Trigger Mortis - Anthony Horowitz

I have got out of sequence with my post-Fleming Bond reboots. I have leapt from the first Gardner to one of the most recent. So what? Trigger Mortis is what I'd been hoping for, a Bond that is as great as the first three Connery movies. Horowitz, one of the most successful contemporary writers of general fiction, is a way better writer than Fleming, as indeed all Fleming's successors are. More importantly, he is a more gifted writer than any of the others, except perhaps Faulkes, who I haven't read. Most importantly, he has chosen to write in period, filling in the gaps, as it were. Trigger Mortis (the title sounds horrible but is in fact brilliant) comes immediately after Goldfinger. Thus we start off with Bond in bed with Pussy Galore. We then plunge headlong into Grand Prix racing at its most dashing and daring (the Nurburgring in 1957). This would have been good enough for many thriller writers but here is only Act One: it introduces the villain, a Korean meglamaniac, and the main plot, which is about the Space Race.

I am very cynical when it comes to Bond. I have already indicated the only movies I care about and it should be noted that I was only nine or ten when I fell asleep in the cinema during Thunderball. I have avoided anything that came after Roger Moore. I read all the Fleming books before I went to see Thunderball. I enjoyed them at the time, but was not a critical reader when only ten and under/ I revisited them perhaps fifteen years ago and was appalled at how bad they are. Fleming himself is interesting but nowhere near as interesting as his brother Peter, a real life adventurer, married to a movie star, and field commander of the British Resistance we never needed in the second World War. Peter was also a better writer, albeit he overwrites in the devil-may-care style popular in the Thirties when he wrote his bestsellers.

I therefore turned to those commissioned by the Estate to keep the cash rolling in. Colonel Sun and Licence to Kill are both reviewed on this blog. It's interesting that Gardner, who kept the franchise going longest, wrote a Moriarty version of Sherlock Holmes, as of course did Horowitz more recently. I preferred the Gardner Moriarity, which, coincidentally, I also read when I was both young and old. But I tell you, Gardner's Bond is not in the same league as Horowitz's. I genuinely cannot remember a thriller so well done, so thrilling that I could not stop reading.

An absolute triumph - a classic of its rather esoteric sub-genre.

Oh ... one last note. Trigger Mortis actually contains original material by Ian Fleming. Don't worry, it's not noticeable. Horowitz must have smartened up any actual writing, and it's only the writing that let Fleming down. The ideas were highly original, even brilliant in their day.

Licence Renewed - John Gardner

Continuing my project of reading the pseudo-Bond novels in chronological order, here is the first of I believe sixteen written for the rights holder by John Gardner in the 1980s and 1990s. Gardner was a known writer, but nowhere near as well known as Kingsley Amis who had written Colonel Sun more than a decade earlier. Amis was associated with the Bond brand while Fleming was still alive (The James Bond Dossier and The Book of Bond, both 1965). Gardner was different. He had found literary success in 1964 with his Boysie Oakes series, an overt 'piss-take' of Bond. He went on to write other series, including my favourite, the Moriarty books. Then came this, in 1981.


Given the time lapse since Colonel Sun and the last of the Fleming originals, it was perhaps a wise move to bring Bond up to date. Had the lapse been longer, I feel sure prequels would have yielded better results, but the idea in 1981 was to sell new Bond to the same people who had bought original Bond. Overall, the updates work fine. The problem, however, is that Gardner wastes half the book getting over them.


Bond books were never the money spinners that the films were. Fleming, indeed, learnt from the movies and tended to begin subsequent novels with teasers intended to hook us into the narrative. I still remember the opening of Dr No (the novel) which I suppose I read in 1966 or '67. Gardner doesn't and I have to say I was on the verge of throwing Licence Renewed at the wall when we finally got to the action - on page 113! Gardner is keen to echo Fleming in detailed descriptions of Bondian technology. Gardner is a better writer than Fleming but clearly he does not love technology to the extent Fleming did. Fleming's prose comes alive when he writes about gizmos and sex. Gardner's technobabble is more a matter of listing and there is absolutely no rampant sex in the book, despite the presence of two strong and sassy female characters.


The super villain is Anton Murik, a nuclear physicist and (bizarrely) Scottish laird. He is absolutely in the Fleming tradition, and his evil plan is appropriately spectacular and ridiculous. From page 113 to the end on page 259 Licence Renewed zooms along like a fighter jet, action, twists, fights all the way. In the second half Gardner's first attempt is better than both Fleming and Amis. But the first half ... oh dear God, the first half is unspeakably awful.


As a result, it looks like I'm stuck with pressing on. Gardner 2 then, For Special Services, another good title. I might try Boysie Oakes, while I'm at it, to get an idea what Gardner really thought about Bond mania.

Moriarty - Anthony Horowitz

I am no great fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories which even as a child struck me as more legerdemain than logic. I am, however, a big fan of John Gardner's Moriarty series from the middle Seventies and, posthumously, 2008. To tell the truth I grabbed this off the library shelf because I thought it was the 2008 instalment.


But no, it is Horowitz, he of Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and the Alex Rider series of thrillers for Young Adults. I liked Foyle's War, Midsomer Murders was meretricious trash, and I am far too old to have encountered young Master Rider. Still, I'm game. I gave it a good go. I finished it. I enjoyed it .. to an extent.


There can be no doubt that Horowitz is a proficient writer and a master storyteller. His characterisation, here at least, and for a reason I will not go into, is thin and two-dimensional. Briefly, and hopefully without giving too much away, the intricacies of the story rather limit what he can do in terms of character development. There is none; it's all about revelation.


Broadly, the premise is this: Moriarty and Holmes have vanished into the Reichenbach Falls; American gangsters seek to take over Moriarty's British crime empire; Frederick Chase of Pinkerton's and Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard team up to thwart them.


There are touches which border on genius. For example, Jones has made himself into a Holmes superfan, dedicated to the continuity of his methods. There is a superbly psychopathic teenager. The Holmes/Watson trope is worked for all its worth in the Jones/Chase relationship. But in the end it all depends on the big twist and how you react to it. It is a huge, massive, stupendous twist and I hated it. I considered myself cheated. I'm still offended by it 24 hours after I read it.


Horowitz includes his own Sherlock Holmes short story, "The Three Monarchs", as an extra, which cleverly reflects the main narrative with Inspector Jones. It struck me as very much in the Conan Doyle tradition, so obviously I didn't like it much. On the other hand, at least it didn't rest on a make-or-break twist.

Moriarty - John Gardner

Three decades after the first two volumes (The Return of Moriarty and The Revenge of Moriarty), Gardner's third and final volume of the 'memoirs' of the Victorian super-criminal were published posthumously.  The immensely prolific Gardner died in 2007 and Moriarty appeared a year later.

Back in the day, Gardner was very famous - I remember the amount of publicity given the first two volumes, a stark contrast with the zero publicity afforded the third.  He was the first English writer to spoof the Bond genre (with his Sixties series of Boysie Oakes novels) only to be hired to by Fleming's executors to write to continuation Bonds in the Eighties.  He ended up writing fourteen original Bonds and the novelisations of two films, License to Kill and Goldeneye.  I remember reading the first, Licence Renewed but don't remember any more.  Certainly, they can't be any worse than Fleming's because Gardner is a much better writer, so it might be worth having a look.

The good news is that loads of Gardner's works are coming out in ebooks.  The Bonds are available now in America but not here yet.  The five Kruger novels are available here published by Bello, Pan's digital arm.  (I did not know that.)  The other great news is that Gardner has such a spiffy website, so his executors are clearly making an effort to keep his work alive.  Good on them.

Anyway, back to this book...  I loved Return and Revenge back in the Seventies and, only the other week, was musing on how good they were.  Then I went to the library and found this.  Did it excite me as much?  No, but I'm older and more miserable.  Did I enjoy it?  Yes, absolutely - great fun.  Did I admire it?  Again, yes - the thing about Gardner is the way he shows he has done his research without clouting you round the head with it in the manner of Len Deighton. 

I think digital Gardners will be joining my digital bookshelf ere long.

Red Flowers for Lady Blue - Donald Thomas

I had so been looking forward to reading this book.  Over the last year I have rediscovered Thomas's Inspector Swain series, realised he also writes as Frances Selwyn and in that guise, discovered his Sergeant Verity series.  Red Flowers for Lady Blue is one of Thomas's Sonny Tarrant series and I shall not waste my time with another.

Tarrant is supposed to be a sort of latter-day Moriarty or Fu Manchu, the spider at the hub of the underworld web.  He lives at the seaside with his doting mum, which is a nice touch, but other than that is about as frightening as a Chelsea bun.  We are told he is behind all crime and held in awe by lesser crooks, but we see none of it.  The idea, I suspect, is that behind the suits and hail-fellow-well-met attitude Sonny is murderous and amoral.  In this novel, however, the idea is not made flesh.

There are far too many characters and the plot is too convoluted.  Things happen - we are supposed to accept that Sonny is pulling the strings - but we don't see him do it and there is no explanation of how it is done.  For me, the most interesting character was Sonny's lawyer, Stan Bowlett, night-school educated and sharp as a switchblade.  The biggest disappointment was the title character, who starts off a sex-mad vamp but rapidly fades into the background.  She is of zero relevance to the plot.

The setting is 1936 - Abdication year.  As it happens I know a lot more about that era than I do the Victorian world of Swain and Verity.  I am not happy with Thomas's period touches - was David Niven a big enough star at that point to have the moustache named after him?  Surely it would have been a Roland Colman at that date.  The fleeting theatrical background, on which I am an expert just as Thomas is an expert on the Victorian underworld, also fails to convince.  I'm sure the Ivor Novello and Jack Buchanan shows mentioned are right because they're easily Googled, but I don't feel he's explored these mercurial characters at all.  Dicky Dash, Thomas's version of Max Miller, is much more entertaining and should have been given a proper role in events.

As I say, a disappointment.  Another further works by Thomas aka Selwyn will have to be pre-Millennium for me.