Scorpius (1988)

The body of a young lady washes ashore from the Thames, and 007's number is on it. Baited into the murder mystery, Bond buddies up with a SAS man and a rogue agent from the... American IRS (guh?) to take on a lunatic cult leader who may or may not have been a notorious arms dealer in a previous life. Oh, Jimmy... you're always getting tangled up in this barmy situations, aren't you? Suicide bombers! Killer snakes! Sham marriages! The bloke who played the Irish cop in The Untouchables? Da-da-DA-DA!

We're now onto John Gardner's seventh Bond continuation novel, and at this point I personally believe that Gardner received a raw deal from fans who derided his work over the years. Yes, there have been a couple of duds in the run thus far and Gardner had that weird penchant for Bond driving a Saab early on, but for the most part I'm finding the Gardner Bonds are perfectly acceptable espionage-tinged adventure stories, and I'm especially enjoying the ones I never had a chance to read before, such as Scorpius. (Yes, I know it drops off towards the end. We'll get there...)

Bond villains usually only come in certain flavors - the egomaniacal dictator, the disgraced former do-gooder, the gluttonous or greedy master criminal, and so on, but in Scorpius John Gardner presents us with something different in the form of Father Valentine (aka Scorpius): a religious zealot who has an army of radicalized true believers at his beck and call. We see some hints of these kind of adversaries for Bond in the film series, such as Professor Joe in License to Kill (who is only a minor minion of the actual villain) and I suppose some elements of the voodoo cult in Live and Let Die might qualify as such too, but on the whole, religion in any form is something the Bond novels never tended to delve into very much until this point.

For what it's worth, I thought Valentine to be a formidable and suitably creepy opponent for Bond. He's a villain who appears to enjoy placing his male and female followers into arranged marriages and playing a perverted mix of god and voyeur towards them, I only wished Valentine was actually in the novel for longer. What our intrepid British agent is going up against for the bulk of the novel are Valentine's true believers, a cult so diabolically brainwashed they're willing to act as suicide bombers to carry out Valentine's plans of assassinating politicians of all stripes and sewing chaos and discord during the elections of world powers. Even though this novel was penned in the late 80's, this method of terrorism sadly brings the Bond novels into the modern world, as we have all likely become more accustomed to seeing such acts of violence and brutality in the news over the last several decades.

Something that threw me off about Scorpius was that Gardner chose not to send Bond out on his usual globetrotting path to far-flung exotic locations. In fact, I was almost convinced the entirety of the novel would remain in England, due to the fact that Bond hadn't traveled more than a hundred miles outside of London by around the 200 page mark. However, Father Valentine manages a daring escape from the British Isles and retreats to his secret lair... in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

It's at this point that I had to stop and laugh for a few minutes. Hilton Head is a stone's throw away from where I live and I have an incredibly hard time imagining this lazy tourist trap of a town as a base of operations for a demented cleric (with a small army in his pocket, no less). I'm aware that John Gardner actually lived in the United States for many years, so my guess is he either visited with his family or came to play golf in Hilton and thought it might be remote enough or have a slightly exotic sounding name enough for readers back in England who may not be familiar with the southeast coast of the US. What's tragic is Gardner barely describes the flavor of the area, simply noting that there's a lot of beaches and golf courses nearby. Gardner does mention nearby Savannah and Bond does briefly travel there - albeit only to Hunter Army Airfield to catch a military flight - but as a resident for several years now I'm convinced the city of Savannah, Georgia would have made for a far more suitable location for a Bond villain to lurk around. There are innumerous freaks, geeks, and general weirdos abound in Savannah, in addition to a plethora of supposedly haunted locations, swamps, marshes, palm trees, Spanish moss... and shitloads of restaurants of all varieties. Hell, nevermind John Gardner... Ian Fleming himself would have loved Savannah for the amount of food on offer if he knew about it in his day. Alas... missed opportunities.

The conclusion of Scorpius is also worth mentioning. Bond is whisked away to Washington D.C. to save both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain in one fell swoop. What I love about this slightly preposterous finale is how the stakes could not be higher and Bond just goes about this task as if it were as routine as brushing his teeth. Perhaps that's a bit of movie Bond creeping into the Gardner novels again (you can easily imagine Roger Moore mugging for the camera during this part), but I couldn't help but be entertained by how nonplussed the character was about saving two of the most important world leaders at the same time.

Recommended.

No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)

An ambitious honeypot operation against the Soviets has gone off the rails, and now the KGB are out for revenge. Before the Ruskies can eradicate the entire list of young assets, Agent 007 is sent into the field by M to locate and rescue as many of the survivors as he can. An exploding pen, Irish castles, turncoats galore, animal abuse (maybe?), and Bond with only a half-loaded Luger in a "The Most Dangerous Game" finale! Da-da-DA-DA! 

Okay, let's get it out of the way right now. The title of this novel: No Deals, Mr. Bond. It's not great. A lot of fans are going to say it's easily the worst title in the history of Bond media, and it's difficult to argue that point. Personally, I have come to appreciate the title No Deals, Mr. Bond in an ironic 'so-bad-it's-good' kind of way, but even then it's a tough sell. In defense of author John Gardner, he hated No Deals, Mr. Bond as a title but was kinda-sorta strongarmed into going with it at the behest of the publishers, who also suggested the equally terrible 'Oh No, Mr. Bond!' and 'Bond Fights Back' as alternate titles. What were these idiots at the publishing house smoking at the time? The only thing I will say in favor of No Deals, Mr. Bond as a title is because it's so odd and cringey, it at least stands out when you're looking at all the Gardner books on a shelf. It's certainly more remarkable than one we'll get to a couple of reviews from now (the utterly generic titled Win, Lose, or Die - blah!).

Anyway, No Deals, Mr. Bond has a lowly reputation among certain literary Bond fans and is often derided as the beginning of John Gardner phoning in stories, recycling plots, and over-utilizing the concept of double or triple agents carrying out last minute betrayals at the behest of their true masters. I can't deny Gardner certainly loved his double agents, but it's not as if the idea of double-crosses is entirely alien to the genre of spy fiction. Gardner also played this hand many times over in his third Bond novel Icebreaker, which I found to be beyond tedious, but here in No Deals, Mr. Bond, I don't find the trope too bothersome. Perhaps it's because Bond dispatches the characters who turn out to be villainous double-crossers in short order, thus they don't have a chance to wear out their welcome once it becomes apparent they're baddies.

There's a slightly understated thread in this novel of M becoming more fatherly towards Bond, which we see hinted at on occasion in both the book series and the films. It comes to Bond's attention after speaking with a fellow British agent in the field that the mission to save the young ladies (and gent) who were involved in the honeypot is less an official mission from Queen and country and more of a personal request from M, as the brewing scandal of a botched honeypot potentially becoming public knowledge is threatening to take M's job as the head of British intelligence and the only agent he felt he could rely on for such a personal, off-the-books task is Bond. And despite the mortal peril this ultimately puts him in, Bond is more than willing to go through with the operation to help M because that's just what bros do, right? While the reader isn't battered over the head with this theme, it's kind of sweet to see how deep both character's loyalty goes for one another.

I wouldn't say this novel is anything near outstanding, but I had a pleasant enough time reading it. From the extremely filmic opening chapter which could have easily been a Roger Moore era pre-title sequence to the setting bouncing around from the streets of London to the Republic of Ireland to Hong Kong (with a one chapter diversion in Paris), I found it easy to lose myself in the brain candy of No Deals, Mr. Bond. The ending in particular, which see Bond stuck on a small island off the coast of Hong Kong, completely outnumbered by a group of bloodthirsty hooligans, and with only four bullets to his name is some truly priceless pulp action that kept me turning pages until the very end.

Don't be deceived by the stupid title, No Deals, Mr. Bond is another worthwhile John Gardner 007 novel. Recommended.

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.

Role of Honour (1984)

After receiving a surprise inheritance from a rich relative he never knew he had, secret agent 007 resigns from the service, spends way too much money on an old Bentley, then wines and dines babes in Monte Carlo. But it's all just a cunning ruse to gain the trust of the baddies. Bond is soon training at a terrorist camp and channeling his inner computer nerd to play wargames with the villains... all in the name of taking down their dastardly schemes from within. Bentleys, blimps, QBasic..? Da-da-DA-DA!

So here we are barreling on ahead with the John Gardner 007 re-read marathon, and I feel as if Role of Honour is a return to form over the Scooby-Doo style shenanigans of Icebreaker. As I said early on in this series of reviews, John Gardner's Bond novels definitely feel like products of the 80's, and this particular novel is painfully dated in many ways, especially where it concerns computing and programming languages, but if you can accept it as a snapshot in time of the early 80's computer craze then you'll have fun. I admit to chortling out loud several times as Bond is being taught the inner workings of the "highly sophisticated" QBasic computer language by an improbably hot American agent who specializes in such "advanced" technology.

Still, I found myself turning the pages of Role of Honour fairly quickly. It's a book that has that sweet spot of literary Bond that I'm looking for: a decent amount of espionage, some action, at least a small serving of travelogue feel, and the main character drinking like a diabetic fish and smoking like it's going out of style. But let's get to the really good news here... the Saab is gone! Bond is back in a Bentley, baby! Albeit a custom job that seems to be capable of withstanding multiple head-on collisions with goons on the roadways, but who cares? Our suave secret agent man is traveling in style again, and that's what we're all here to see.

An interesting twist in Role of Honour is Gardner trying his hand at a small cabal of villains for Bond to contend with instead of one main antagonist. The plot certainly sets itself up for the reader to believe there's only one major villain, but as the book rolls along it becomes evident Bond has several players, and indeed an entire organization, that needs to be dealt with.

Something I haven't really addressed with these Gardner reviews yet is how much the film series seemed to acquire... shall we say, inspiration from his books? It's often bandied about on various Bond fan sites that the filmmakers weren't legally allowed to use the Gardner books, but clearly that didn't stop them from cribbing important set pieces here and there. For instance, Role of Honour features a lot of computer jargon and a climax that takes place on a blimp... which is totally not featured in A View to a Kill, right? As a fan, I've never been bothered by the idea of the films taking a cue from continuation novels instead of being strictly adherent to Ian Fleming's ideas. What bothers me more is EON Productions' insistence that they weren't copying the test answers by looking over at John Gardner's desk, because the examples are too numerous to be mere coincidences.

Recommended.

Icebreaker (1983)

Bond is sent to the snowbound reaches of Finland to team up with operatives from the CIA, Mossad, and the KGB in order to prevent weapons from reaching the hands of a socialist terror group looking to bring about a new world order. But wait! There's a double agent on the team who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! There could be another double agent on the team who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! There could be a triple agent on the team who only wants you to think that they're a double agent who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! The whole fucking team might be double agents who might be working with the terrorists! Ah, to hell with it, here's a snow plough chase scene! Da-da-DA-DA!

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Icebreaker drinking game: take a shot every time John Gardner uses the word 'acid' or 'acidly' to describe someone speaking. Take a shot every time John Gardner uses the word 'slewed' to describe a vehicle in motion. Try not to die of alcohol poisoning.

I seem to remember enjoying this book many years ago when I originally read it (or at least regarding it as one of the better Gardner Bonds I'd read), but upon reaching the third novel in my amazing John Gardner 007 re-reading marathon, I found myself turning the pages of a rather ho-hum spy novel with little in the way of thrills or excitement.

I enjoyed seeing Bond in an arctic setting for a change of pace and it's evident John Gardner actually visited some of these spots in Finland for added descriptive flair, but just about everything else in Icebreaker is a big miss for me. The main baddies being a bunch of neo-Nazis trying to install a new wannabe Hitler as supreme leader had to be a tired trope even in the 80's when this thing was written, and the amount of ridiculous double and triple crosses from the secondary characters is enough to make a Mission: Impossible film blush.

Bond himself is less like the maturing spy Gardner tried to establish in his first two novels and turns into a bit of a boob, stumbling from the clutches of one double crosser to the next and seldom in control of anything. Here he's like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer character without any of the wit and he only escapes or saves the day because of happenstance instead of using his spycraft, combat prowess, or any of his detective skills. There's a torture sequence that is quite (pardon the Mr. Freeze style puns) chilling, but the impact is undercut and horribly unrealistic to have Bond wake up and be good as new a few pages later without suffering any long-term frostbite injuries. The poor bastard's balls would have fallen off, is what I'm saying here.

I will also point out the amount of space dedicated to the Saab Turbo and all the various bells and whistles the vehicle possesses makes me believe Gardner was definitely receiving some kind of annual stipend from Saab themselves. There's no way the author believed this grandad car was genuinely appropriate for what is supposed to be a suave gentleman spy like James Bond.

The first dud in the Gardner Bond series.

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. Recommended.

License Renewed (1981)

A new Bond for the 80's! With the looming threat of coordinated nuclear meltdowns across the globe, secret agent 007 heads to Scotland for some caber tossing and castle crusading. Standing in his way is an international terrorist and a nuclear physicist with a penchant for cheating at horse racing. Girls! Guns! Gadgets! A.. Saab 900 Turbo? Da-da-DA-DA!

For reasons completely unknown to me, I had this desire to go through all of the John Gardner 007 novels. I've probably only read a little more than half of his 14 Bond books and the ones I did read were all out of order, so here goes - an attempt to read John Gardner instead of Ian Fleming. Don't ask me to try to understand how my brain works...

Gardner's 007 novels always seem to have such a lowly reputation among literary Bond fandom, but I've always held a soft spot for the ones I've read. Perhaps it's because I'm an 80's guy and I view the Gardner series with the same kind of retro charm I have for a lot of media from the 80's. And because this is Bond in the 80's, despite the author claiming he swore off watching the films once he got the gig as the continuation author (so as not to be too influenced by the big screen adaption of the character), it's really hard to read these and not envision Roger Moore running around as Gardner's Bond. Since Roger Moore is my favorite Bond, it's not too difficult to see why I'm a little bit warmer towards these books than others.

It's also a matter of adjusting your expectations. Gardner writes his Bond novels as less of a pulp adventure like Fleming and as more of a contemporary spy thriller, complete with a penchant for going into borderline obsessive levels of detail over arms and equipment. And yes, there was much consternation over Gardner's decision to have Bond driving a Saab instead of an old Bentley in addition to the introduction of strange supporting characters such as a female quartermaster nicknamed... Q'ute. Okay, so these changes don't exactly scream exciting gentleman spy action, but keep in mind Gardner wasn't allowed too much freedom from the publisher in terms of character development, so I can give him some kudos for at least attempting to push for some minor cosmetic tweaks to the formula. Considering we're catching up with what is supposed to be the same man Fleming wrote about some 13 years after his last adventure, some changes in the life of the character are to be expected.

But a fucking Saab? Dude...

The plot of License Renewed is another "hold the world to hostage over the threat of nuclear annihilation" scenario we've seen in spy fiction a thousand times over, but Gardner tackles it in an uncomplicated and fast-paced fashion that makes for rather pleasant reading. It's certainly not as poetic or quotable as Fleming, but again, I don't believe Gardner was ever attempting to write in the same style as the original creator. Gardner does borrow some Fleming-esque elements, such as giving the villain a strange and unfavorable quirk (in this instance bird-like qualities) and a brutish henchman at his side (ala Oddjob), and there is of course the beautiful but damaged winged dove love interest for Bond to rescue (and be rescued by). Gardner tries to give some love to Fleming's side characters by including M and Tanner in some additional scenes, even giving Tanner a little cameo in the field as Bond's partner for the climax. The primary settings of both a foreboding castle in the wilderness of Scotland and the Mediterranean side of France are believable haunts for Bond to find himself in and adds to the travelogue sense that this series, both literary and film, is known for.

Recommended.