Nobody Lives Forever (1986)

Secret agent 007 has a bounty placed on his head by his old enemy SPECTRE, and every assassin, gangster, and two-bit hood that isn't currently running for public office is attempting to collect. It's a mad dash from Europe to the Florida Keys with Bond as the target! Crooked cops, an all-female bodyguard agency, double agents, Bond slumming it by eating shrimp cocktails in grotty Florida bars, and giant vampire bats! Da-da-DA-DA!

My re-reads of the John Gardner 007 novels have been something of a Marmite affair so far. On one hand, I enjoyed License Renewed, For Special Services, and Role of Honor, but on the other hand absolutely despised the incredibly overrated Icebreaker. On novel number five, Nobody Lives Forever, I've come to the first Gardner Bond that's truly stumped me about how I should feel about it.

Let's start with the good things: the simple premise of Bond being the target takes the series in a new direction and I'm genuinely surprised we didn't get something like this sooner. Instead of the usual routine of Bond receiving a mission from M and going off to some exotic locale to investigate the bad guys, the mission is now simply survival. This novel is also the first direct sequel that Gardner wrote in his series. While preceding Gardner 007 novels made reference to prior missions, they could just as easily be read as standalone adventures if one felt so inclined. Here, we have a continuation from events at the end of Role of Honor where Tamil Rahani, the man who inherited leadership of SPECTRE after Bond wiped out the entire Blofeld clan, is not doing so hot after his narrow escape and wants nothing more than Bond's head on a silver platter. Quite literally.

I took no issue with the setting either, with Bond and his newfound cohorts in what becomes essentially an elongated chase sequence throughout parts of Europe with the finale taking place in and around Earnest Hemmingway territory in the southern tip of Florida. Once again, Gardner delivers some distinct and specific minute details about places I suspect he visited himself (or had damn good travel guides for), from little favors at the tables of restaurants to the type of stucco used in local shops. He even nails the Floridian aspect of prosperity alongside poverty by pointing out the fancy, lavish houses around Key West directly next to rundown tenements with unfinished sidewalks.

Then there's the not so good things, chief among them is not, surprisingly, the fact that for most of the novel Bond is paired with two Charlie's Angels rejects, one of whom runs an improbably all-female bodyguard firm that's so adept at being discrete no intelligence agency appears to know who they are. No, the worst offender for me in Nobody Lives Forever is actually how Bond himself is characterized. This man's life has been threatened more times than he could possibly remember at this point in his career, so why, when presented with the possibility that there's a bounty on his head and a bevvy of assassins on his tail, does Bond get all paranoid and sulky? Bond even starts yelling at characters at certain points, which comes across as truly bizarre and out of character.

One also has to roll their eyes at the MacGuffin that prevents Bond from simply going into hiding for a few months and letting this whole assassin business blow over... Moneypenny and his "Scottish treasure" housekeeper May have been kidnapped by SPECTRE! Oh no! Next you'll be telling me Bond forgot to put his clothes in the dryer or one of his pens just ran out of ink. Again, I applaud Gardner for doing something different in this novel, but using Bond's elderly housekeeper as a major catalyst piece of bait for the plot didn't exactly scream action-adventure extravaganza to me.

Nobody Lives Forever is a competently written page-turning thriller with plenty of enjoyable action, but it loses me in certain places with our hero acting like a grouchy child and some downright goofy plot contrivances. The first 'thumbs in the middle' Gardner 007 novel for me.