for hearing with – not for collecting lip-stick.” (35)
Bond: “’. . . goddamn sleuth . . . If you find yourself dead in your bed tonight,’ laughed Bond, ‘you’ll know who did it.’” (35)
“The consensus of opinion was that they were bad news and no credit to the carefully restricted clientele of The Everglades.” (36)
“Bond shrugged his shoulders and they went back to their sitting-room and sat gloomily for a while, drinking and staring out across the sand, bonewhite in the light of the moon, towards the endless dark sea.” (36)
sanguine – confident, optimistic, cheerful
“It was a bright moonlit night and the buildings and warehouses threw great blocks of indigo shadow.” (39)
alarum – alarm
“It was odd to think of all the worms and eels and fish stirring quietly in the night, the thousands of gills sighing and the multitude of antennae waving and pointing and transmitting their tiny radar signals to the dozing nerve-centres.” (39)
“He looked up to see if by chance there were any clouds about to cross the moon, but the sky was empty save for its canopy of brightly burning stars” (39)
Poisonous fish guarding gold coins hidden under aquarium tank sand: “It was a scheme after Mr. Big’s philosophy, effective, technically brilliant, almost foolproof.” (40)
carboy – large bottle for corrosive liquid
“Either way, he could not stand still. He was reminded of the fact as a shot whammed between his legs into a pile of conchs, sending splinters of their hard china buzzing round him like wasps.” (40)
coconut-shy – carnival skill game
supplication – appeal made to someone in authority, addressing of requests
“Bond was glad to be on his way to the soft green flanks of Jamaica and to be leaving behind the great hard continent of Eldollarado.” (42)
casuarinas – evergreen shrubs and trees
perspex windows – acrylic glass
“. . . destiny, so why worry?” (43)
“You start to die the moment you are born.” “So take it easy.” (43)
“. . . being quick with a gun doesn’t mean you’re really tough. Just don’t forget it. This happy landing at Palisadoes Airport comes to you by courtesy of your stars. Better thank them.” (43)
penury – poverty
Shanties: “. . . low-lying shacks in the fashion known in Jamaica as ‘wattle-and-daub’.” (44)
bauxite deposits – principle source of aluminum
“. . . the erection of a base for one-man submarines in the event of war . . .” (44)
“. . . the New York syndicate that had purchased the island was wholly owned by Mr. Big.” (44)
reconnoitering – explore to gather information
“The ten minutes of tropical twilight brought its quick melancholy and then the stars and the three-quarter moon blazed down and the sea died to a whisper. There was the short lull between the two great winds of Jamaica, and then the palms began to whisper again.” (46)
“The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.” (48)
Sharks: “But they could sometimes be frightened off, he read, by loud noises in the water – even by shouting below the surface, and they would often flee if a swimmer chased them.” (48)
shoal of sharks – group or fish/people, shallow water, underwater sandbank
Stingray eggs: “Mermaids’ Purse” (Devil’s Pocketbook) (51)
“Up above, someone was spraying the surface of the sea with blood and offal.” (52)
offal – edible internal organs, something thrown away
incuriously – not curious or inquisitive
specie – coined money, in coin form, in the form specified
ingot – metal casting mold
baize – green woolen cloth similar to felt
“. . . he saw a hopeful awareness dawn through her tears.” (55)
paravane – towed winged underwater object, towed underwater minesweeping device
paroxysm of coughing – sudden outburst of emotion/symptom, convulsion, fit, spasm
rictus of agony and frenzied endeavour – fixed grimace or grin
merthiolate – mercury-containing substance that was once widely used as germ-killer and a preservative
cipherenes – code breakers
Moonraker (1955)
Card sharp: Steffi Esposito (6)
M.: “‘Better go along now and sandpaper your fingertips or whatever you sharpers do.’” (6)
“. . . he examined his face in the glass and decided that he had no intention of sacrificing a lifetime prejudice by shaving twice in one day.” (7)
Duke of Wirtemberg, 1782: “‘This is indeed the “Ace of Clubs”!’” (7)
Blinking Shell sign: “‘SUMMER SHELL is HERE’” . . . “‘HELL is HERE’” (8)
Drax: “A bullying, boorish, loud-mouthed vulgarian.” (10)
Drax on Bond: Commander Thingummy (10)
He placed a broad menu card beside his plate and handed another to M. ‘Blades’ was written in fine gold script across the top. Below there was a forest of print. (12)
“”Thank heaven for a man who makes up his mind,” said M.” (12)
“. . . clubs would be very dull without a sprinkling of eccentrics.” (13)
M.: “Somebody said that to become very rich you have to be helped by a combination of remarkable circumstances and an unbroken run of luck” (13)
Benzedrine: “Whenever he had a job of work to do he would take infinite pains beforehand and leave as little as possible to chance.” (13)
Bond: “And I feel rather generous tonight. What would you like to take off me?”
Drax: “Every penny you’ve got,” (14)
M.: “James. A little more champagne. The second bottle always tastes better.” (15)
“Very high stakes in a private game generally led to trouble.” (17)
Bond after beating Drax: Before he slept he reflected, as he had often reflected in other moments of triumph at the card table, that the gain to the winner is, in some odd way, always less than the loss to the loser. (19)
Bond on Drax: “He is almighty—the man in the padded cell who is God.” . . . . “Sir Hugo Drax is a raving paranoiac.” (20)
Drax’ comment: “’Spend it quickly, Commander Bond.” (21)
Gala Brand: Bond thought she looked very innocent standing there with her brown hair falling back from her head and the curve of her ivory throat sweeping down into the plain white shirt. With her hands clasped behind her back, gazing raptly upwards at the glittering fifty feet of the Moonraker, she might have been a schoolgirl looking up at a Christmas tree—except for the impudent pride of the jutting breasts, swept up by the thrown-back head and shoulders. (35)
Bon kicking Krebs: Gradually the colour came back to his face and the craftiness to his eyes. (36)
Krebs: “Leck mich am Arsch” (36) (Kiss my ass)
Gala Brand picks a flower, Bond tells her about the pain picked flowers feel, she give it to him: “You can stick it in the muzzle of your revolver,” (37)
He held nothing back and he showed each false hare as it had been started and finally run to earth, leaving nothing but a thin scent of ill-founded suspicions and a muddle of clues that all ended in the same question mark… where was a pattern? (37)
The white chalk cliff comes down upon Bond and Gala Brand: “. . . like the dying clang of a bell.” (39)
After escaping the cliff avalanche: Bond broke the silence. “Well, by God,” he said. “That was close.” (40)
Walter of Kerbs: Du Scheißkerl (42) (You son of a bitch.)
Krebs: “Sehen sie her, mein Kapitän” (45) (See it here, my captain.)
It appeared that all that day there had been heavy selling of sterling. It had started in Tangier and quickly spread to Zurich and New York. The pound had been fluctuating wildly in the money markets of the world and the arbitrage dealers had made a killing. (46)
Bond Cutting off a taxi: “. . . Bond heard a four-letter yell as he shot past.” (48)
Krerbs speaking German baby-talk to the machines (48): “Jesu Maria, hist du ein braves Kind” (Jesus Mary, you art a good child)
Krebs and Brand: “. . . she was enveloped in the miasma of his breath” (49)
“Verstanden? Also. Hals und Beinbruch!” (Roger that? So. Break a leg!) (50)
“Wunderschön” (Beautiful), “Zum Kotzen!” (Suck!), “Halt’s Maul.” (Shut!), “Der Tag” (The day) (51)
Drax’s reaction to Bond’s “Kraut” (Herb) comment”: “Reichsdeutscher” (German Empire) (53)
“There was a big farmhouse a mile away from our hideout in the forest. A lot of Nissen huts had been built round it and it was used as a rear headquarters for some sort of liaison group. English and Americans. A hopeless place. No discipline, no security, and full of hangers-on and shirkers from all over the place. ” (53)
“Pfui Teufel!” (Ugh) (54)
After Drax’s story: “What do you think of my story? Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, remarkable? For one man to have done all that?” (54-55)
Bond: “It’s a remarkable case-history. Galloping paranoia. Delusions of jealousy and persecution. Megalomaniac hatred and desire for revenge. Curiously enough,” he went on conversationally, “it may have something to do with your teeth. Diastema, they call it. Comes from sucking your thumb when you’re a child. Yes. I expect that’s what the psychologists will say when they get you into the lunatic asylum. ‘Ogre’s teeth.’ Being bullied at school and so on. Extraordinary the effect it has on a child. Then Nazism helped to fan the flames and then came the crack on your ugly head. The crack you engineered yourself. I expect that settled it. From then on you were really mad. Same sort of thing as people who think they’re God. Extraordinary what tenacity they have. Absolute fanatics. You’re almost a genius. Lombroso would have been delighted with you. As it is you’re just a mad dog that’ll have to be shot. Or else you’ll commit suicide. Paranoiacs generally do. Too bad. Sad business.” (55)
Bond after Drax’s beating: “‘S’all right,” said Bond thickly. “Don’t worry. London’s okay. Got a plan.” (55)
Suety (57): “hard white fat found on the kidneys and loins of sheep and cattle. Use: cooking, tallow.”
“Zu Befehl!” (At command.) (57)
Diamonds are Forever (1956)
