The Man with the Golden Gun (novel) who managed the Tate & Lyle plantations in West Indies after the war and the book's main villain, Francisco Scaramanga, was named after George Scaramanga, an Etonian contemporary of Fleming's: the pair are said to have fought at school. The effects of the two Eon Productions Bond films released prior to the writing of the novel ("Dr. No" and "From Russia with Love") were reflected in the novel through the increased number of gadgets used. One of these was the poison gun used in the scene of the attempted assassination of M. The idea was taken from the story of
The Man with the Golden Gun (novel) Bohdan Stashynsky, who defected from the Eastern Bloc to the West in 1961. 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. Fleming returned to Britain with a completed first draft of the manuscript in March 1964 and wrote to the copy editor of all his novels, William Plomer, saying it needed a lot of re-writing. As time went on Fleming became increasingly unhappy with the book and thought about re-working it in the spring of 1965, but was persuaded