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) 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