 Fleming intended the book to have a more serious tone than his debut novel, and he initially considered making the story a meditation on the nature of evil.The novel's original title, "The Undertaker's Wind", reflects this; the undertaker's wind, which was to act as a metaphor for the story, describes one of Jamaica's winds that "blows all the bad air out of the island".The literary critic Daniel Ferreras Savoye considers the titles of Fleming's novels to have importance individually and collectively; "Live and Let Die", he writes, "turns an expression of collective wisdom, in this case fraternal and positive, into its exact opposite, suggesting a materialistic epistemological outlook, individualistic and lucid".