It’s a medical joke…
Also “From a View to a Kill”: Fleming wrote some short stories after writing (most of?) the novels. A guy shoots at Bond, which was not unexpected, and Bond kills him. I say “not unexpected”, but he hadn’t discussed it with anybody or been targeted: he was just on a job, and killing somebody was what he was doing at that stage of the job.
Fleming got a bit looser with his characters as time went on. I’ve got just a vague suspicion that at the same time the British government was getting a bit looser with it’s characters.
I don’t think it’s archaic in British usage, or at least it wasn’t 50 years ago.
I like how they handle it in the Casino Royale movie:
This article is a pretty interesting read - it discusses what a real-world 007 career path might look like (and touches on the question about the “license to kill”.
I guess I’ve watched Bond since I was so young I didn’t “get” what was going on, how the world worked. But I just accepted it. And never considered the implications, the mechanics, of it.
I guess I just figured shooting double agents or assassinating spies was just “another day at the office”. MI-6 would just “clean up the mess” and Bond would continue on. It’s just housecleaning. Why would the police care? They might not even know.
It never occurred to me that THAT is what a license to kill meant. not that the police department would let you go when you showed them your double-naught card, so much that your boss would smooth things over. It’s not the killing that needs the “license”, it’s the aftermath.
Though now I’m wondering what happened after a lot of scenes in the movies. Dead guys in hotel rooms, bodies in trees, guys that fell through roofs from airplanes. Do the police ever figure out what happened? Or are there tons of unsolved homicides in Bond’s wake, clogging the open case files?
There was a news item several years back about a van with four people that crashed and all were killed. None had IDs, and as far as I know, nothing ever came from it. AFAIK, they were never identified, no arrests made. They could have been undocumented aliens, most likely, but part of me thinks they were henchmen, killed in the middle of some real-life Bond movie, and us civilians none the wiser. Could be!
Man, that’s arrogant of Dryden, to assume that if the boss was on to him, she’d let him know about the guy coming to kill him.
He doesn’t think that. It’s just that he already knows Bond, and knows that Bond has never killed before. He therefore assumes that Bond isn’t about to kill him.
Mad magazine claimed he had a license to kill, “but only a learner’s permit to make out”, because “the English don’t mind violence, but they’re a little stuffy about sex”.
But he also assumes that if Bond had killed, he’d have found out about that.
The UK release of **License to Kill **was Licence Revoked, so yeah, there’s a provision to limit his reckless behavior.
Not quite, **License Revoked **was the working title during early development. By the time they started shooting, it had been renamed as License to Kill, and was released as such in all English-speaking markets.
The OED has it marked as obsolete, and I’m pretty sure it would have been at least obsolescent when Dr No was written. Certainly not usual, or capable of being used without likely being misunderstood.
I remember that I found it jarring when I read it over 30 years ago. Certainly not standard British usage then or now.