Purging “Offensive” Content from 007 Novels

Following protests that greeted a decision by children’s book author Roald Dahl’s UK publisher to alter or “remove and update” language in his fiction which some young readers might find offensive (“An exercise in priggish stupidity,” lamented the Sydney Morning Herald), it was only to be expected that similar objections would attend an announcement that Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) has “commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.”

This year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of British super-spy James Bond’s introduction to the world. In April, a new IFP edition of 1953’s Casino Royale, the first Agent 007 yarn, will begin a succession of reissues, all edited to “remove perceived racist content,” as The Book Bond explains. That blog goes on to quote from a report in Variety, which lays out some specific revisions being made, in particular to Fleming’s second Bond adventure, Live and Let Die (1954):

A commonly used pejorative term used for Black people by Fleming, whose Bond books were published between 1951 and 1966, has been removed almost entirely and replaced with “Black person” or “Black man.” In other instances, references have been edited.

For example, in “Live and Let Die” (1954), Bond’s opinion of Africans in the gold and diamond trades as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” has been altered to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

Another scene in the book, set during a strip tease at a Harlem nightclub, was originally “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.” This has been revised to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” A segment in the book describing accented dialogue as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in,” has been removed.

In several of the books, including “Thunderball” (1961), “Quantum of Solace” (1960) and “Goldfinger” (1959), ethnicities have been removed.

IFP contends that many of these changes are in line with what Ian Fleming himself “would have wanted.” Returning to the matter of Live and Let Die, for instance, the company (which has taken over publication of this author’s books and short stories) notes that “The original U.S. version …, approved and apparently favored by Ian, had removed some racial terms which were problematic even in mid-1950s America, and would certainly be considered deeply offensive now by the vast majority of readers.” The Spy Command says IFP will bring “similar standards” to bear on other Fleming yarns: “Racial words ‘likely to cause great offense now, and detract from a reader’s enjoyment, have been altered, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and period.’”

Responses to this latter-day sanitizing have been mixed. Andrew Lycett, author of the 1996 biography, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, writes in Britain’s Independent newspaper: “I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s—and society’s—attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming. … [T]here’s no way Bond’s character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.”

The Book Bond’s John Cox has a rather more equanimous perspective on this subject. “For me personally,” he says, “I want the original unedited texts. Full stop. … But I also understand IFP’s dilemma. They are marketing these editions to a mass audience and they have to deal with the times we are in. For those who want the unedited texts, you can certainly still find those. And maybe some day the texts will be returned to the original. I'm not sure if these changes will make these 70th anniversary editions more collectible or less so, but they better have some pretty spectacular cover art to overcome the taint that I think these will forever have for Fleming purists.”

READ MORE: “A Bond Is a Bond Is a Bond,” by John Cork (Double-O-Seven Magazine); “Phillip Kennedy Johnson Writes New James Bond for 70th Anniversary,” by Rich Johnston (Bleeding Cool).