The Man with the Golden Gun (novel) assassination attempt, not only does M not press charges against Bond, he sends him out on further missions. According to Benson, the main adversary of the novel, Francisco Scaramanga, is more a henchman than a major adversary and "a second-rate, smalltime crook who happens to have gotten lucky with his shooting." Comentale, Watt and Willman note 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". There are two main themes in the novel. The first involves Scaramanga providing
The Man with the Golden Gun (novel) that "perhaps Ian Fleming was very tired when he wrote it. Perhaps ... he left it unrevised. The fact remains that this posthumous Bond is a sadly sub-standard job." His praise for the novel was muted, admitting "it isn't of course by any means totally unreadable but it's depressingly far from the best Bond." Writing in "The Observer"s sister paper, "The Guardian", Christopher Wordsworth noted that "since "Goldfinger" 007 has been toiling hopelessly in the wake of the "Zeitgeist"." Prior to this novel, Wordsworth writes, "the distance between "Live and let Die", Ian Fleming's second and best, and "You Only