And when it finally occurred, as finally occur it must, it indeed took me and everyone else completely by surprise. It was not the time that I was so intent on watching the crane overhead that I got clobbered by the long metal rods swinging on the hook and pitched thirty feet into the welding room. Nor was it the time I yelled ‘take it away’ instead of ‘up slowly’ and got my hand jammed in the chain and was carried halfway across Assembly hanging by my arm with my legs kicking in midair. It was not even the time I walked into the path of a truck backing into the loading bay which went straight over the top of me and only stopped when I picked myself up unscathed in front of the astonished driver.
    All these and many other thrills and spills I survived, while one other man was killed when a mobile crane hit overhead electrical wires, two lost hands when they were trapped between gilders, a welder was blinded when he mixed up his gas bottles and another broke both legs when the gantry dropped a load of steel rods on top of him. Those better tougher men went down while I survived similar accidents. It was beginning to become humiliating. Or was it that I was really indestructible despite my innumerable injuries? No I was not. All those big disasters I survived. It was a silly thing that got me in the end.

“Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No—Doctor Julius No.”
“No? Spelt like Yes?”
“That’s right.”…
…Suddenly, from the dribbling snout, a yellow-tipped bolt of blue flame had howled out towards Quarrel’s hiding place. There was a single puff of orange and red flame from the bushes to Bond’s right and one unearthly scream, immediately choked. Satisfied, the searing tongue of fire licked back into the snout. The thing turned on its axis and stopped dead. Now the blue hole of its mouth aimed straight at Bond.
    Bond stood and waited for his unspeakable end. He looked into the blue jaws of death and saw the glowing red filament of the firer deep inside the blue tube. He thought of Quarrel’s body—there would be no time to think of Quarrel—and imagined the blackened smoking figure lying in the melted sand. Soon he, too, would flame like a torch…
 James Bond—killed off Sherlock Holmes style by Ian Fleming at the end of From Russia with Love—came back from the dead to bury Dr No in a mountain of bird dung. In 1958, the English still characterised all their villains as Germans, even when they were really Chinese. But Fleming must have really enjoyed himself writing this, setting it in all his favourite locations in Jamaica. I envied him at the time, sitting with his Gin and Tonic in the sun, writing as if Bond was sitting at the next table; then a wander around the corner to the scene of the next fight; then playing out his fantasies on that beautiful girl down there on the beach. I envied him when I read the book. I still do.
    But at least his timing was a little better than Alistair MacLean’s, in that he still had a bit left in him when—at around the same time—filmdom bestowed its million dollar blessing upon him. Having read all Fleming published up to that time, I devoured the advance publicity with quivering enthusiasm—puzzling at the choice of unknown Scot Sean Connery when surely Roger Moore was the perfect for the role, and grumbled that they were not making the movies in the right order.
    I need not have worried. Dr No looks rather slow and dated these days, but at the time it rocketed across the screen at twice the pace of any other movie to date, possessed blindingly detailed action scenes and Connery became the very personification of the action hero that all others would strive to match for all time to come. It was impossible to read Bond without seeing Connery, such that Fleming’s suggestion that his character looked like Hoagy Carmichael positively jarred. But what would Fleming know—he was merely the author. Hoagy Who? If you don’t know who he is, you’re probably better off.