Recently polishing and putting up a number of
book reviews of John Gardner's James Bond novels, and considering the hugely uneven body of work that quite talented author unmistakably contributed to that franchise, it seemed a reminder of how by the time he was enlisted to work on the series continuing the James Bond novels was pretty much one of those impossible tasks that writers are only enjoined to do because the people who own the franchise see more money in it. By the 1980s Ian Fleming's creation was so much out of his time that "more Ian Fleming" was unsalable, and at the same time a more contemporary version of James Bond so unrecognizable that it was pointless to call him James Bond. Reflecting all this Gardner, after (to the extent that his irony toward the character allowed it) going from one extreme to the other in his first two books (a
thoroughly updated Bond in Licence Renewed, a
thoroughly backward-looking, nostalgic, adventure in the next book, For Special Services), and then mostly offered compromises that did not please many. Unsurprisingly, while Gardner's Bond novels were bestsellers through the 1980s (every one of them from
Licence Renewed to
Win, Lose or Die making that gold standard of those lists in America, the
New York Times hardcover fiction list), they left very little longer impression--certainly to go by that handy index of enduring readership, Goodreads. Customer ratings and reviews are very few for these bestsellers, suggesting that they have not been looked at much in a long time--which in light of what I have seen of the books, and of the franchise recently, bespeaks these books not being forgotten gems, but rather the Bond franchise soldiering on through decades of declining public interest simply because there was just enough money in it for that. Alas, as
the audience's response to No Time to Die showed (and as
the slowness of Everything-Or-Nothing to get work underway on Bond 26 has also showed), the days of that are likely coming to an end.
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