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Favorite Non-Fleming Bond novels?
Browner
Tucson AZ, USA
Hi, new member here who is also a book editor, studying and reporting on Bond novels for my clients. I've been focusing on Ian Fleming's craft thus far and am looking to consider other authors in the series. Any recommendations for authors and titles? Thanks!
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James Bond and The Spy Who Love Me- Christopher Wood; takes the Roger Moore film and makes it Fleming-like
Licence Renewed- John Gardner; takes Bond to the 80s successfully and relatively faithfully, if a by the numbers plot.
Nobody Lives Forever- John Gardner; while a sequel to Role of Honour, it stands on its own. Does the interesting job of putting Bond on the run rather than the traditional mission structure.
Most of the other John Gardner works get mixed reviews; either for excessive double-crossing or for bizarre and fantastical plots.
Zero Minus Ten- Raymond Benson; brings Bond to the 90s with a Bond more in the image of Pierce Brosnan and M as a Judi Dench figure. This work still stays faithful to the literary tropes though
High Time to Kill- Raymond Benson; A very cinematic adventure, with the original plot of a race up a mountain.
Benson's work gets criticised for weak prose and dialogue, being far too close to the films, and for the sexual explicitness of his work.
Horowitz's trilogy of Trigger Mortis, Forever and A Day and With a Mind to Kill are all good. Trigger Mortis does a typical Bond action plot, but with more of a Fleming spin on it. Forever and A Day is similar, but with a more emotional focus on Bond and the Bond girl. With a Mind to Kill is close to a Le Carre type thriller
The three authors between Benson and Horowitz were all mediocre.
Faulks' Devil May Care copies and pastes tropes and events from Fleming novels. For example, in reference to Goldfinger's golf, this villain cheats at tennis. Instead of the Korean Oddjob, this villain has the Vietnamese Chagrin (with a hat as well!). And so on and so forth. For some, this was written with disdain for the original works. I personally enjoy it due to nostalgia.
Deaver's Carte Blanche tries to bring Bond to the 21st century, but it doesn't work for me. MI6 is revamped an interesting way but Bond doesn't exactly ring true to Ian Fleming's character, by being less womanising and less ruthless. Deaver also tries to add cliffhangers at every chapter, which turns into misdirect after misdirect, making reading a bit frustrating. It is an average read
Boyd's Solo takes Bond into a more political, reflective direction with a look at British post-colonial interference in Africa. The novel is interesting in concept, but for the entirety of the second half, Bond changes nothing about the situation (not even killing the villian!). I suppose Solo is a better literary work than it is a Bond novel.
The other authors and stories (spin-offs like The Authorised Biography, Young Bond, and the 00 stories) are interesting, but not exactly standouts.
I also really enjoyed SOLO, particularly for the charactarization of Bond.
I'm reading the Benson books at the moment. I'd read the first few about 20 years ago but have been plowing through them recently. HTTK of course was a helluva book. I'm reading NDOD at the moment. This is the one I've wanted to get to the most. I'm personally pretty enthralled by it. The settings, the characters, the mood of it.
BTW, I was a mod on the old MI6 boards back in the 2000's. This just about my first post here in maybe 15 years. Not sure what the landscape is like now. I saw that "Last Movie You Watched?" thread. Wow, I started the original about 20 years ago.
For me Trigger Mortis is the best of Horowitz's trilogy. It really captures the spirit of a classic Fleming adventure, even without the inclusion of Pussy Galore, but I like how she's given her due. The idea of the Nurburgring set piece is taken from Fleming's TV scripts which lends it an authenticity, but even so he turns it into a thrilling bit of prose. And then I'm a sucker for all things Space Race related, so the rocket plot works well to place the novel in that particular time.
I enjoyed Forever and a Day when I read it but on refection that story is held together by Madame Sixtine. Great character though she is, I'm not sure I wanted to see his first mission as a 00 (apart from his first meeting with Loelia, that was cute).
Which is somewhat ironic given that love the Young Bond books, but as much as they do their best to follow continuity they are their own thing. Some of it is nostalgic but for what they are I think they're fantastic. Particularly Higson's, the way the build and develop James' character over the series is really well done. The various tortures and tribulations he's put in are as gruesome as anything in the adult novels and even more affective given they're happening to a teenage boy.
I also really love Sherwood's Double O books. I like how it takes the idea of using other characters viewpoints to understand Bond's character in his absence. And I love the characters she's created, especially Harwood who given that she's in this love triangle could've come across as cheap. But she's given a lot of depth beyond that, that she's not just the love interest. Also in Double or Nothing there's a set piece at Baikonur Cosmodrome with a Buran space shuttle, and like I say I love the Space Race.
Benson, the same with The Union Trilogy.
I'm yet to read those of Horowitz, haven't acquired an E-book for those, the same for other one offs.
Devil May Care is alright, decent read, not my favorite though, but it's fine, maybe it would grow on me in my subsequent reads.
I like all the Bond novels in one way or another. Jeffery Deaver, Anthony Horowitz, Raymond Benson and Kim Sherwood have been kind to me on social media. We are lucky to have them as Bond ambassadors!
The other books i tend to find somewhat frustrating. I quite liked Gardner's Nobody Lives Forever which has a cool concept, but most of his others i find pretty dire. His character of Brokenclaw was an intriguing villain, but he did little with it and the book was meh.
Benson's are OK in parts and i probably should re-read High Time to Kill which wasn't bad.
Devil May Care (Great title) is the only one of the standalone novels i have read. I thought it was pretty awful and i believe the villain had an actual Monkey paw..!
Horowitz's books i have found the most readable. Especially the last one With A Mind To Kill
But overall i just prefer to re-read Fleming. They never get old.
I'd actually say HTTK really went downhill for me when I re-read it. I liked it during my first read, but I revisited it last year and it's a very strange novel. Bond seems to turn into a schoolboy when he gets involved in his petty antagonism with Marquis (I love the idea of a rivalry with someone who outmatches Bond, but the way it's written is weird and out of character for Bond, even if he's irked by the guy). The Union are framed as this brilliant group of master criminals, and yet they come off as incompetant, with numerous traitors and double crossings within their ranks getting the better of them. Again, I like the idea in theory: this wannabe SPECTRE group who basically amount to thugs and enlist some dodgy individuals, which in turn completely ruins their plan. But again, there seems to be this idea that they're actually quite brilliant for some reason. The Bond girl's a bit strange as well.
I enjoyed Doubleshot though. It's a bit of FRWL spin in concept, but you get a sense that The Union are actually quite devious and calculating. NDOD is ok I guess.
To be fair, i don't remember much about HTTK, apart from some of the mountaineering stuff. A lot of these 'continuation' novels are not very memorable.
He does come off as a bit of a schoolboy with Marquis; but for me Bond constantly sounds adolescent in the Benson novels. If one were to give Benson the benefit of the doubt, perhaps that's just the incompatibility of the dialogue of films with the a novel's dialogue.
The Bond girl is a indeed bizarre, the whole bit of her being a sex maniac was unnecessary.
I also agree that the Union could have been done better. They aren't exactly mysterious: Bond knows all about them in a briefing, and yet we don't get grabbed by fear with them. There's no previous example of competency to justify us knowing so much about them
I think with HTTK, if one imagines slightly different dialogue (that communicates round about the same message) the story is quite enjoyable.
In terms of worst continuation novels, I think Benson's last 2 and Gardner's last 3 are up there.
Oh yes, I forgot Bond basically gets a lot of exposition about The Union through a computer! I can understand why Benson thought the opening necessary (it’s sort of a PTS) but there’s this sense the novel starts twice when we shift again to the golf game. I guess it establishes Bond’s affair with his secretary and shows us a bit of The Union, but it really feels like we’re going to see a portion of the story deal with Bond directly investigating the Governor’s death, which while a good way in, is a slightly different story.
I think a one off novel involving Bond mountain climbing to retrieve something could have been great. Maybe a short story or novella. I think downplaying The Union as this loose band of ambitious thugs who are constantly double crossed works better frankly, especially with a shorter format. It’d mirror and play more into the theme that Marquis is undone by his own hubris/wanting to get Skin 17 and ascend a stupidly high amount during the climb (has a cautionary tale element to it, and is apt when the book is about people scaling this near impossible climb).
High Time To Kill is my favorite of the Bensons. There's real suspense as they make their way up the mountain and the non-traditional mission setup is good. Zero Minus Ten is also solid, but I don't feel like the others have held up particularly well upon re-reading.
I really liked the first half of Solo a lot, I think it's definitely worth a read and much stronger IMO than Carte Blanche or Devil May Care.
The Horowitz novels didn't really connect for me. Forever And A Day is the best of the lot. As noted above, Sixtine is a really great character, a true three-dimensional Bond girl.