The James Bond Continuation Novels: In Lieu of a Guide

Listed below are the James Bond continuation novels--specifically the twenty-seven authorized, non-novelization James Bond continuation novels by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.

At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.

Kingsley Amis

Colonel Sun (1968)

John Gardner

Licence Renewed (1981)

For Special Services (1982)

Icebreaker (1983)

Role of Honor (1984)

Nobody Lives Forever (1986)

No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)

Scorpius (1988)

Win, Lose or Die (1989)

Brokenclaw (1990)

The Man From Barbarossa (1991)

Death is Forever (1992)

Never Send Flowers (1993)

SeaFire (1994)

Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)

Raymond Benson

Zero Minus Ten (1996)

The Facts of Death (1997)

High Time to Kill (1998)

DoubleShot (2000)

Never Dream of Dying (2001)

The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)

Sebastian Faulks

Devil May Care (2008)

Jeffrey Deaver

Carte Blanche (2011)

William Boyd

Solo (2013)

Anthony Horowitz

Trigger Mortis (2015)

Forever and a Day (2018)

With a Mind to Kill (2022)

"Make it New" or Go Retro? (The Experience of the Bond Continuation Novels)

Working through the history of the James Bond franchise one point of interest for me has been the ways in which that history anticipated the problems of other franchises that likewise just keep going and going and going in the course of its doing just that before many of them had even hit the market.

One of them is the dilemma of whether to forget the past and try to make the new installment in the series as contemporary in tone as possible; or to cleave to the past, evoking it ceaselessly and hewing to the old pattern and giving the audience "more of the same" as much as the need to avoid intolerable repetition or the appearance of being ridiculous or offensive will allow.

If the franchise goes on long enough, as the Bond franchise has, not least in print, one is likely to see the series swing back and forth between these extremes, and maybe stop at every detectable point in between. Indeed, both John Gardner and Raymond Benson displayed the pattern within just their own phases of the continuation books.

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was an attempt at making James Bond over as an entirely contemporary figure, the agent of a thoroughly post-imperial Britain fighting a Carlos the Jackal type against the backdrop of the energy crisis, while the follow-up For Special Services went in the other direction of an attempt at "Ian Fleming for the '80s." Icebreaker ended up in somewhere in the middle, and so did it generally go ever since, if with particular books tacking this way, others that.

Raymond Benson had much less room to attempt anything like For Special Services, but in his first, Zero Minus Ten, it was clear that he wanted to keep something of Fleming (in the long gaming sequence, in the torture scene, etc.), but then went as contemporary as could be with Never Dream of Dying reading like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper.

Some of the results were more entertaining, others less so--but the task was ultimately impossible. There could be no going back to Fleming, really, while there could also be no 100 percent update that would leave anything of Bond intact--with the problem underlined both by the works which tried to take Bond all the way back to his '50s-era point of origin (at its most extreme in Anthony Horowitz's Goldfinger "sequel" Trigger Mortis, and Jeffrey Deaver's giving us a James Bond born in 1979 in Carte Blanche). Still, especially considering the failure of these later efforts to register on the bestseller lists it seems to me that the intent of these books is less to "get it right" than to help keep James Bond in the zeitgeist in the ever-longer spells between the Bond films that are the real backbone of the franchise.

After Spectre: A Prediction

Originally posted on December 18, 2015.

As I noted in a previous post, Spectre has not been the triumph hoped for by the producers or the fans--but, as it adds to an already $800 million global gross, it is also no flop.

Of course, neither was Die Another Day, or Moonraker, or Quantum of Solace a flop for that matter. But in each of those cases a decision was taken to follow a very different path with the next Bond movie, and it does not seem impossible that this will be the case here.

What direction might that be? Nothing so radical as the retro approach that the various novelists Glidrose has commissioned to write new James Bond novels (which reached a new peak with Horowitz's '50s-era Trigger Mortis, set just after the events of Goldfinger).

Rather I think that we will see the filmmakers back off to some extent from the course they established in Skyfall, and continued in Spectre--a more "mythic" approach to Bond, which not incidentally makes much more of his personal history. I suspect also that, just as happened after Quantum of Solace, they will hesitate to go with a political plot (which, somehow, always leads to exaggerated criticisms in big, popular movies). Instead we are apt to get a shorter, brisker Bond movie, with less aspiration to be epic, but more emphasis on simple fun--which will also leave the filmmakers more hard-pressed to make the twenty-fifth installment in the series headed our way in the next few years somehow feel like more than just "another" Bond movie, itself now just another example of the would-be blockbusters that have come to saturate the multiplex year-round.

Bowdlerizing Bond?

Apparently there are plans to reissue the Ian Fleming Bond novels later this year to mark the series' (and thus the franchise's) seventieth anniversary. (The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit print in 1953.)

It seems to me that this is more gesture toward the idea of the brand name "James Bond" attaching to an essentially coherent and thriving franchise than anything else given the lack of evidence for any audience for the novels themselves. Bond continuation novel author Raymond Benson himself acknowledged that the literary prose style of the Fleming originals (Fleming's writing the adventures of James Bond as if he were writing Madame Bovary) by itself suffices to make the books unsalable today, while even when Benson and his colleagues produced more accessible, brisker, more action-packed books they did not exactly set the bestseller lists on fire. (Indeed, so far as I am aware John Gardner's Win, Lose or Die was the last Bond novel to grace the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, way back in 1989, since which time there have been no fewer than eighteen more novels, none of which seem to have managed the feat.) And if anything the odds against a comeback only decline with time, as the public shifts away from print toward audiovisual media for its entertainment generally, and its dose of action-adventure especially.

It has also come to my attention that the books are being bowdlerized. Specifically there is an effort to edit out the more overtly racist material.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, in the hierarchy of concern among the status politics-minded sensitivity in matters of genders comes ahead of sensitivity in matters of race, and even were that not the case I would imagine that there is more offense taken at how he handled gender than race. (Indeed, while our culture warriors love to think of the '50s as right-wing heaven the ultra-Establishment Edwardian Tory Fleming was already being called out as a reactionary by the feminists of his day, and Fleming's reaction to them such that I suspect that Fleming sometimes played the troll--as in Goldfinger.) Certainly it would seem to say something that, to cite one of those more recent continuation writers, Anthony Horowitz went to extreme, in fact wildly anachronistic, lengths to make the gender politics of Trigger Mortis conform to the expectations of what we now call the "woke" (to the point of undoing Bond's "conversion" of Pussy Galore to heterosexuality, and subjecting Bond to a speech on gay liberation), but kept Bond's casual racism. (This was not least in his remarks about Slavs as a race into which "cold-bloodedness and contempt . . . seemed to be built"--which, no matter what Whoopi Goldberg thinks "racism" means, most certainly are racist, as we especially should not forget when discussing a book that hit print in a moment in which the Brexit-loving right whipped up hatred against Poles, and the most dangerous conflict of the post-Cold War era was brewing on the shores of the Black Sea along lines that make just how Westerners see Russia a matter not to be taken lightly.)

However, there is also the matter of—again--the way in which the books are written. The more inarguable racism in Fleming tends to consist of offhand remarks on the part of the characters or the narration, which can be easily cut out without affecting the larger narrative. By contrast what would appear offensive in the treatment of gender from the standpoint of entertainment-industrial complex standards in 2023 is deeply rooted in the stuff of the novel. A story like Casino Royale (and certainly Goldfinger) would be reduced to shreds if one tried to "fix" it, such that it would not be a matter of excising a little material here and there, but of a full-blown rewrite--after which pretending Fleming is the author of the result would be an empty piety by even the debased standard of these times. And so those are the adjustments they have elected to make.

Of course, to say that they can more easily make those adjustments is not the same as saying that they should do so--and I have to admit that I disapprove. While I certainly don't endorse Fleming's social attitudes (Bond's sneering attitude toward young people and the working class in the first pages of Thunderball, if not what causes controversy these days, were already an unpleasant surprise, and proved no anomaly) the fact remains that the books were written long ago by an author in no position to make decisions regarding his work. To me that in itself seems enough reason to leave things as they are. At the same time that the books have in their way become artifacts of cultural history--with the alteration not merely disrespect for an artist's creation (however we may judge the art), but an attack on the memory and understanding of the past, a thing even less forgivable.

Review: Anthony Horowitz's Forever and a Day

MILD SPOILERS

I will say up front--for the benefit of those who have never read this blog before--that I tend to be less than enthusiastic about prequels. This is all the more the case when the subject of the prequel in question is a figure like Bond. Double-o-seven is very much a Gary Stu figure (if at times quite an unusual one), and it strikes me that such figures ought not to have too much past about them, or too much inner life, with the rebooted film series only confirming me in the impression.

There is, too, the fact that there just does not seem much for a Casino Royale prequel, about Bond becoming a double-o, to do. In Fleming's universe no one becoming a double-o is a neophyte. He is already a veteran when he starts in the section. And of course, the Bond of the novels, even as a veteran, was no omnicompetent superman. Instead he messed up time and again, and badly, often finishing his mission and staying alive simply because of some spectacularly unlikely coincidence. Thus nothing really formative, no making-of-the-superman-type stuff, can be said to happen here, just Bond being Bond, with a predictable result that, after the opening couple of chapters concerning Bond's assignment to the section I quite easily forgot that this was a prequel until some remark about Bond's preference in cigarette brands or cocktail preparation methods arises.

Hardly the makings of a memorable prequel or origin story, that. Still, if there was little hope of that from the outset the question of how well the book does as a plain and simple continuation novel remains. And the answer there is that some of it works, and some of it does not. One can say that the elements are indeed Fleming stuff, less distinctive and flamboyant than the precedents Horowitz opted to follow in Trigger-Mortis, but less worn too (Corsican gangsters and drug trafficking rather than secret rocket bases). Where its structure is concerned the book manages to feel like a Bond novel rather than a novelized Bond movie where the structure of the adventure is concerned. (For better and worse, Benson, and even Gardner, did not always do so.) And if Horowitz undeniably panders to the sensibility prevailing in 2018, he may be somewhat more circumspect in doing so (at least, by comparison, with an allegedly '50s-era Bond novel which undoes Pussy Galore's "conversion" in extremely in-Bond's-face fashion, and squeezes in a speech on gay liberation). And so in these ways it may be a more successful performance than his first. I will say, too, that his depiction of headquarters and M holds up, and if he does not quite have Fleming's eye for the little details, his travel writing is solid enough.

Still, some fairly central elements of the book are wildly implausible for a Fleming novel (like the bad blood between Bond and the CIA, even if it does not get quite as nuts as what we see in Faulks' Devil May Care), and wildly implausible period. (This is especially the case with the villain's motivation, the idea of an Establishment billionaire making his last grand act in this world the feeding of a heroin epidemic in the hopes of turning the country's attention inward at the height of the Cold War is . . . well, I cannot think of a way to express my incredulity politely.) So does it go where the smaller touches are concerned. (A lengthy anecdote involves a Soviet cruiser named Aleksander Kolchak, with a Captain Stolypin for a commanding officer. If any irony was intended, there is no sign of it, and I have to admit that it jarred.*)

And more consequential than any implausibility in the story is the sense that nothing here is really surprising or necessary. Of course, I doubt that Horowitz can be blamed for that, with the franchise in its seventh decade; with, even excluding the film novelizations (seven thus far), the spin-offs about Bond's childhood (Charlie Higson and Steve Cole have delivered nine all by themselves), the parodies that actually refer to Bond as Bond (from Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Firth's Alligator to Mabel Maney's Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy), and assorted still weirder projects (from Andrei Gulyashki's Avakoum Zakhov vs. 07 to the Miss Moneypenny Diaries), nearly forty James Bond novels in print; with the task of "making it new" so much the more difficult because the interaction of book and film encouraged the "formulaic procedural" expectation so many fans of them; likely no one can do anything with them that has not been done before, and that to the point of exhaustion.

But such things do not give publishing executives pause. Whether or not Horowitz's latest has been a moneymaker, the idea of the owners of an IP whose value has been estimated at a staggering $20 billion (the GDP of Malta) letting go of the idea of continuing Bond adventures in the medium where they began is so implausible as to guarantee that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN."

* Admiral Aleksander Kolchak, of course, commanded one of the White armies which attempted to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the civil war (1918-1921) that followed the Russian Revolution (1917)--hardly somebody Stalin's government would honor by naming a warship after him. (Incidentally, I did make a brief attempt to see if there had ever been such a vessel. Predictably, there wasn't. By the way, Ian Fleming's brother Peter actually wrote a journalistic investigation of the death of Kolchak, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. Did this escape Horowitz?) Nikolai Stolypin was a pre-Revolutionary Minister remembered principally for his brutal repressive measures (testament to which is the expression "Stolypin necktie"). Alas, not the first time Horowitz has displayed a profound ignorance of other nations' histories and cultures, to the point of confusing racist stereotypes of one country with another (as with the matter of which nationalities supposedly eat dog and so forth, in Stormbreaker).

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.

Steven Poole Reviews the New Bond Novel

The Guardian's Steven Poole has just reviewed Anthony Horowitz's Forever and a Day--the next Bond novel, which is notable for two features. One is that it is the first time since Raymond Benson that an author has had a chance to pen a second of the Bond continuation books. The other is that it represents yet a new wrinkle in that series by offering a prequel to Casino Royale.

Poole remarks that Horowitz's novel serves up "disappointing" bits of exposition (like where we get his preference for his dry martinis shaken, not stirred, and even "the name is Bond, James Bond"), and "prose throughout is more verbose and cliched than the brutal efficiencies of Fleming." However, he also praises the choice of villain, remarks that Horowitz is "good at the action scenes," and declares the book on the whole "still an enjoyably compact thriller, with an absolutely killer last line . . . [with] some pleasingly echt Bond moments."

It seems a rather plausible assessment as far as it goes, given my impressions of Horowitz's prior effort, Trigger Mortis (which you can read about, here)--though Poole, perhaps predictably, skirts the issue of whether there is a point to his having made it a prequel (could the adventure have been just as satisfying as another '50s era entry in Bond's adventures?), and whether there is any point to writing more novels in a series where so much is modified (Poole acknowledges, among other things, the gender relations, again predictably, and Horowitz's apologies for the extent to which he carried forward Fleming's attitudes, even while, as Poole's observation suggests, exaggerating that extent). The book hits the market next week in the UK, but arrives in the States in November (according to Amazon, at least).

I expect to get in my two cents then.

James Bond for the YA Crowd?

It has long been impossible to pay much attention to contemporary science fiction and fantasy and not be hugely aware of the presence of young adult fiction within it. The historic commercial success of such franchises as Harry Potter, Twilight, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games and Divergent (among others) has loomed large within not just the genre landscape, but popular culture as a whole. Indeed, Game of Thrones apart, virtually every really major publishing success of the genre has been a YA phenomenon. And while the esteem for such works among the hard core of science fiction and fantasy fans, and especially the "higherbrow" among them, has not been on a par with their commercial success, YA has attracted the attention of such critical darlings as Cory Doctorow, Paul di Filippo and Scott Westerfeld, each writing heavily in this area in recent years, and even getting some critical recognition for the results, as with the Hugo nomination Doctorow got for Little Brother.

The same cannot be said of other genres. Indeed, science fiction and fantasy have done as well as they have in YA because of the lingering prejudice that they are kid's stuff anyway, and ironically, because of the way in which the adult stuff has become so adult--so involved, so dense, so literary, often at the same time, that someone who has not been a longtime reader of contemporary science fiction and fantasy has a hard time getting into it, or even getting it at all. (That a book like The Hunger Games is so apt to seem derivative and undemanding and unimpressive to someone who reads full-blown literary science fiction for grown-ups is an asset, not a liability, in the marketplace.)

By contrast, a YA thriller is necessarily a toned-down thriller--which does not mean that it cannot be entertaining, but must eschew the easier ways of achieving its effects by being restrained in handling its violence and other, rougher fare. All the same, writers do write thrillers aimed at the YA market, and that has long included spin-offs of 007--going all the way back at least to R.D. Mascott's The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003 1/2 (1967)--as well as imitations, one of the more successful of which has been the Alex Rider novels of Anthony Horowitz, of which there are presently ten in print, with an eleventh reportedly on the way this year.

Personally I have taken little interest in these efforts, giving them only cursory attention even while tracking down and reading every one of the regular continuation novels. Still, having recently reviewed Horowoitz's Bond continuation novel Trigger Mortis (2015), I decided to give the first Alex Rider book, Stormbreaker, a look, not because I thought he had done anything really new with the concept (the tradition was already well-worn when Fleming came up with Bond, just an update of a half century of clubland heroes), but because I was curious as to how he would cram Bondian adventure into the life of a young adult, and whether very much of such adventure would remain in it when he was done. You can read my thoughts on that book here.

Review: Trigger Mortis, by Anthony Horowitz

With Original Material by Ian Fleming

New York: HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 320.

It is not easy to make judgments about the James Bond continuation novels because just working out the criteria is a job in itself. For instance, are we just looking to be entertained, or are we expecting faithfulness to the original Ian Fleming books? If that is the case, are we more concerned with faithfulness to the content, or to the form? For example, are we looking for the Fleming prose style--its technique of the "indirect" glance, its penchant for the evocative over the encyclopedic--or are we content to just get the formula?

The character . . . how many of the rough edges do we expect the new book to retain? Do we insist on a Bond endlessly excreting the reactionary gripes of the Edwardian Etonian who created him, and going to seed when too long without a mission--or would we be happier without such details?

Some metafictional elements, some self-parody, are inevitable--they were already an increasingly conspicuous presence in the later Fleming--and if history is any guide, likely to be profuse. How much are we okay with, and exactly what parts of the whole set-up are we okay with seeing mocked?

One can go on, but I suspect you get the idea by this point.

Evaluating Trigger Mortis is a little trickier because the concept is different this time. Rather than straining to update 007, or just picking up the tales where Fleming left off back in the mid-'60s, this one attempts to insert an original story within his series, mere weeks after the events of Goldfinger. The approach is necessarily more restrictive, any inconsistency the more jarring--as with the character's attitude. Perhaps the '60s would have changed Bond a little, so that he might take some amusement in the scandals of Mick Jagger rather than tut-tut at these kids today . . . but here we get Bond before even his time at Shrublands, when any liberty of the sort is much more glaring.

Moreover, in writing this novel Horowitz prominently used a story Fleming created for that television series that never happened . . .

And I have to admit that this has helped leave me of two minds about the book. And in the end it seemed simpler to just write two different reviews--one more sympathetic, one more critical.

You can find the more sympathetic review here.

You can find the more critical one here.

A Sympathetic Review: Trigger Mortis, by Anthony Horowitz

With Original Material by Ian Fleming

New York: HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 320.

A case can be made that Anthony Horowitz's Trigger Mortis is the best continuation Bond novel written to date.

Granted, there are ways in which Horowitz makes less effort to capture the flavor of the Bond novels than his predecessors. He does not really strive to give us the flavor of Fleming's writing to the degree that, for example, Kingsley Amis did. Fleming's particular way with words, his tendency toward what Umberto Eco called the "technique of the aimless glance," his penchant for combining lengthy descriptions of the mundane with much brisker treatments of the sensational.1 Reading Horowitz we need not bother with subtext very much; if there is a thing we really need to know, he flatly tells us about it.

However, despite that Horowitz does not strive to give us the same sense of Bond's interiority as Amis, or John Gardner. Indeed, apart from his Soviet-bashing (which crosses the line into indisputably racist remarks against Slavs), Horowitz's Bond generally comes off as a less world-weary and bad-tempered, less snobbish and bigoted and reactionary figure--at times because of changes that will not quite ring true (Bond's thoughts about women drivers, for instance, directly contradict what Fleming's character actually said), but more often as a result of strategic silences. (Bond's thoughts regarding the final outcome of the James Bond-Pussy Galore-Logan Fairfax triangle, for example, are passed over in such a silence, and he does not think of it afterward.)

Still, much of the Fleming sensibility is there, not least in a rather Fleming-like story--perhaps the most satisfactorily Fleming-like plot since Fleming was actually writing these things. The implausible wealthy emigre villain-and-rocket plot, the blend of low crime and games of state, gangsterism and SMERSH, the choice of Central European and North American settings, are all in line with the tradition. Fleming's taste for car chases--and train chases--is of course quite prominent within the book's action. And there are subtler touches, too, among them the shadow of World War Two, particularly as it was fought between Britain and Germany (German rocket scientists, Nazi counterfeiting operations, while the memory of the war and the time before the war hangs heavily over Bond as he travels the country); the odd Gothicisms (the stone circle, Jason Sin's castle); and the "tacky" image of the American landscape in the book's second half (like the motel Bond stays at in Virginia, or the ads he sees on the New York subway, even if the expressions of disapproval are comparatively muted). (It helps, too, that evocations of past adventures are frequent, but subtle, as with Horowitz's making oblique reference to Bond's rather close-up view of the Moonraker's launch when he looks at an American Vanguard.)

The same can be said for Horowitz's handling of these elements. As a thriller-writer he does not go so questionably over the top as Raymond Benson, or keep the adventure too grounded to feel very Bondian at all, the way Jeffrey Deaver and William Boyd did, instead finding a middle ground closer to the originals than the work of most of his predecessors. Think Fleming's pace at its fastest, all the way through the book, more or less, and while the action that ensues may contain nothing quite so flamboyant as Bond's blowing up Mr. Big's yacht or chasing Blofeld in a bobsled, it packs sufficient fireworks to satisfy any reasonable taste, especially at the climax (treated the more satisfactorily perhaps because of Horowitz's plainer style, and tendency to flesh out the action more thoroughly than Fleming did). Moreover, in treating all this Horowitz manages to display a sense of humor (facing a captive Bond, the villain knows that he has been in this situation before) without making a complete joke of the thriller element, the way Amis did (mostly unintentionally, I think), or Gardner tended to do (quite intentionally, I'm convinced). The same cannot be said for the sex-romance-gender politics part of the story (some of this is in fact impossible to take as anything but parody), but it does still have Bond and Bond girl coming together at the end.

Of course, the desire to be faithful also makes it very difficult not to be repetitive. (Indeed, this is not the first continuation novel to have Bond in a car race like this, Gardner having done it in For Special Services three decades ago.) Moreover, it has to be admitted that this particular plot, which brings together unfinished business from Goldfinger, the car race plot Fleming had been developing (in the end, just a subplot) with the main story about Jason Sin, along with a couple of smaller bits (a noirish tale of murder, a bit of revenge directed against Bond himself) is almost as sprawlingly structured as Deaver's Carte Blanche. Still, Horowitz makes it feel fresher and flow better than it ought to, in part because some of his variations on familiar themes constitute improvements. The car race in Nurburgring, one of the strongest aspects of the assemblage, has in its visceral aspects and tight binding with its subplot an intrinsic interest that the card and golf games did not--while Sin's obsessions bring a new interest to the card game that Bond does end up playing with him. And on the whole if Horowitz made certain compromises, he struck me as typically making the right ones, and putting the full package together with sufficient aplomb that I would not be disappointed to hear that he got a return offer on the job.

1. Umberto Eco remarked in his classic essay "Narrative Structures in Fleming" Fleming's tendency to linger on the "apparently inessential" and then "with feverish brevity" describe "in a few paragraphs the most unexpected and improbable actions"--a contrast evident in Goldfinger's long golf game, and then its rushing through the robbery of Fort Knox.

A Critical Review: Trigger Mortis, by Anthony Horowitz

With Original Material by Ian Fleming

New York: HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 320.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

In taking on Bond Anthony Horowitz largely dispenses with the idea of attempting to emulate Fleming's prose, or his treatment of Bond's interiority. Instead, in this story set back in the literary Bond's '50s-era heyday, he focuses on producing as "Flemingesque" a story as he possibly can, not only utilizing the formula that had largely emerged by the time of works like Dr. No and Goldfinger, but also incorporating numerous smaller themes (from World War Two legacies to unflattering comments about American aesthetics).

This approach has an obvious appeal, but also some real limitations--all the more striking in light of the limitations of the material he is looking to emulate. Fleming himself reused a number of his major ideas in his period writing the Bond novels, so that attempting to repeat them yet again carries real risks. Moreover, plausibility and nuance were not usually features of his political scenarios.

The latter in particular is evident in Fleming's most direct contribution to this specific work, a Soviet scheme to stage a fatal accident for British racing champion Lancy Smith during a race. Their purpose is to permit a Soviet entry into the same competition to emerge victor, and thus "demonstrate the superiority of Soviet engineering." A fairly silly conception, its believability relies entirely on the readiness to believe the Soviets are not just monstrous, but completely nuts--a thing they were depicted as being time and again in Fleming's novels (in Moonraker, in Goldfinger, their schemes entailed an idiotic indifference to consequences), and which Bond flatly declares them to be here, Bond having no difficulty believing in the suspected sabotage plot because it seems to him simply another "example of the utter cold-bloodedness and contempt that seemed to be built into the Slavic race."

Setting aside the offensiveness of such sentiments (and the unintended irony in them--just who's really contemptuous here?), similar problems are quite evident in the villain and the scheme at the heart of this book's plot. "Jason Sin" (the colorful but unfortunate Anglicization of Jai Seung Sin) is very much in the line of Fleming villains--a foreigner and ethnic Other who arrived in a Western country in the aftermath of wartime chaos, and in a short time (and by suspect means) amassed a large fortune, despite which he has kept his past a closed book, while in the present question marks hang over his sex life that imply something outside heteronormative expectations. Moreover, despite a complete lack of personal connection to the Soviet bloc, or interest in Soviet ideology, he is in the service of SMERSH, on whose behalf he will employ advanced technology in a plan intended to harm the English-speaking powers at the heart of the Western alliance. Indeed, his East Asian background, pretensions to wielding the power of death over others, and involvement with rocketry recall Dr. No (while, given how this is all coming on the heels of Goldfinger, one can hardly overlook that he is specifically Korean). His war-related grudge--and again, interest in rocketry--recall Drax.1 His status as an ethnic outsider in the United States, his base in the New York area, and his accidie, all recall Mr. Big.

Given so much of what we have seen before the character and premise cannot but seem derivative. It may be claimed that Horowitz's combination of familiar features makes this all feel fresher than it is--but it also makes it less coherent, the whole not geling together convincingly. The result is that despite the aura of intrigue with which Horowitz imbues Sin in his early appearances (his use of cards in determining the punishments of his enemies is an interesting variant on the old theme), in the end he is less engaging than the various particular madnesses from which his character was derived.

Much the same can be said for the villain's plans. In Dr. No, No suggests something rather similar to Sin's plot when he says that going beyond jamming the radio signals guiding American rocket tests to bringing those rockets down on Western cities:

"They would land on Havana, on Kingston . . . on Miami. Even without warheads, Mister Bond, five tons of metal arriving at a thousand miles an hour can cause plenty of damage in a crowded town . . . There would be panic, a public outcry. The experiments would have to cease . . . And how much would Russia pay for that to happen, Mister Bond? . . . Shall we say ten million dollars for the whole operation? Twenty million? It would be a priceless victory in the armaments race. I could name my figure."

Here, instead of an actual rocket coming down, there would be just a suggestive plant of evidence at the scene of a disaster, a less plausible variation on an already implausible idea bespeaking diminishing returns.

These particular weaknesses makes the flaws of the handling of the material more difficult to overlook. Certain aspects of the villain's character seem underdeveloped--Sin's revelations about himself not satisfyingly accounting for his vandalism of his paintings (initially presented as a very significant clue to the man, but not commensurately referenced later). Still more problematic is the story's presentation of the massacre at No Gun Ri as the "key" to Sin--the sort of thing perhaps too weighty for such prominent use in a narrative like this. Indeed, Horowitz's use of it can be taken as trivializing the event (it is raised, then treated as irrelevant), and this is all the worse because of the evocation of the September 11 attacks (rich foreigner attacks tallest building in New York), making for a typically tasteless postmodernist muddle--the more so because, at any rate, its significance for Sin's actions is made ambiguous. (Sin says that he will not forgive the United States--but this is not a matter of revenge, and not only is he indifferent to the plan's fuller success, but he would be just as happy to work for the CIA as for SMERSH.)

The unfolding of the narrative on the way to these less than satisfying revelations also has its problems from the standpoint of simple storytelling. The subplot about Thomas Keller's murder proved more tangential and less interesting when it was resolved than it initially seemed--while the same goes for the bit of intrigue surrounding Pussy Galore, which goes no further than the first quarter of the story. (Who were those men who came after her, really?) Meanwhile Fleming's contribution--the Soviet plot to sabotage a car race--adds up to just a subplot that winds up just a third of the way through, and (save for one bit that turns up at the very end) has surprisingly little bearing on the story. In contrast with, for example, Bond's investigation into Goldfinger's gold smuggling uncovering his involvement in something bigger, this is less the tip of the iceberg of a larger plan than an operation in itself which very slightly intersects with another, different operation, opening the door to Bond's coincidentally spotting Sin with the known SMERSH operator involved in both (who never pops up again in the story).

It all makes for rather a loosely assembled work, while even when taken alone the central investigation has its problems. Bond makes very little progress through the middle third of the book when we might have expected tantalizing clues (the only ones we get are familiar--bad guy interested in rockets, not enough after Drax and No), and pretty much everything of importance is not unearthed by Bond's sleuthing, but explained by Sin when he plays Talking Villain for a captured-and-about-to-be-put-in-a-death-trap 007.

The result is that this side of the story relies heavily on the action to carry it--perhaps too heavily--and the performance here is not unmarred by sloppy bits. (Bond uses a "judo" kick at one point--shades of Austin Powers here--and that M-60 machine gun's positioning makes little sense to anyone who understands geometry even slightly.2) At the same time it lacks the wackier touches that might have helped make the book memorable--like Bond's getting keel-hauled while waiting for his limpet mine to blow up Big's yacht, or his chasing Blofeld in a bobsled. The stronger bits are adequate, even robust--but a little on the generic side.

Still, if many of the book's problems come from an effort to be faithful to the original that for various reasons does not quite work, there are also aspects of the story in which Horowitz (in practice, at any rate) dispenses altogether with such pieties--those pertaining to Trigger Mortis' sex-romance side. Pure spoof, it speaks entirely to twenty-first century gender politics, rather than being explicable in terms of any Fleming precedent. Indeed, even Bond's friend Charles Duggan (himself a fairly anachronistic touch) laughs that Bond must be "losing his touch" when he hears about how things have shaped up here. Of course, this is all predictable to anyone who has been attentive to the contrast between the Fleming originals and prior continuation novels (already John Gardner had gone in this direction with early efforts like Licence Renewed and For Special Services). However, that it was so predictable, and that Horowitz went to such lengths in it, only underlines what should have been obvious looking at the rest of the narrative--that a writer's providing "more Fleming," even to this limited extent, may not really be all that worthwhile, while in significant respects impossible in today's market.

1. Dr. No declared that "I would proceed to the achievement of power—the power, Mister Bond, to do unto others what had been done unto me, the power of life and death, the power to decide, to judge, the power of absolute independence from outside authority."
2. Horowitz writes that Bond "used a judo move" to subdue an attacker, this "judo" move entailing Bond's "twisting round and lashing out with his right foot." Judo, however, is a martial art concerned with throws, not strikes (that's karate), Austin's "judo chop!" apart. In a world where it seems everyone is boasting about having a black belt in something, that this kind of sloppiness is not just so everpresent but so rarely remarked is the sort of thing that gives the lie to the douchebaggery choking the Internet.

The Bond Girls of Trigger Mortis: Pussy Galore, Logan Fairfax and Jeopardy Lane

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

At the close of the acknowledgements section of Trigger Mortis, Anthony Horowitz writes that he "tried to stay true to [Ian Fleming's] original vision and to present the character as he was conceived in the fifties, whilst hopefully not upsetting too many modern sensibilities."

Anyone familiar with the Fleming originals--and how different their sensibility is from anything that would be regarded as acceptable in commercial fiction--cannot help but be skeptical reading those words, and the book preceding these comments justifies such skepticism. And perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in his handling of the book's three Bond girls: Pussy Galore, Logan Fairfax, and Jeopardy Lane.

The Return of Pussy Galore
As the novel begins, Pussy Galore is in London with Bond, hanging about his apartment--a completely unprecedented situation for Fleming's hero. Of course Fleming described an unhappy pattern to Bond's relationships in Casino Royale, a "conventional parabola"--

sentiment, the touch of the hand . . . the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness . . . furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

However, in subsequent books the latter parts were not usually mentioned (Tiffany Case in Diamonds is an exception), and just about never dramatized, let alone carried into the next book (the special case of his murdered wife Tracy aside). The result is that when reading the series, after the first, relatively unconventional and grim installment, Fleming's character has his fun and escapes the consequences--and indeed, it seems that Bond generally pursues his affairs so as to be able to do so.1

Bond's having to deal with Pussy Galore as the affair palls feels like not merely a novelty, but a concession to contemporary mores far less forgiving of men who have their fun and then move on, far quicker to remind us all of the less happy emotional and other entanglements sex tends to involve, even in a piece of ostentatiously retro escapism heavily marketed as true to the Fleming vision.

This is all the more so as Pussy's attitude toward Bond is a far cry from the "conventional parabola." Rather than tears and bitterness, she makes it very clear that she's ready to go while Bond dithers. As if that were not enough, Bond winds up meeting Pussy again while hoping to seduce the next lady in his life, reduced to "the stale admission of a suburban husband found cheating by his wife," and made to feel all the guiltier because his dithering contributed to a situation which almost got Pussy killed. And after all that it is Pussy who in the end takes the initiative, tells Bond that their time together was a lark ("We had fun, didn't we?"), "But there's no future in it and we might as well pack in before it all goes sour," while Bond can only "shamefully and hypocritically" mumble "Whatever you want, Pussy"--and have her call him a "bastard" and tear into him for the shameful hypocrisy of his not admitting that "It's what you want too."

Speaking of which, Pussy's already onto her next lover, who is not a man, but in fact the very woman Bond had expected to sleep with the night they ran into each other again, Logan Fairfax. Despite being hospitalized with injuries and not feeling or looking her best, she and not Bond was Logan's seducer--not just snatching away Bond's victory here, but in a lot of ways mooting an old one. If the reader thought that Bond had turned Pussy Galore around, so to speak (and this is what Fleming seemed to mean for us to think in Goldfinger), well, that's all undone here. Not only is she just fine without 007, thank you very much, but (as we generally think in the twenty-first century) sexual orientation just doesn't work that way--which gives her a chance to one-up a Bond increasingly one-upped by the women he meets in this particular department, while Bond can go without.

Perhaps wisely, Horowitz does not bother to tell us what Bond really thinks of all this, walking out of the room and in the next scene already in Germany, thinking of his memories of the place, and how the war has colored them.

Meet Logan Fairfax
The third participant in this triangle, Logan Fairfax, is running a training school for car racing enthusiasts where Bond prepares for his mission. Fleming never went so far as this in putting "a woman in a man's job," and still less did he have Bond submit to their authority the way that he has to submit to Logan's during his time under her tutelage.

Moreover, when women were arrogant, prickly, unpleasant, difficult, insulting as she is (and Logan is very much these things), Fleming's Bond did not gracefully endure their idiosyncracies as Horwoitz has him do, but typically had certain choice words for them (even if he tended not to use them to their faces), and received their attitude as a challenge--precisely because alongside the Tiffany Cases and Pussy Galores there were also the Vesper Lynds and Solitaires who threw themselves at him. In fact it can fairly be said that the "strong" women were there, when they were there, as exceptional figures intended to give Bond a chance to show he was stronger, and take that much more satisfaction in the conquest when he finally did get them into bed the way he did all the others.

It might be noted, too, that where on occasions Horowitz simply silenced Bond's internal monologue on those occasions when he was likely to say something distasteful (see above), Horowitz pointedly changed the attitude of Fleming's Bond toward women drivers. Watching Fairfax at the wheel prior to their first meeting Bond thinks of her driving as rather distinctively a woman's--remarking "a lightness of touch . . . as if she was flicking ash off the shoulder of a man's coat."

The effect of these words is rather admiring and complimentary--and entirely different from what Fleming's Bond really had to say about women drivers, as expressed in the later Thunderball:

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was always ready for the unpredictable.

Granted, Domino drove like a man (did a lot like a man, actually, which is why he called her a "Bitch" as she drove off in her MG), but the presumption stood, and the contrast here is such that Fairfax's inclusion in the story (set before Thunderball, of course) can fairly be called a continuity issue for the series. And of course, the "parabola" of Bond's relationship with Logan deprives him of the usual satisfaction in taking on a strong woman, proving himself the stronger and getting action in the process.

Driving Along Jeopardy Lane
After leaving Galore and Fairfax behind, Bond runs his race and accomplishes his object, thwarting a Soviet plot against British driver Lancy Smith. Afterward, he enters a party packed with race car groupies and thinks to himself "Almost every woman [Bond] had ever known had put up at least some measure of resistance, challenging him to win her round," and that "soft acquiescence" of the sort the groupies had to offer "didn't appeal" to him.

Given Bond's history, of course, this appears complete nonsense--soft acquiescence no barrier to his interest in the past (see above), and arguably yet another continuity break, taken for much the same reason as the prior one, the elision of a certain kind of Bond girl, a certain kind of sexual encounter (the girls who threw themselves at him, the casual dalliances more offensive to contemporary sensibility) within the narrative. And indeed, so does it go with the next woman Bond meets, Jeopardy Lane--similarly difficult and insulting at their first meeting, similarly resistant to his appeal. After fleeing the party with Jason Sin's men on their trail, they wind up drenched in a hotel room where, after she leaves the bathroom, Lane's first words are "If you think I'm going to sleep with you, you can forget it" and, as good as her word, the night ends with her in the bed and Bond on the sofa, thinking to himself that: "He had never slept like this before . . . a few feet away . . . A naked attractive girl."

But then that wasn't the first such disappointment he'd experienced in this book, was it? And making matters worse, she completely dupes him in the aftermath--after which, again, Bond is mad only at himself. This is, of course, the familiar first phase in a dynamic that was to become very familiar to fans of the Bond films from the 1970s on: Bond and a foreign female agent backing into each other in the course of investigating the same thing and having to work together, with much made of her as an equal partner--and Bond accepting it with a grace not to be expected of his '50s-era self ("Jeopardy . . . was taking over the whole operation and being utterly businesslike and unapologetic about it"). He also has plenty of occasion to admire her driving (this seems to be turning into a fetish with him), which saves Bond's life and the mission not once, but twice, over the course of the story. And while Bond and Jeopardy do get together in the end, once again, rather than Horowitz just having them enjoy the moment, much is made of the fact that the moment is all they will have, and again, that not only he but she will be moving on (just like Pussy and Logan, Jeopardy having someone else in her life).

Taken altogether, all this seems less an attempt at a Flemingesque Bond story than a parody of one, and not the kind of self-parody toward which Fleming increasingly tended as the series went on either. Rather it is a twenty-first century parody all the way through--while Bond's reaction to being the butt of the jokes time and again is not slightly altered from what it would have been before, but either elided or changed into something explicitly different from what we saw in the originals.

Of course, that so much is different is in the view of most for the better. (Even those who might wish conventional male fantasy were treated a little more tolerantly in the newer installments of the series probably can't help feeling that a James Bond who calls women "Bitch" as soon as they are out of earshot comes across as a bit undignified and puerile.) But the point is that this was integral to Fleming's conception of the character--in many respects, a reaction to trends in the world that he did not like at all (there were many of them for the Edwardian Etonian in the age of Tommy Steele)--and one cannot toss all this out and at the same time claim to be anywhere near as faithful to the original as the PR so tiresomely assures us. In fact, it may not be going too far to say that Fleming's Bond and the twenty-first century (or even the 1970s!) are irreconcilable with each other. And the strain in trying to show otherwise has made the James Bond series as blatant a case of commitment to old IPs for purely commercial reasons as any in our pop cultural life today.

1. Indeed, in Moonraker, we learn that when back in town Bond carries on sexual relationships with three different married women--presumably, his way of limiting such involvements. There is no mention of anything like that in Horowitz's novel.

The Best James Bond Novels, After Fleming

The question of what were the best "post-Fleming" James Bond novels is a complex one. Just what standard ought we to apply?

Are we looking for more fiction just like what Ian Fleming produced? If so, then Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun comes closest--helped by the fact that Amis had prior, and direct experience of meeting Fleming, helping prepare his own fiction for publication (reviewing the galleys of The Man with the Golden Gun).*

It helped, too, that he produced his book just a few years after Fleming wrote his last word, before his work dated nearly so much as it was to do later. Indeed, every writer who came after Amis had little choice but to downplay Fleming's attitudes (even Sebastian Faulks, writing "as Ian Fleming"), while changes in the broader political context nullified many an old concern. (What need for imperial policing when there is no empire? And did the hand-wringing over the welfare state unsurprising in the age of Macmillan make any sense in the age of Thatcher?)

Moreover, those unavoidable changes apart, the fact remained that, as a writer aiming not for pulpy adventure but "thrillers designed to be read as literature," Fleming was prone to an oblique narrative style, and character drama. And with only a few exceptions, the result has been that his tales seem slow and lacking in action from the perspective of those accustomed to today's thrillers. (Or at any rate, that was how this reader of today's thrillers found them when first trying Fleming.) That Fleming tends toward a bleakly irony view of life does not necessarily make this more appealing.

By and large, today's reader is likely to prefer something more accessible and less literary, brisker and more action-packed; something more like the Bond films which are the basis for almost everyone's perception of Bond today, even those of us who eventually read the books. And indeed, most of the post-Fleming books have something of this about them. However, if the standard is that of a Bond novel that reads like a Bond film, then the writer who comes closest is Raymond Benson, whose works are easily readable as Brosnan-era Bonds in book form, particularly in the climax to his Union trilogy, Never Dream of Dying.

If one is looking for a better balance (the characterizations of Fleming, the fireworks of the EON productions, a decent amount of polish), then I can think of none better than John Gardner's first, Licence Renewed--while also giving a good word to the novelizations. Christopher Wood's novelizations of the scripts he co-wrote for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were, some distasteful or strained bits apart, a pleasant surprise in that respect.

* At the time of this writing, the author had not yet read Anthony Horowitz's Trigger Mortis (released only this September).