Live and Let Die (film) and orchestrated the "James Bond Theme", was unavailable during production. Broccoli and Saltzman instead asked Paul McCartney to write the theme song. Since McCartney's salary was high and another composer could not be hired with the remainder of the music budget, George Martin, who had been McCartney's producer while with The Beatles, was chosen to write the score for the film. "Live and Let Die", written by McCartney along with his wife Linda and performed by their group Wings, was the first true rock and roll song used to open a Bond film, and became a major success in the
Live and Let Die (novel) is an ingenious affair, full of recondite knowledge and horrific spills and thrills – of slightly sadistic excitements also – though without the simple and bold design of its predecessor". Elizabeth L Sturch, writing in "The Times Literary Supplement", observed that Fleming was "without doubt the most interesting recent recruit among thriller-writers" and that "Live and Let Die" "fully maintains the promise of ... "Casino Royale"." 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", although overall she felt that the novel "contains passages