The story centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond, who had been posted missing, presumed dead, after his last mission in Japan.

The first draft and part of the editing process was completed before Fleming's death and the manuscript had passed through the hands of his copy editor, William Plomer.

The publishers Jonathan Cape passed the manuscript to the writer and Bond aficionado Kingsley Amis for his thoughts and advice on the story, although his suggestions were not used.

Scaramanga is known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver, which fires silver-jacketed, gold-cored dumdum bullets.

[1][2] Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica in January and February 1964,[3] completing it by the beginning of March.

[3][b] Fleming's wife, Ann, was concerned about the effect it was having on her husband, and wrote to her brother that "it is painful to see Ian struggle to give birth to Bond".

[6] Fleming based his title on Nelson Algren's 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm; he also considered Goldenrod and Number 3½ Love Lane.

[7] Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964[4] and wrote to his friend and copy editor William Plomer saying it needed a lot of rewriting.

Chancellor put the events of The Man with the Golden Gun in 1963; Griswold is more precise and considers the story to have taken place between November 1963 and the end of February 1964.

[20] While in Kitzbühel, Austria, in the 1930s, Fleming's car, a Standard Tourer, had been struck by a train at a level crossing, dragging him fifty yards along the track.

From that time on he had associated trains with death, which led to their use as a plot device not just in The Man with the Golden Gun, but also in Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia, with Love.

[21] Chancellor also considers that one of Fleming's earlier novels, Goldfinger, was an influence on The Man with the Golden Gun, with the conference of gangsters from different gangs being used in both stories;[22] in both novels—and in Moonraker—Bond, in an undercover capacity, acted as a male secretary to the villain.

[20] Fleming used the name of the secretary of the Royal St George's Golf Club, Mark Nicholson, for the novel's CIA representative at the hotel.

[20] Tony Hugill, the sugar planter mentioned in the book, was named after a member of 30 AU—the commando unit formed by Fleming during the war—who managed the Tate & Lyle plantations in the West Indies after the war.

[26] Fleming also used the surname of his friend, Morris Cargill, a columnist on The Gleaner, as the name of the Justice of the Jamaican Supreme Court at the end of the book.

Stashynsky was put on trial for the murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera and stated that he had used a poison-spray gun to do it.

Sitting behind Scaramanga in a car, he considers shooting him in the back of the head (what he describes as "the old Gestapo-KGB point of puncture"[32]) but decides against it for a number of reasons: the itch of curiosity, an inbuilt dislike of cold murder, the feeling that this was not the predestined moment, the likelihood that he would have to murder the chauffeur also — these, combined with the softness of the night and the fact that the 'Sound System' was now playing a good recording of one of his favourites, "After You've Gone", and that cicadas were singing from the lignum vitae tree, said 'No'.

While Bond is described as a blunt instrument, he is not a cold-blooded killer and he has to rise above the actions of such enemies and act more suitably for a British fictional hero.

[36][31] For the first time in the Bond canon, M's full name and title of "Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG" was finally revealed.

[31] The weakness of the villain affects the standard of the novel; according to Chancellor the two weakest books in the Bond canon—The Spy Who Loved Me and The Man with the Golden Gun—are the stories that do not have "an older, super-intelligent villain",[39] while Amis writes "the overall inferiority of The Man with the Golden Gun is typified by the ordinariness of Scaramanga, who entirely lacks the physical presence of Bond-villain at his best and remains a mere trigger-man whatever his (undemonstrated) deadliness".

[40] The Anglicist Vivian Halloran notes that Scaramanga had the same character profile as Herr von Hammerstein, the former Gestapo officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service in "For Your Eyes Only".

[41] The literary critic Meir Sternberg observes that many of the Bond villains are monstrous—a definition in which he includes deformity of one of the parts of their bodies;[e] Scaramanga is one of these, possessing three nipples.

[54] The arson was part of a wider conspiracy by Scaramanga and his KGB connection, Hendricks, to destabilise the region by a campaign of industrial sabotage against companies based in Jamaica, including Reynolds Metal, Kaiser Bauxite and Aluminia.

[57] The Man with the Golden Gun was published in the UK on 1 April 1965[8] by Jonathan Cape, was 221 pages long and cost eighteen shillings.

[65][66] Even before the US edition was published, The Man with the Golden Gun was ninth place on the best-seller lists, with 80,000 pre-orders for the hardback version.

[67] In July 1966 Pan Books published a paperback version of The Man with the Golden Gun in the UK that sold 273,000 copies before the end of the year and 485,000 in 1967.

[71] Chancellor considers that the reviews were "polite and rather sad ... recognising that the book had effectively been left half-finished, and as such did not represent Fleming at the top of his game".

William Trevor, writing in The Listener, was dismissive of the work, thinking that "Bond continues to behave with so little originality that neither Templar nor Drummond, Marlowe nor Nick Charles, would have paused to waste a pellet on him";[76] he continued, saying that "this present work is once again a fantasy for grown-up children, neither as clever nor exciting as the early thrillers of Edgar Wallace or the boys adventure stories of fifty years ago".

Jones, writing in The New York Review of Books, thought The Man with the Golden Gun was "an innocuous run-of-the-mill adventure story of 1911 vintage".

[65] The critic for Books and Bookmen lamented the fact that "Bond has gone out like a lamb; even the girls are below par, while the villain seems like a refuge from a seedy Western.