14 hours ago
12
Written by Mark Edlitz
Foreword by Bruce Feirstein
Independently Published
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.”
– Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
The twenty-five (and counting) blockbuster films produced by EON since 1962 have made the character of James Bond, 007 ubiquitous in the collective pop consciousness of the world.
Bond has been an icon of sixties swag, a master of 70’s camp charm, and a relic of the Cold War searching for his identity in a new world since 1995. Everyone on Earth knows James Bond.
This has presented a unique challenge to those charged with preserving and embellishing the literary legacy of Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator. For though the Bond books remain popular, their place in the public mind is miniscule compared to the pop culture footprint of their cinematic children.
Everyone on Earth knows James Bond: the sex symbol; the stuntmaster; the blockbuster hero, but not necessarily James Bond, the hard-boiled hero of the books. How do you honor that legacy with integrity while still keeping Bond recognizable to a wider audience who think they know what they’re getting into? How do you ensure that Ian Fleming’s ruthless and sardonic master spy survives his creator’s death as he’s survived so many traps and showdowns?
Mark Edlitz’s new book, Keeping 007 Alive attempts to draw out an answer to these questions, and more straight from the authors charged with doing just that. From Kingsley Amis’ weird, wonderful pastiche Colonel Sun in 1968 to Kim Sherwood’s still ongoing “Double-O” trilogy this work gives an inside look at the process of picking up where Fleming left off from the perspective of both publisher and author.
Edlitz begins by interviewing Corinne Turner from Ian Fleming Publications. She began working with the firm during John Gardner’s tenure in 1988, and as you might expect from an interview with a Managing Director– it’s kind of a puff piece. There’s some biographical detail about Ms. Turner and it is nice to hear from someone who enjoyed the Gardner years but there’s not really any insight gleaned into how a manuscript is put into shape or why the company chose to shift direction after Raymond Benson’s novels towards doing period pieces. Most distressingly there’s no real detail on how the authors differ from one another as personalities or partners. Everyone was wonderful, and look out for all the new spin offs coming.
Next is John Gardner’s son, Simon Gardner and right away the book springs to life.
John Gardner wrote the most Bond novels of anyone (even Fleming) and being a tough thriller writer in the post-Le Carre mold, he had a real eye for spycraft and technical authenticity. This verisimilitude made him strange bedfellows at times with the James Bond character– he’s probably most remembered by the general public for choosing a Saab as Bond’s car in the early novels because a real life spytech firm was kitting models out, without thinking of how dopey the idea of Bond in a Saab really is.
Simon really gets across the difficulties in pleasing American and English editors and publishers while trying to maintain some kind of literary authenticity and authorial voice while working on a character that isn’t yours. Gardner wrote amazing spy thrillers in a literary mold with his own characters, but given that he could never really change Bond fundamentally, he had to reserve any wild chances he took for the plots.
1991’s The Man from Barbarossa and 1993’s Never Send Flowers get singled out here for being particular favorites for their departure from the Bond formula. Through Simon we get a vision of a tough writer who loved his fans, and labored under the burden of knowing he would always be best remembered for his work on Bond and not his creations.
Raymond Benson is the flip side of the coin: he had worked writing computer and tabletop Bond game scenarios as well as The James Bond Dossier and was not a novelist before taking the reins for 1997’s Zero Minus Ten.
If Gardner was never entirely comfortable living in another man’s house, Benson spent his tenure on Bond restoring that house to what it looked like under its original ownership. Benson is extremely fan literate, and his interview is informative, enthusiastic, and genuinely fascinating even if I prefer Gardner’s novels to his in general, I learned more about the process from his interview than anyone else’s.
Those looking to read Benson after reading this book would be well advised to seek out 1999’s High Time to Kill– one of the best Bond continuation novels.
The following two interviews focus on spin-offs: Charlie Higson wrote the “Young Bond” novels and Samantha Weinburg wrote the “Moneypenny Diaries” books.
I wasn’t familiar with either writer prior or their work prior to this and both interviews are pleasant enough, especially Weinberg’s who details how she put together a character profile for Moneypenny that made it possible to write stories from her perspective.
If Gardner struggled to maintain his literary voice in his novels and Benson got to indulge his love then Sebastian Faulkes, Jeffrey Deaver and William Boyd’s interviews reveal how much the labor stemmed from an appreciation for Fleming’s voice and narrative sweep.
Each of the three was asked to write a one-off and so the interviews mainly confine themselves to that process of accepting, plotting and delivering a single story. Faulkes is probably the most interesting of the three because while Deaver and Boyd were always Bond fans, he needed to go back and read them.
This brings us logically to Anthony Horowitz, who has just completed a trilogy of novels set between the Fleming books. Horowitz is both a fine writer of thrillers and a fan, as well as having a deep literary reverence for Fleming and his understanding of the character is a natural progression through the process from Gardner to Benson to Faulkes. Trigger Mortis, written in 2015, even uses previously unpublished Fleming material and it is quite seamless with his own original contributions.
In conclusion: there’s a lot of repetition in this book. It’s clear that Ian Fleming Publications has a strict way of handling writers and so the process of being solicited to write a Bond novel is constant from writer to writer.
There’s not a lot of insight into the individual stories themselves, and there’s absolutely very little in the way of frank complaints or hardship in the collaborative process. So the only real substance to this book is getting a sketch of each writer’s personality in the course of the interview.
It’s pleasant light reading, but I couldn’t help but wish that Edlitz dug a little deeper with his subjects.
Recommended, for Bond fans only.
English (US) ·