Live and Let Die

Live and Let Die is the second novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. It was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1954, and it is set in London, the United States and Jamaica.

Fleming wrote the novel at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica before his first book, Casino Royale, had even been published, and much of its background came from his travel in the United States and his knowledge of Jamaica. The story centres on Bond's pursuit of Mr Big, a criminal with links to the American underworld, to the world of voodoo and to SMERSH, an arm of the Soviet secret service, all of which are presented as threats to the First World. Bond's way into the case is Mr Big's smuggling of seventeenth-century gold coins from British territories in the Caribbean, and the trail runs through the jazz joints of Harlem and the Florida Everglades before it reaches the islands. Solitaire, a beautiful fortune teller, is both the prisoner and the instrument of the man Bond is hunting, and nobody in the book can be certain how the contest between the two of them will finish.

The novel deals with the East-West struggle of the Cold War, including relations between Britain and the United States, the question of Britain's position in the world, and race relations, alongside the larger struggle between good and evil that Fleming returns to across the series.