Fans bemoaning the changes made to the James Bond character in the new movie can relax with the all new edition of John Gardner's first James Bond novel available now - print and digital
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Showing posts with label ian fleming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ian fleming. Show all posts
Wednesday, 27 October 2021
Friday, 1 June 2018
James Bond new book - eBook price woes and the full first chapter
Of course this is publication week and the eBook is likely to be discounted over the coming weeks, but this price fixing does leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Whilst I don't believe the eBook should be priced stupidly low it should more in keeping with the price of a paperback. You are getting the same story with the eBook so both publishers and author should be compensated fairly, but when readers see the eBook priced so highly they just think, 'Rip Off.'
I collect the Bond books and I've already bought the hardcover, but I'll also pick up the eBook as I very rarely read fiction as a physical book. I'm so used to my Kindle that for fiction I find it a better experience. No searching for something to use as a bookmark, easier to carry around and once in the story you don't notice the delivery method. This also means that my hardcover will remain in mint condition.
Anyway courtesy of the publisher here is the first chapter of the new Bond book:
‘So, 007 is dead.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.’
M took a last, fleeting look at the photographs that lay scattered across his desk and that had been sent to him by General André Anatonin, his counterpart at the SDECE, or the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, in Paris. They had been taken from different angles but showed the same bleak image. A dead man, lying face down in dark, glistening water, his hands stretched out limply above his head as if in one last futile attempt at surrender. The flashbulbs from the cameras had reflected back, producing balls of brilliant light that seemed to float on the surface.
Eventually, the police had pulled him out and laid him on the quayside so that closer pictures could be taken of his face, his hands, the three holes in the breast of his jacket where the bullets had penetrated. He had dressed expensively. M remembered him sitting in this very office only a month ago, wearing the suit that had been made for him by the tailor he liked to visit just off Savile Row. The suit had kept its shape, M reflected. It was the man who was lying there, dripping wet and lifeless, who had lost his.
‘Are we sure it’s him, Chief of Staff?’ The evidence seemed inescapable but M asked the question anyway. The camera can lie. In his world, it often did.
‘I’m afraid so, sir. He was carrying no identity papers – no surprises there. And he didn’t have his gun. But the French have Belinographed his fingerprints and there’s no doubt. It’s 007 all right.
‘And this was taken in Marseilles?’
‘Yes, sir. The basin of La Joliette.’
Bill Tanner was closer to M than anyone in the building, although the distance between them was incalculable. They had never eaten together, never enquired about each other’s private lives. M despised small talk anyway but it would not have occurred to either of them to discuss anything but current operations and the general work at hand. Even so, Tanner – previously a colonel in the Sappers until he had been sucked into the less formalised world of the Secret Intelligence Service – knew exactly what would be going on in the head of the older man. The death of an active agent was to be regretted and 007 had been effective on more than one occasion. More important was to find out what had happened and to take immediate, quite probably permanent, countermeasures. It wasn’t just a question of revenge. The service had to demonstrate that killing one of its operatives was nothing less than an act of war. He had actually been with M, in this very room, when the idea of a Double‑ O Section had first been mooted, the cipher being as blank and anonymous as possible: it was literally nothing and nothing again. And yet it meant everything to the elite group of men who were going to carry it and who would at once be promoted to the front line of the country’s war against its many enemies. Tanner still remembered the reaction of Sir Charles Massinger, permanent secretary to the Minister of Defence, when the proposal had first been put to him. His lip had curled in evident distaste.
‘Are you serious? What you’re suggesting here is tantamount to a licence to kill.’
It was the same old-fashioned thinking that had hampered the efforts of the Special Operations Executive at the start of the war. At first, the RAF had refused even to provide planes to transport their agents, not wanting to dirty their hands with Churchill’s ‘ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’. And now, just five years after VE Day, how many of those same agents were to be found in the corridors and offices of the tall grey building next to Regent’s Park? Still ungentlemanly. Still, whatever the public might think, at war.
Tanner had listened as M quietly explained the point which the civil servant had missed. Although it might not appear so, hostilities had not come to an end in 1945. There were a great many people dedicating themselves to the complete destruction of Great Britain and everything it stood for. Counter-intelligence agencies like SMERSH in the Soviet Union and the Special Activities Committee of the People’s Liberation Army in China. Or rogue elements including Nazis who still refused to believe that their precious Third Reich hadn’t quite made its promised thousand years. You had to fight fire with fire, which meant that there was an urgent need for men – and women, for that matter – who would be prepared to kill, if only in self-defence. Death was part of the job. And like it or not, there would be times when the service would have to strike first, when a state-sponsored assassination would be the only answer to a particular threat. M could not have his hands tied. He was the one making the decisions and he had to know that he could act with impunity. The licence was as much for him as it was for the people he commanded.
The Double‑ O Section had been kept deliberately small. In fact, after this recent loss it was now down to just two men – 008 and 0011. M had always rejected the idea of there being a sequence, 001, 002, 003 and so on. Patterns, in any shape or form, are the enemy of counter-intelligence. Tanner wondered how quickly 007 would be replaced.
‘What exactly happened?’ M reached for his pipe, which rested next to the ashtray made out of a twelve-inch shell base that never left his desk.
‘We still don’t have all the details, sir,’ Tanner replied. ‘As you know, we sent 007 to the south of France a little over three weeks ago. He was investigating the activity of the Corsican underworld in the area. Or rather, the lack of activity. Someone had noticed a sharp drop in the supply of drugs coming out of Marseilles and the natural assumption was that they must be up to something else.
‘These Corsicans are loud and unpleasant, really nothing more than modern-day gangsters with fancy names and a proclivity for violence – Joseph Renucci, Jean- Paul Scipio, the Guerini brothers . . . to name just a few. Up until now, they’ve had none of the discipline of the Unione Siciliana or even the Unione Corse but that’s exactly the point. This silence is worrying. If they’ve managed to organise themselves, that could make them a danger not just to the immediate area but to the whole of Europe and – inevitably – us.’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ M had all the information in the cavernous filing cabinet that was his mind and didn’t need it paraded in front of him now.
‘007 went in under cover. We gave him a new name, new passport and an address in Nice. He was an academic working out of University College, writing a history of organised labour. That allowed him to ask all the right questions without raising too many eyebrows. At least, that was the idea. Part of the trouble is that the police – and that includes the SDECE – are riddled with informers. We thought he’d have a better chance on his own.’
‘Did he come up with anything? Before he was killed?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The chief of staff cleared his throat. ‘It seems that there was a woman involved.’
‘There always is,’ M growled into the bowl of his pipe.
‘It’s not quite what you’re thinking, sir. 007 mentioned her in what would turn out to be his last radio transmission. He referred to her as Madame 16.’
‘Sixteen? The number?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s not her real name, of course. You’ll know her as Joanne Brochet – French father, English mother – started life in Paris before the first war and then moved to London where she grew up. She spent three years at Bletchley Park, working in the indexing hut, before she was selected by Special Operations, who trained her up and parachuted her into France under the code name Sixtine.’ Tanner spelled it out. ‘She was very highly regarded by both F Section and the Deuxième Bureau and there’s no doubt that she provided us with useful intelligence in the build‑ up to Operation Overlord. She was captured and tortured by the Germans and after that she disappeared. We assumed, of course, that she had been killed. But she turned up again a few years ago, working in Europe, and by then she’d managed to lose her entire history . . . age, name, nationality and all the rest of it. She called herself Sixtine or Madame 16 and she’d gone into business for herself.’
‘She was the woman who sold us the Kosovo file.’
Tanner nodded. Both men knew what he was talking about. The Kosovo file was a feasibility study that had been put together by a low-grade civil servant with too much time on his hands and, worse still, a heightened imagination. It set out, in detail, the strategy to incite and support an armed uprising in Albania, which had become a communist state after the war. There was never any chance that the plan would be given a green light, but the file had gone into minute detail, identifying all the local operatives along with the royalists and the expatriates who might have lent themselves to the cause. The Kosovo file should have been shredded the moment its existence was known. Instead, it had been photostatted and circulated and then, unbelievably, a young man working as third secretary at the Prague embassy had left a briefcase with a copy under his seat one evening when he got off a tram.
‘We never found out how Sixtine got her hands on it,’ Tanner went on. ‘But it was hardly surprising. By now, she’d reinvented herself as an agent for hire, dealing in pretty much anything that would make her money. She had a good-sized organisation behind her and contacts all over Europe . . . on both sides of the Atlantic as a matter of fact. Exactly the sort of person to act as a go‑ between in a business such as this. Anyway, she contacted us
‘It was blackmail, pure and simple!’ M made no attempt to hide his annoyance. ‘We should never have agreed.’
‘That may well be true, sir.’ Tanner drew a hand over his chin. It was always risky, answering M back. ‘But for what it’s worth, our man in the Treasury thought she struck a remarkably fair deal. The Russians would have paid five times as much and we’d have ended up looking like complete fools if the file had come out. It may be that she felt some loyalty towards us, left over from the war. It’s like I said: as an agent, Sixtine had been very useful.’
‘And 007 met her in Marseilles,’ M said.
‘We don’t know that, sir. But he was certainly interested in her. The very fact that she was in the south of France indicated that she was up to something. This is not the sort of woman who simply goes on holiday, and we know for certain that she’d been talking to the syndicates. In the last transmission he made, a week before his death, 007 said he had concrete evidence.’
‘What sort of evidence?’
‘Unfortunately, he didn’t say. If 007 had one fault, it was that he liked to keep his cards close to his chest. In that same transmission, he mentioned that he had arranged to meet someone who could tell him exactly what she was up to – but once again, he didn’t tell us who it was.’ Tanner sighed. ‘The meeting took place at the basin of La Joliette and that was where he was killed.’
‘He must have left notes – or something. Have we been to his house?’
‘He had an apartment in the Rue Foncet and the French police searched it from top to bottom. They found nothing.’
‘Perhaps the opposition got there first.’
‘It’s possible, sir.’
M tamped down his pipe with a thumb that had, over the years, become immune to the heat of the smouldering tobacco. ‘You know what surprises me in all this, Chief of Staff? How could 007 allow himself to be shot at close range in the middle of a crowded city? Seven o’clock in the evening, in the summer months . . . it wouldn’t even have been dark! And why wasn’t he carrying his weapon?’
‘I was puzzled by that,’ Tanner agreed. ‘I can only assume he must have been meeting someone he knew, a friend.’
‘Could he have actually met with Madame 16 herself? Or could she have found out about the meeting and intercepted it?’
‘Both those thoughts had occurred to me, sir. The CIA have people out there and we’ve been trying to talk to them. In fact the whole area is crawling with security services of one sort or another. But so far . . . nothing.’
The heavy, sweet smell of Capstan Navy Flake hung in the air. M used the pipe to punctuate his thoughts. The age-old ritual, the lighting and the relighting, gave him time to consider the decisions that had to be made.
‘We need someone to look into what happened,’ he went on. ‘This business with the Corsicans doesn’t sound particularly pressing. If there are fewer drugs coming out of France, that’s something to be grateful for. But I’m not having one of my best agents put down like a dog. I want to know who did this and why and I want that person removed from the field. And if it turns out that this woman, Sixtine, was responsible, that goes for her too.’
Tanner understood exactly what M was saying. He wanted an eye for an eye. Somebody had to be killed.
'Who do you want me to send? I’m afraid 008 is still out of action.’
‘You’ve spoken to Sir James?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sir James Molony was the senior neurologist at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and one of the few men who knew M both socially and professionally. Over the years he had treated a number of agents for injuries, including stab wounds and bullet wounds, always with complete insouciance and discretion. ‘It’s going to be another few weeks.’
‘And 0011?'‘In Miami.’
Read more
‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.’
M took a last, fleeting look at the photographs that lay scattered across his desk and that had been sent to him by General André Anatonin, his counterpart at the SDECE, or the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, in Paris. They had been taken from different angles but showed the same bleak image. A dead man, lying face down in dark, glistening water, his hands stretched out limply above his head as if in one last futile attempt at surrender. The flashbulbs from the cameras had reflected back, producing balls of brilliant light that seemed to float on the surface.
Eventually, the police had pulled him out and laid him on the quayside so that closer pictures could be taken of his face, his hands, the three holes in the breast of his jacket where the bullets had penetrated. He had dressed expensively. M remembered him sitting in this very office only a month ago, wearing the suit that had been made for him by the tailor he liked to visit just off Savile Row. The suit had kept its shape, M reflected. It was the man who was lying there, dripping wet and lifeless, who had lost his.
‘Are we sure it’s him, Chief of Staff?’ The evidence seemed inescapable but M asked the question anyway. The camera can lie. In his world, it often did.
‘I’m afraid so, sir. He was carrying no identity papers – no surprises there. And he didn’t have his gun. But the French have Belinographed his fingerprints and there’s no doubt. It’s 007 all right.
‘And this was taken in Marseilles?’
‘Yes, sir. The basin of La Joliette.’
Bill Tanner was closer to M than anyone in the building, although the distance between them was incalculable. They had never eaten together, never enquired about each other’s private lives. M despised small talk anyway but it would not have occurred to either of them to discuss anything but current operations and the general work at hand. Even so, Tanner – previously a colonel in the Sappers until he had been sucked into the less formalised world of the Secret Intelligence Service – knew exactly what would be going on in the head of the older man. The death of an active agent was to be regretted and 007 had been effective on more than one occasion. More important was to find out what had happened and to take immediate, quite probably permanent, countermeasures. It wasn’t just a question of revenge. The service had to demonstrate that killing one of its operatives was nothing less than an act of war. He had actually been with M, in this very room, when the idea of a Double‑ O Section had first been mooted, the cipher being as blank and anonymous as possible: it was literally nothing and nothing again. And yet it meant everything to the elite group of men who were going to carry it and who would at once be promoted to the front line of the country’s war against its many enemies. Tanner still remembered the reaction of Sir Charles Massinger, permanent secretary to the Minister of Defence, when the proposal had first been put to him. His lip had curled in evident distaste.
‘Are you serious? What you’re suggesting here is tantamount to a licence to kill.’
It was the same old-fashioned thinking that had hampered the efforts of the Special Operations Executive at the start of the war. At first, the RAF had refused even to provide planes to transport their agents, not wanting to dirty their hands with Churchill’s ‘ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’. And now, just five years after VE Day, how many of those same agents were to be found in the corridors and offices of the tall grey building next to Regent’s Park? Still ungentlemanly. Still, whatever the public might think, at war.
Tanner had listened as M quietly explained the point which the civil servant had missed. Although it might not appear so, hostilities had not come to an end in 1945. There were a great many people dedicating themselves to the complete destruction of Great Britain and everything it stood for. Counter-intelligence agencies like SMERSH in the Soviet Union and the Special Activities Committee of the People’s Liberation Army in China. Or rogue elements including Nazis who still refused to believe that their precious Third Reich hadn’t quite made its promised thousand years. You had to fight fire with fire, which meant that there was an urgent need for men – and women, for that matter – who would be prepared to kill, if only in self-defence. Death was part of the job. And like it or not, there would be times when the service would have to strike first, when a state-sponsored assassination would be the only answer to a particular threat. M could not have his hands tied. He was the one making the decisions and he had to know that he could act with impunity. The licence was as much for him as it was for the people he commanded.
The Double‑ O Section had been kept deliberately small. In fact, after this recent loss it was now down to just two men – 008 and 0011. M had always rejected the idea of there being a sequence, 001, 002, 003 and so on. Patterns, in any shape or form, are the enemy of counter-intelligence. Tanner wondered how quickly 007 would be replaced.
‘What exactly happened?’ M reached for his pipe, which rested next to the ashtray made out of a twelve-inch shell base that never left his desk.
‘We still don’t have all the details, sir,’ Tanner replied. ‘As you know, we sent 007 to the south of France a little over three weeks ago. He was investigating the activity of the Corsican underworld in the area. Or rather, the lack of activity. Someone had noticed a sharp drop in the supply of drugs coming out of Marseilles and the natural assumption was that they must be up to something else.
‘These Corsicans are loud and unpleasant, really nothing more than modern-day gangsters with fancy names and a proclivity for violence – Joseph Renucci, Jean- Paul Scipio, the Guerini brothers . . . to name just a few. Up until now, they’ve had none of the discipline of the Unione Siciliana or even the Unione Corse but that’s exactly the point. This silence is worrying. If they’ve managed to organise themselves, that could make them a danger not just to the immediate area but to the whole of Europe and – inevitably – us.’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ M had all the information in the cavernous filing cabinet that was his mind and didn’t need it paraded in front of him now.
‘007 went in under cover. We gave him a new name, new passport and an address in Nice. He was an academic working out of University College, writing a history of organised labour. That allowed him to ask all the right questions without raising too many eyebrows. At least, that was the idea. Part of the trouble is that the police – and that includes the SDECE – are riddled with informers. We thought he’d have a better chance on his own.’
‘Did he come up with anything? Before he was killed?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The chief of staff cleared his throat. ‘It seems that there was a woman involved.’
‘There always is,’ M growled into the bowl of his pipe.
‘It’s not quite what you’re thinking, sir. 007 mentioned her in what would turn out to be his last radio transmission. He referred to her as Madame 16.’
‘Sixteen? The number?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s not her real name, of course. You’ll know her as Joanne Brochet – French father, English mother – started life in Paris before the first war and then moved to London where she grew up. She spent three years at Bletchley Park, working in the indexing hut, before she was selected by Special Operations, who trained her up and parachuted her into France under the code name Sixtine.’ Tanner spelled it out. ‘She was very highly regarded by both F Section and the Deuxième Bureau and there’s no doubt that she provided us with useful intelligence in the build‑ up to Operation Overlord. She was captured and tortured by the Germans and after that she disappeared. We assumed, of course, that she had been killed. But she turned up again a few years ago, working in Europe, and by then she’d managed to lose her entire history . . . age, name, nationality and all the rest of it. She called herself Sixtine or Madame 16 and she’d gone into business for herself.’
‘She was the woman who sold us the Kosovo file.’
Tanner nodded. Both men knew what he was talking about. The Kosovo file was a feasibility study that had been put together by a low-grade civil servant with too much time on his hands and, worse still, a heightened imagination. It set out, in detail, the strategy to incite and support an armed uprising in Albania, which had become a communist state after the war. There was never any chance that the plan would be given a green light, but the file had gone into minute detail, identifying all the local operatives along with the royalists and the expatriates who might have lent themselves to the cause. The Kosovo file should have been shredded the moment its existence was known. Instead, it had been photostatted and circulated and then, unbelievably, a young man working as third secretary at the Prague embassy had left a briefcase with a copy under his seat one evening when he got off a tram.
‘We never found out how Sixtine got her hands on it,’ Tanner went on. ‘But it was hardly surprising. By now, she’d reinvented herself as an agent for hire, dealing in pretty much anything that would make her money. She had a good-sized organisation behind her and contacts all over Europe . . . on both sides of the Atlantic as a matter of fact. Exactly the sort of person to act as a go‑ between in a business such as this. Anyway, she contacted us
‘It was blackmail, pure and simple!’ M made no attempt to hide his annoyance. ‘We should never have agreed.’
‘That may well be true, sir.’ Tanner drew a hand over his chin. It was always risky, answering M back. ‘But for what it’s worth, our man in the Treasury thought she struck a remarkably fair deal. The Russians would have paid five times as much and we’d have ended up looking like complete fools if the file had come out. It may be that she felt some loyalty towards us, left over from the war. It’s like I said: as an agent, Sixtine had been very useful.’
‘And 007 met her in Marseilles,’ M said.
‘We don’t know that, sir. But he was certainly interested in her. The very fact that she was in the south of France indicated that she was up to something. This is not the sort of woman who simply goes on holiday, and we know for certain that she’d been talking to the syndicates. In the last transmission he made, a week before his death, 007 said he had concrete evidence.’
‘What sort of evidence?’
‘Unfortunately, he didn’t say. If 007 had one fault, it was that he liked to keep his cards close to his chest. In that same transmission, he mentioned that he had arranged to meet someone who could tell him exactly what she was up to – but once again, he didn’t tell us who it was.’ Tanner sighed. ‘The meeting took place at the basin of La Joliette and that was where he was killed.’
‘He must have left notes – or something. Have we been to his house?’
‘He had an apartment in the Rue Foncet and the French police searched it from top to bottom. They found nothing.’
‘Perhaps the opposition got there first.’
‘It’s possible, sir.’
M tamped down his pipe with a thumb that had, over the years, become immune to the heat of the smouldering tobacco. ‘You know what surprises me in all this, Chief of Staff? How could 007 allow himself to be shot at close range in the middle of a crowded city? Seven o’clock in the evening, in the summer months . . . it wouldn’t even have been dark! And why wasn’t he carrying his weapon?’
‘I was puzzled by that,’ Tanner agreed. ‘I can only assume he must have been meeting someone he knew, a friend.’
‘Could he have actually met with Madame 16 herself? Or could she have found out about the meeting and intercepted it?’
‘Both those thoughts had occurred to me, sir. The CIA have people out there and we’ve been trying to talk to them. In fact the whole area is crawling with security services of one sort or another. But so far . . . nothing.’
The heavy, sweet smell of Capstan Navy Flake hung in the air. M used the pipe to punctuate his thoughts. The age-old ritual, the lighting and the relighting, gave him time to consider the decisions that had to be made.
‘We need someone to look into what happened,’ he went on. ‘This business with the Corsicans doesn’t sound particularly pressing. If there are fewer drugs coming out of France, that’s something to be grateful for. But I’m not having one of my best agents put down like a dog. I want to know who did this and why and I want that person removed from the field. And if it turns out that this woman, Sixtine, was responsible, that goes for her too.’
Tanner understood exactly what M was saying. He wanted an eye for an eye. Somebody had to be killed.
'Who do you want me to send? I’m afraid 008 is still out of action.’
‘You’ve spoken to Sir James?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sir James Molony was the senior neurologist at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and one of the few men who knew M both socially and professionally. Over the years he had treated a number of agents for injuries, including stab wounds and bullet wounds, always with complete insouciance and discretion. ‘It’s going to be another few weeks.’
‘And 0011?'‘In Miami.’
Read more
Monday, 2 November 2015
The complete Literary 007 - Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz Book Review
'I was quite surprised that although Bond had memorably played bridge in Moonraker, golf in Goldfinger and baccarat in Casino Royale, he had never, in any of the novels, taken part in the much more lethal world of Grand Prix. Better still - and this was really exciting for me - Fleming's outline contained a scene with Bond meeting Bill Tanner and M at the Secret Service HQ.' Anthony Horowitz
Horowitz was able to use parts of the scene in the second chapter of his novel, which means of course that a small part of this new Bond was written by Fleming himself. Horowitz of course has already taken on iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty to great success, and now he tackles James Bond. Of course it could be argued that his Alex Ryder series is basically teenage James Bond but that's an argument for another time.
In Trigger Mortis (dreadful title, that) we find Bond still shacked up with Pussy Galore following the events told in Fleming's Goldfinger. Indeed this new novel is set just two weeks after Goldinger's
She waited until Bond had finished his egg, the lit two cigarettes - not the Morlands brand which were specially made for him and which he preferred, but one of her own Chesterfields. She passed it across and Bond inhaled deeply, reflecting that the first cigarette of the day definitely tasted better when it came from the lips of a beautiful woman.
The Bond of this latest book is classic Bond - chauvinistic, heavy smoking, hard drinking. Horowitz certainly has a good grip on the character and the book carefully follows the blueprint set out over several Bond novels by Fleming himself- we even get the classic style, though ridiculous , scene where the bad guy, this time a Korean named Sin Jai-Seong but known by his Americanised name of Jason Sin tells Bond what he intends to do, the full details of his diabolical plan are laid out to a seemingly doomed 007. Big mistake there Mr Megalomaniac because we know that Bond is going to somehow escape from this latest brush with almost certain death and be able to thwart your dastardly schemes.
'I wonder? Am I acting out of vanity. Am I, perhaps a little too pleased with myself? I do not know - but I suppose I must be as there can be no other reason to explain everything to you. Even so I must be brief.'
Pussy Galore though only plays a small part in this book and the main Bond girl is an American secret service agent with the wonderfully Flemingish name of Jeopardy Lane. But Pussy Galore does have a satisfying arc - in Goldfinger she was a lesbian who was turned by Bond, (never having met a real man, you see) but in this book she finds that her attachment to Bond is only fleeting and she soon leaves him, going off with another woman.
An excellent Bond novel then that feels a lot like Fleming. In fact the only thing I didn't like is the title, Trigger Mortis (which refers to the fail safe device on a USA Vanguard rocket). It's just my opinion but I think Mr Sin would have been a far more Bondian title. I asked Anthony Horowitz about this and he did consider titling the book, Mr Sin, but in the end he went with the actual title. He didn't say why - perhaps Mr Sin would sound too similar to Colonel Sun.
It matters not...this Bond novel is quite excellent.
Thursday, 8 October 2015
James Bond: The Man with the Undescended Testicles
These letters, among many others are featured in the new book The Man With The Golden Typewriter which is published OCT 8TH 2015. These letters make for entertaining reading and the correspondence between Boothroyd and Fleming is particularly interesting. The pair became such good friends that Fleming named a character Major Boothroyd.
Boothroyd even once lent Fleming a gun for a cover illustration.
Another reader, William Plomer, wrote to Fleming after the publication of Goldfinger - ' I have just finished Goldfinger. I think it is well up there with your best. But I don't much like the circular saw business. Anatomically I am a little worried. Whizz goes a fly button. But didn't other objects get in the way first? Or does Bond have undescended testicles?'
The book is out now and well worth a browse - some of the letters are absolutely hilarious.
Thursday, 22 May 2014
That old racist Ian Fleming
To charge this book with racism, as many reviews have done so, is absurd. The book and attitudes were of the time and obviously these views are expressed within the pages. The same charges could be aimed at Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Bulldog Drummond and any classic character.Or what about Shakespeare - could we call the bard homophobic for not representing gay characters in his plays? Do we start judging classic works by modern standards? The book uses the word Negro a lot but at the time this was not considered a racial slur. It also uses the word gay in its true meaning - damn Ian Fleming for living during the period and writing what is probably the best series of thrillers in history. Didn't he realise that in the future the PC brigade, those same people who airbrushed the cigar from a famous poster of Winston Churchill, would be judging him by standards of the next century? How small minded of him!
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
This month Bond will return
"A new Bond cover needs to do a lot of things at once. It needs to appeal to literary and commercial audiences, both fans of the original 14 Fleming books and film fans. It needs to reflect both the content of the novel and capture the reader’s imagination." Suzanne Dean
Set in 1969 the novel is placed very much in the timeline originally created by Ian Fleming. The title Solo references the fact that this time Bond is out on his own and operating as a rogue agent.
“In my novel, events conspire to make Bond go off on a self-appointed mission of his own, unannounced and without any authorisation – and he's fully prepared to take the consequences of his audacity,” William Boyd
Boyd recently told the press that Bond has been incorrectly portrayed as a “cartoon character” by film directors when the spy should be troubled and “a massive boozer”.
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| Fleming - the master |
All of this makes the Archive very excited to get our grubby mitts on this book.
“The few of us with the good fortune to have read Solo can testify that Will has written an absolutely brilliant book and we look forward with mounting excitement to a huge worldwide publishing event on September 26.” Richard Cable, managing director of Vintage Books.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
THE COMPLETE LITERARY 007 - Wrapping up on Fleming
For Your Eyes only contained:
From a view to a kill
For your eyes only
Quantum of Solace
Risico
The Hildebrand Rarity.
Octopussy Contained:
Octopussy
The Property of a Lady
The Living Daylights
Currently all of the stories, including 007 in New York are collected in the Quantum of Solace collection.
Ian Fleming has always been a favourite writer of mine. I devoured the books when I was younger, and continue to dip into Fleming's world from time to time.
The books, although by Fleming's own admission, were pot-boilers, they represented a level of sophistication, or at least suggested sophistication, not found with other action adventure books
The Bond character was a superb creation, which is why he still lives on in popular culture today. Someone, maybe a critic, once said something like, "Bond is the man every man want to be and the man every woman wants to be with". And you know there just might be some truth in that.
Rest in peace, Ian Fleming for even now, many years since your passing, you still provide readers with many hours of pleasure. A fine legacy indeed.
He truly was an outstanding writer - and maybe because of the massive popularity of the film series, he has never been granted the full respect he deserves for his part in the development of the popular novel. The Bond books were easy to read but that's not to say they were shallow. Far from it and Fleming carried on a long tradition of adventure fiction that went back to John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson and beyond.
Next up in this series we start on the second stage of 007 literature, those Bond books not written by Fleming.
Friday, 1 January 2010
THE NAME' S FLEMING, IAN FLEMING
Scottish actor, James McAvoy, recently seen with Keira Knightley in Atonement, showed he could play both sensitive and sophisticated, as well as gruff and tumble, which is good since he'll need both, as he's been picked to portray Ian Fleming in an upcoming biopic of the man who brought James Bond to life.
The 30-year-old actor has been approached by the producers of the film about the life of the hard-living journalist and author who eventually settled in his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye, to write his 12 thrillers about 007 following a distinguished wartime career in British intelligence, The Independent reported.
It is understood that the act
or has been formally approached to secure his involvement in the role and that his signature is imminent.The 25 million pound film is based on an acclaimed biography of Fleming written by Andrew Lycett and will revolve around the period that gave Fleming the inspiration for his most famous creation.
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