For Special Services (1982)

Secret Agent 007 puts on his cowboy boots and heads to Texas to lock horns with an ice cream magnate (no, I'm serious!) who may or may not have revived Bond's old enemies - the SPECTRE organization. There's a car race, a woman with only one breast, a bizarre subplot where Bond is brainwashed into believing he's an American army general, and giant snakes. Whew, lad. Da-da-DA-DA.

Okay, so in my review for John Gardner's first Bond outing I gave praise to the author for not trying to ape Ian Fleming too much. However, Gardner's second outing takes things in a much different direction. While he's not trying to emulate Fleming's writing style, Gardner does turn For Special Services into something of a 'greatest hits' of Ian Fleming: we have Bond being undercover with the villains, an exotic fantasyland setting (the villain's ranch), the return of SPECTRE, Bond teaming up with a Leiter (albeit Felix's daughter Cedar), a load of gadgets, Bond besting the baddies at some kind of sporting activity (in this instance, auto racing), villains with grotesque disfigurements and physical defects, and a last minute plot twist that anyone half-awake could telegraph at least a hundred pages prior. Even the title itself - For Special Services - is a deep cut reference to a revolver that was gifted to Ian Fleming in the 1940's.

This novel seems to have a rather appalling reputation amongst fans of literary Bond, and some of it has to do with the villain being in the ice cream business. I suppose the idea is not exactly menacing or sinister for a potential Bond villain at face value - and it might even be a little silly, but it really didn't bother me. What matters is that the character of Markus Bismaquer uses his vast sums of wealth to collect art - specifically rare prints - in his spare time, since this is the hook to get Bond involved with him in the first place. Yeah, he could have been a rich businessman in just about any field, but given this is a greatest hits piece, I think Gardner may have tapped into Fleming's penchant for the peculiar with this decision.

The other major issue fans have is with a revelation towards the very end of the novel, where Felix Leiter essentially 'gifts' his friend James Bond with the uh... 'special services' of his daughter Cedar. A lot of this bellyaching comes from contemporary readers who are often looking for things to be perpetually outraged about and then try to 'cancel' because they are joyless homunculi with nary a creative bone in their bodies, buuuut.... I have to begrudgingly admit they might have a point here. Look, I'm a weirdo and I can get on board with some pretty strange and outlandish stuff, but why does this segment of the novel read like Felix pimping out his own daughter? There's also presumably a decent age gap between Bond and Cedar which really doesn't help this scenario feel any less creepy.

Despite this little bit of ickiness, For Special Services is still an enjoyable romp regardless if much of it has been done before. I actually liked it more than License Renewed, despite its lowly reputation.