Rant Reads: The 007 Re-Read Project

As longtime Rant readers remember, this blog began as a classic horror blog. It quickly expanded to encompass pretty much anything that interested me, and has been taken over by toy reviews in the past few years. While there's nothing at all wrong with that, I've been wanting to expand the range of content again recently. As part of that, the 007 Re-Read Project was born.

I've been a Bond fan for decades. My fascination with the character and his world extends nearly as far back as my love for MOTU, dinosaurs, and Batman. Roger Moore is the first Bond I remember seeing; I have hazy memories of watching The Spy Who Loved Me when I was very small. I would come across the movies on TV every so often, and would usually drop whatever else I was doing so I could watch. While I enjoyed the goofy excess of the Moore Bonds, Sean Connery was darkly charismatic in a way unlike anyone else I had ever seen, almost like a charming villain who was on the side of the "good guys." He quickly became my Bond of choice. I remember seeing trailers for License to Kill when I was 10, and I badly wanted to see it. Trips to the theater were rare, however, so I didn't get to see it until I got a VHS copy of it a couple of years later. (And it didn't disappoint! Contrary to the dismissive views of it you'll find scattered across the internet, I think it's one of the best in the series. It also ranks with Dr. No and From Russia with Love as the movies that are closest to the Fleming novels.)

I was vaguely aware that there were James Bond novels, but I don't remember ever seeing any of them in stores. During the six year gap of the early '90s, which saw no Bond movies, and very little media featuring the character at all, Bond kind of faded into the background for me. I would still watch the occasional movie on TV, but that was pretty much it. Then, 1995 rolled around. A new Bond was on the way! Goldeneye was the first Bond movie I got to see in the theater, and it reignited my love of the franchise. I was talking about it with a friend at school some time later, and suddenly remembered that there were all these books I'd never read. I mentioned this to my friend, and he revealed that he had actually read some of them, and proceeded to rave about how awesome they were! I resolved then and there to track some of them down.

This was easier said than done in the US in the '90s. The original 007 novels by Ian Fleming were inexplicably out of print, so one was limited to any remaining stock that might be lingering at local bookstores, along with whatever they could find at the library. I managed to find a paperback copy of a single book at the local Books-a-Million. Thus, my first Bond novel was The Man with the Golden Gun. Definitely not the best choice, as this is generally considered some of Fleming's weakest work, but it was good enough to make me want more. A trip to a the local library turned up another half dozen or so novels, and I resumed my reading with the novel version of my favorite movie: Goldfinger. I was hooked.

Over the next couple of years, I tracked down all 14 of Ian Fleming's Bond books, even accruing a couple of first editions along the way. Thanks to a gift from a friend, I discovered that there were an additional fourteen novels and two movie novelizations penned by John Gardner, who picked up 007's adventures beginning in 1981. (The gift was a hardcover copy of Seafire, which he had come across while perusing the BAM sale tables. As much as I had dug through those myself, I have no idea how I missed seeing it!) I hunted all of these down in short order, though his novelization of the film License to Kill took a bit of doing. 

A year or so later, I had started working at BAM, and had a customer ask me if we had any copies of Zero Minus Ten by Raymond Benson in stock. I checked to make sure that we carried it-- BAM had no inventory system, you could only check the microfiche to make sure that we carried a title before going to look for it on the shelf, a system that was woefully outdated even in the late '90s-- and took him to the fiction section to show him where it was. Removing it from the shelf, I saw that it was a James Bond novel! (I'm still shocked that the publisher's promotion of the books was so poor that even someone like me, who made it a point to buy and read these novels, and even worked in a bookstore, had no idea that it even existed prior to this!) Handing the customer a copy, I grabbed the other one for myself. I quickly devoured it, and while it wasn't on par with the best of Fleming, I enjoyed it quite a bit. A quick search of the author's name on the BAM computer revealed that Benson's second Bond novel had recently been released in hardcover, so I ordered a copy, and the collection continued to expand.

In the midst of this, while in a used book store in town, I came across a paperback Bond novel I had never heard of before. It had nice pulpy painted art on a white background, with the title Colonel Sun emblazoned across the cover in large block letters. Written by Kingsley Amis under the pen name Robert Markham, it was a curiosity to me. It had been published only a couple of years after Fleming's final Bond book, yet the lists of books I'd hunted down had not mentioned it. As I commence re-reading the Bond continuation novels, we'll begin with it. Be here next Monday!