English spy novelist John Gardner (b.1926) has died. After collapsing at this home and being rushed to the hospital, he died on Friday, August 3, 2007 from suspected heart failure. In 1981, Gardner revived Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels with the publication of LICENCE RENEWED, bringing Eisenhower-Kennedy era Bond into the Reagan eighties.
“I described to the Glidrose Board how I wanted to put Bond to sleep where Fleming had left him in the sixties, waking him up now in the 80s having made sure he had not aged, but had accumulated modern thinking on the question of Intelligence and Security matters. Most of all I wanted him to have operational know-how: the reality of correct tradecraft and modern gee-whiz technology.”
- John Gardner
When I began studying the action film format, I re-read all the Fleming novels and began reading the Gardner books. While his first Bond novel LICENCE RENEWED proved to be a compelling read, I found ROLE OF HONOUR, his fourth Bond book, to be the best example of the updating of the character. In this 1984 novel, Bond learns computer programming. Reminiscent of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (the book, not the movie), he spends the first portion of the book in bed with Miss “Percy” Proud, a lovely CIA agent who teaches him everything she knows about computers while he teaches her everything he knows about rigorous daily fornication. That’s our Bond.
Between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote sixteen James Bond novels. Two of them were novelizations of the film scripts for Dalton’s LICENCE TO KILL and Brosnan’s GOLDENEYE. While Gardner’s books were commercial successes, he felt unsatisfied writing novels with a character he hadn’t created. In 1996 Gardner retired from writing Bond novels and, after a long sabbatical due to illness, began a series of books with a new character, Suzie Mountford, a 1930’s police detective. John Gardner’s contribution to the mystery/spy genre is incalculable. RIP.
Poe Note:
In Poe’s third August Dupin mystery story, “The Purloined Letter,” his Parisian detective investigates the blackmailing of the Queen by one of her more unscrupulous Ministers. (Sounds like something spy chief M would ask royalist Bond to do.) Using deductive reasoning worthy of Bond and misdirection worthy of Columbo, Dupin finds the incriminating letter “hiding in plain sight” and saves the day.
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