Would you rather a Bond book based in modern times OR stick with time period adventures?

MSL49

Modern time.

NickTwentyTwo

Contemporary.

BT3366

CommanderRoss wrote: »

Modern day Bond. The character (if understood) can easily be transferred to our day and age, and modern-day writers have trouble understanding the fifties and sixties of the last century. I think the last one I read going utterly wrobng like that was 'Devil May Care', in which Bond hardly knew anything about Iran, and the 'Caspian Sea Monster' was a surprise to him. Well, both are ubeleavable for a spy at MI6. They were heavily involved in Iran, and the Caspian Sea Monster was well known in intelligence services as it was seen as a big threat.

But getting the character right has been the biggest challenge to continuation novelists, and the only one that got close, I think, was Horowitz.

I was excited to buy the book to take on my vacation in the summer of 2008 and right off it just seemed more like fan fiction than a professional continuation of a Bond adventure set in the '60s with a stereotype villain with a physical deformity, a sport to test Bond and so on that smacked more of the expected formula of the film series than the tribute to Fleming as it was supposed to be. I finished the first few chapters, set it aside and have never to this day revisited.

mtm

I tried reading it again recently, and although there’s nothing really wrong with it, it all feels just too close to pastiche and formulaic that there didn’t seem to be any point reading it. I think it was around the point that Bond went to Tehran and meets not-Kerim Bay, and is guided through the mathematically appropriate amount of local customs and colour, and I just gave up with it. It’s like an AI Bond book.
Horowitz’s books feel like sincere attempts to make Bond thrillers, Devil May Care has the slightest whiff of an author sneering at the material and, ironically, failing to match up to it.