The British Secret Service agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, to New York City to investigate "Mr Big", real name Buonaparte Ignace Gallia.

These gold coins have been turning up in the Harlem section of New York City and in Florida and are suspected of being part of a treasure that was buried in Jamaica by the pirate Henry Morgan.

On leaving, Bond kills several of Mr Big's men; Leiter is released with minimal physical harm by a gang member, sympathetic because of a shared appreciation of jazz.

Bond is reunited with Solitaire; the following morning Mr Big ties the couple to a line behind his yacht and plans to drag them over the shallow coral reef and into deeper water so that the sharks and barracuda that he attracts in to the area with regular feedings will eat them.

Fleming and his wife Ann flew to New York before taking the Silver Meteor train to St. Petersburg in Florida and then flying on to Jamaica.

[10] Fleming intended the book to have a more serious tone than his debut novel, and he initially considered making the story a meditation on the nature of evil.

This is in keeping with the storyline in that Bond brings order without which "the world would quickly turn into the dystopian, barbarian reality feared by [Thomas] Hobbes and celebrated by [Marquis] de Sade.

[24] Fleming also used, and extensively quoted, information about voodoo from his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1950 book The Traveller's Tree,[23] which had also been partly written at Goldeneye.

[25] Fleming had a long-held interest in pirates, from the novels he read as a child through to films such as Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn, which he enjoyed watching.

This racism reflected not only a pronounced theme of interwar adventure writing, such as the novels of [John] Buchan, but also widespread literary culture.

Quarrel was Fleming's ideal concept of a black person, and the character was based on his genuine liking for Jamaicans, whom he saw as "full of goodwill and cheerfulness and humour".

[37] Mr Big is described as being intellectually brilliant,[38] with a "great football of a head, twice the normal size and very nearly round" and skin which was "grey-black, taut and shining like the face of a week-old corpse in the river".

[38] According to the literary analyst LeRoy L. Panek, in his examination of 20th century British spy novels, Live and Let Die was a departure from the "gentleman crook" that appeared in much earlier literature, as the intellectual and organisational skills of Mr Big were emphasised, rather than the behavioural.

[50] Live and Let Die, like other Bond novels, reflects the changing roles of Britain and America during the 1950s and the perceived threat from the Soviet Union to both nations.

Unlike Casino Royale, where Cold War politics revolve around British-Soviet tensions, in Live and Let Die Bond arrives in Harlem to protect America from Soviet agents working through the Black Power movement.

"[52] Live and Let Die also gave Fleming a chance to outline his views on what he saw as the increasing American colonisation of Jamaica—a subject that concerned both him and his neighbour Noël Coward.

[54] The writer Louise Welsh observes that "Live and Let Die taps into the paranoia that some sectors of white society were feeling" as the civil rights movements challenged prejudice and inequality.

[55] That insecurity manifested itself in opinions shared by Fleming with the intelligence industry, that the American National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was a communist front.

[56] The communist threat was brought home to Jamaica with the 1952 arrest of the Jamaican politician Alexander Bustamante by the American authorities while he was on official business in Puerto Rico, despite the fact that he was avowedly anti-communist.

[57] Friendship is another prominent element of Live and Let Die, where the importance of male friends and allies shows through in Bond's relationships with Leiter and Quarrel.

Live and Let Die was published in hardback by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1954[59] and, as with Casino Royale, Fleming designed the cover, which again featured the title lettering prominently.

[69] Elizabeth L Sturch, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, observed that Fleming was "without doubt the most interesting recent recruit among thriller-writers"[70] and that Live and Let Die "fully maintains the promise of ... Casino Royale.

"[70] Tempering her praise of the book, Sturch thought that "Mr Fleming works often on the edge of flippancy, rather in the spirit of a highbrow",[70] although overall she felt that the novel "contains passages which for sheer excitement have not been surpassed by any modern writer of this kind".

[71] George Malcolm Thompson, writing in The Evening Standard, believed Live and Let Die to be "tense; ice-cold, sophisticated; Peter Cheyney for the carriage trade".

[79][80] In 1955, following the television broadcast of an adaptation of Fleming's earlier novel, Casino Royale, Warner Bros. expressed an interest in Live and Let Die, and offered $500 for an option, against $5,000 if the film was made.

[82] The film was directed by Guy Hamilton, produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and is the eighth in the Eon Productions Bond series.