Ian Fleming's 1956
James Bond novel about
diamond smuggling. The weakest of the original Bond books, mostly due to the lack of an interesting villain. O.F. Snelling, in his raving-fan companion-piece to Bond (
007 James Bond: A Report) states "{...}There seems to me to be little about {the Spang brothers} that is frightening, dreadful, or sinister."
Bond is sent to the US to track down a group of diamond smugglers known as the Spangled Mob, after their leaders, the Spang brothers. He gets reacquainted with Felix Leiter, now missing an arm and a leg and working for Pinkerton after his retirement from the CIA. In a curiously anticlimactic sequence, he offhandedly kills one of the Spang brothers and several other heavies. On his return from the case, he is targeted by two more killers, but handily whips them and saves the girl.
Fleming is an expert in the field of espionage.
Unfortunately, he knows little about American organized crime, and this book comes off as a hodgepodge of flat characters and uninspired guesswork.
The memorable line from this book is also quoted in his factual book about a real diamond smuggling interdiction operation, The Diamond Smugglers. "It reads better than it lives.".