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That's an interesting observation and one I don't think I've heard before in relation to the novel. You could be right of course as a deal had to be done with Saab for it to be included in the early Gardner Bond novels. We're of course not privy to the details of that deal from a promotional point of view.
In the same vein, the comment you do hear much more often is that about Gardner's later Bond novel Never Send Flowers. With that novel people say that Gardner had to include Bond waxing lyrical about past visits to Disneyland as the price to use EuroDisney in the climactic scene with the villain. For some Bond fans this was a bridge too far in terms of the quid pro quo cost of the inclusion of EuroDisney as a real world location in the novel.
I don't want this to be a reductive comment, but I think you have to take the rough with the smooth with Gardner's work. They are not sober novels. They are bonkers in many respects, and the product placement and naffness of including Bond's EuroDisney holiday, are all a part of it. For me, it's this stuff that makes his books fun.
I think the Unauthorised Guide to Bond (forget the authors right now), point out his obsession with the Cats musical (or is it Les Mis?), and how he always mentions the billboards for the musical whenever he describes a London scene.
They're not really canonical (if such a thing exists in Bond universe).
Also, as much as I am told the Saab is crap, I actually quite like it.
Yes, that's right, the authors of The Bond Files - Andy Lane and Paul Simpson - do indeed refer to John Gardner's seeming obsession with the Andrew Lloyd-Webber Cats musical. He does refer to it in a few of his 90s Bond novels, I believe. Sometimes even more than once within the one novel!
Those that know a little of the biography of Gardner (perhaps not a plentiful number nowadays) won't be too surprised by this. Gardner gave lecture tours on Shakespearean production in the United States and even visited Moscow with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was also the theatre critic for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald local newspaper before he became a full-time author of fiction with firstly the Boysie Oakes spoof spy novels in the 1960s. Early in his writing career he wrote several plays that never really went anywhere. He also later wrote the book Every Night's a Bullfight (1971) about the internal dramas of the theatrical world and staging productions of plays. The novel was later reworked by Gardner and published as The Director (1981).
Some of Gardner's theatre buff credentials even spilled over into his Bond novels as well. Witness the villain David Dragonpol's partly holographic theatre museum within his Rhine castle home, Schloss Drache. So Gardner's obsession with musical theatre doesn't seem so out of place in the light of these facts from his background. In some ways it was to be expected that it would leach into his Bond novels at some point or other. One writes of what one knows, as they say, and Gardner certainly knew a lot about theatre.
Top knowledge, @Dragonpol
Thank you, @FatherValentine. As may be clear by now, I find John Gardner a fascinating man and subject both from a Bond and wider literary perspective. :)
I'm sure his heart must've been in it or he wouldn't have signed the next three book contract with Glidrose. I know fans like to speculate about how committed to Bond Gardner really was as the series continued but there's no real evidence he had lost heart. Perhaps the charges of losing inspiration or repeating himself a bit with later books could be levelled at him. Gardner himself once said on an update to his website that he had obviously found an affinity with Bond after writing about him for so long. Due to something Gardner had written on the Bond part of his website around 2002 the belief that he hadn't in fact ever liked Bond had gained credence online. Gardner responded to this on his website update that it was a particularly stupid canard doing the rounds at the time and he obviously refuted it. That said, writing the official Bond continuation novels obviously brought him a good supplementary income to his own novels. He said the money paid was fair for the job but not huge as some had speculated.
We also have to remember that Gardner was pretty ill with two separate bouts of cancer and other ailments including heart attacks while he was writing the Bond novels in the later stages (from about 1990 onwards) and that this could have left the impression that he was just doing it for the money. Of course, as he said in interviews around the time that his new novel Bottled Spider was released in 2002, when you have a big operation in the US, where he lived up until November 1996, they do a thing called a "walletectomy" as well. So he definitely needed the money and had to continue writing Bond until he was quite literally dying. The US medical bills for his oesophageal cancer treatment in 1996 cost $250,000, almost his entire life savings, as he said in an interview with the Financial Times in June 2001. Gardner was nearly left bankrupt and his wife Margaret sadly died of cancer herself, in February 1997, shortly after their return to England.
Thankfully he was successfully cured of his cancer but he had lost nearly all of his money. When he returned to England he had to live in the end house of a row of (I think) 17th century almshouses. He there started writing his last series of books featuring policewoman Suzie Mountford in World War II set crime novels. The fact that after his last Bond novel Cold (1996) he went on to have success with the novel Day of Absolution (2000), five Suzie Mountford novels (six novels were planned) and the last of the Moriarty Journals, Moriarty (2008), suggests that Bond wasn't really his pension nor was his writing career over with Bond. Of course it may have seemed that way to Gardner considering the litany of life-threatening illnesses he faced at that time. So, with all of this in mind, and not being privy to all the details I don't think we can begrudge Gardner wanting to continue writing the Bond books and getting everything of his wrapped up for the next Bond author. Perhaps he did view Bond in the end as necessary labour. It was a means of sustaining himself and his wife. It would be pretty mean-spirited to deny him that income after all he'd done to keep the literary Bond flame alive over the years.
That's terrible. I knew of his battles with cancer but had no idea of the financial straits it had left him in. Medical treatment should not cost people their life savings. That's just not the way the world should operate.
I'll try to finish Icebreaker soon. The middle section bored me a bit and I put it away for a month.
When I first read this I thought you meant the middle part of @Dragonpol's post!
Thanks for the rundown anyway.
I vaguely remember some of this now you have mentioned it (the illnesses), but didn't know he wrote that much after Cold.
Thanks again for the information.
It's of course my pleasure to share some background information about Gardner, @goldenswissroyale and @FatherValentine.
I'm sure he could be forgiven for thinking that. I was perhaps a little long-winded in my post. Happily of course he was referring to Icebreaker itself. :)
Yes, Gardner obviously received a second wind after surviving his illnesses with great fortitude. After having of course stopped for a few years after he was ill and being treated he returned to writing after he was cured and completed seven more books before his death on 3 August 2007. Both Day of Absolution (2000) and Moriarty (2008) (originally to have been titled The Redemption of Moriarty) were planned to have been written in the mid-1990s and the 1970s respectively but illness and a mix-up with the contract meant that each novel wasn't completed at the time. In fact, the ideas for both novels were originally conceived in the 1970s.
You will find that I have edited a few details in the posts I made above. This is just to ensure accuracy as I was largely depending on memory when I wrote them. After double checking my sources I made a few small corrections or added a little bit here and there. I strive to get these details right as I think accuracy is very important. I think Gardner Bond fans are a little hamstrung as there's not an awful amount of information about him out there or if there is sometimes you really have to dig for it. Good job that I'm a digger, then. I suppose that's all part of the fun of being a fan though. It's all about the challenge of slowly trying to unpick the mosaic of truth.
I totally agree with that sentiment, @Some_Kind_Of_Hero. It's certainly not the way the world should operate. Draconian medical bills are an iniquitous thing in a civilised society, all the more so when they decimate someone's life savings and bring them to the very brink of bankruptcy. Gardner had health insurance but unfortunately the costs of life-saving medical treatment still stripped away most of his life savings. It is surely an indictment on the United States that as the richest country in the world it still can't provide a healthcare system that is free to all at the point of use. Political arguments about it being "socialism" be damned. It's one area where the United Kingdom has the advantage over the United States. Clearly root and branch reform of the healthcare system is desperately needed in the United States. I suppose that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was a first step in that direction, though.
Of course had Gardner been back in England at the time of his illness he'd have gotten his healthcare free on the NHS. That's the tragedy of it all but at least he still had his life and the chance to keep on writing novels and delineating new characters for the next decade or so until his death, aged 80, in August 2007.
Yes, and as Jack Jersawitz was famous for saying on his Atlanta public-access TV show in the early 2000s, "That's the way it goes."
It's just utterly unfathomable to me that anyone wouldn't want universal health care.
Me too, though the vested interests of private healthcare companies would certainly be one lobby group that wouldn't want it to happen.
Me too of course though in a way small parts of it have already been used in the Bond films such as Count Konrad von Glöda's Ice Palace appearing in Die Another Day (2002). A full faithful adaptation would be great though.
ever extending their catalogue to cover some of the continuing Novels. Although I
do enjoy the audiobooks of the J Gardner novels.
Good to know I'm not alone. Icebreaker seems to be a popular Gardner and I just can't grip why, for many of the reasons you said above. How the ending came about was pretty predictable as they left the loose end that was a common trope of the films.
Yes, that would be great to see. Some members here have speculated that after that team get all of the Ian Fleming novels and short stories done they might well go ahead and adapt Amis's Colonel Sun as well. This would be a more likely bet than most I suppose as it's the first Bond continuation novel and parts of it have already been adapted in the Bond films, most notably the torture scene (including verbatim dialogue) being used in Spectre in 2015. There's also the fact that Colonel Sun is as close as it's possible for a Bond novel to get to being part of the Fleming canon without actually having been penned by Fleming himself. It's at the top of many a literary Bond fan's list as being the best continuation novel of them all and it's certainly at the top of my list too! The decision to adapt part of Colonel Sun in Spectre certainly reinforces this notion and does no harm at all to its continuing good reputation amongst Bond fans. It also ensures that it will continue to be read by future generations of Bond fans as it's woven into the fabric of the Bond films now as well.
It would be nice to see Colonel Sun adapted for radio and for the team to then go ahead and adapt the John Gardner Bond novels as well. Whether it'll happen or not will all be down to Eon of course and they haven't exactly embraced the continuation novels in the past at least as far as their Bond films are concerned. Perhaps the use of part of Colonel Sun in Spectre has set a precedent though and in the future we will see the continuation novels used more in the films or adapted by other means such as radio plays. Radio adaptations could be the only hope for getting the continuation novels adapted at all. Only time will tell on that one but it could just as easily have been that case that they only used Colonel Sun as they were between a rock and a hard place creatively and needed some last minute old school Bondian inspiration. In fact, that seems to have been what actually happened according to an article on Per Fine Ounce that appeared in MI6 Confidential a few years ago.
Maybe it would have worked better if it was set in or after Fleming’s 50s timeline. The NeoNazis would have been better planned had it been set back then.
As for a movie, there are some elements that should be used. The ice torture for example.
A radio adaptation SHOULD be made after Fleming and Colonel Sun, maybe even the first, like Dr. No was.
All in all, I’m interested in reading this over JG’s other books.
P.S. as for American Healthcare and political leaders, I am sorry world. People like Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, and quite a few others are to blame, and the people who keep or kept voting them in. There’s no center ground for a while, and I’m sorry that my country is so selfish in its political leaders.
I also found this other interview between John Gardner and Donald Swaim from 21 November 1985 on the latter's website:
https://media.library.ohio.edu/digital/collection/donswaim/id/3620/rec/3
I remember finding these interviews online back in 2010 but it's great to find them again and be able to share them here for those interested.
My pleasure, @Some_Kind_Of_Hero. It's always good to hear an interview with John Gardner as there are so few of them preserved like this. That's despite the fact that he did hundreds of such interviews to promote his novels over the years. He does have a lovely voice and a rather jolly disposition when it comes to his life and works. He did refer to himself as Jolly JEG in his email address so that fits. On the part about only doing the six Bond novels, I was thinking that myself. I think initially he thought he'd only do the first three he was contracted for and then someone else would write them. However, as we know, he went on to write fourteen original Bond novels and two film novelisations so presumably, as in The Godfather, they "made him an offer he couldn't refuse." I believe the contracts continued in threes and he kept signing on for them. I thought it was interesting too how the original title for what eventually became No Deals, Mr Bond was Tomorrow Always Comes. This shows that the choice of that poor title was down to Glidrose and not Gardner himself, despite him often being personally blamed for that title.
On the SPECTRE novels point there was a second SPECTRE trilogy, albeit not strictly in sequence. For Special Services featured SPECTRE and the new Blofeld and then we had the unrelated mission Icebreaker in between before returning to SPECTRE again under its new leader 'Colonel' Tamil Rahani in Role of Honour and Nobody Lives Forever. When you think about it it's much the same as how the original SPECTRE/Blofeld Trilogy was similarly split up in the sequence TB-TSWLM-OHMSS-YOLT with TSWLM being a break in the trilogy dealing with an unrelated mission. Of course there is the difference that there are two villains over the three Gardner novels but it's still a trilogy featuring SPECTRE as the villainous organisation.
For Special Services did cross my mind, but I guess I distinguished it from Role of Honour and Nobody Lives Forever because of the split villains as you say. I hadn't thought about the similarity between the structuring of FSS-IB-ROH-NLF and TB-TSWLM-OHMSS-YOLT though. Whether that was intentional or not, it still is interesting.
Sorry for not getting back to you at the time, @Herr_Stockmann. To be honest, I don't exactly know why Gardner decided to have a SPECTRE trilogy split between two different main villains. Though I did correspond by email with Mr Gardner towards the end of his life I never thought to ask about this. What I do know is that Gardner was initially contracted by Glidrose to write three Bond continuation novels. Those turned out to be Licence Renewed, For Special Services and Icebreaker. So, as we of course know each of them had a different villain's employer - Dr Anton Murik was self-employed, Blofeld's heir was the leader of the revived SPECTRE and Count Konrad von Glöda was the leader of the neo-Nazi organisation the National Socialist Action Army (NSAA). So, from that alone one can surmise that Gardner hadn't planned to write a new SPECTRE trilogy from the offset but had only used the revived organisation in the middle book out of three.
For all he knew he might not have been contracted by Glidrose to do any more than the initial three novels. In fact, this was his expectation. He thought he would do his three and then Glidrose would get another author to do them. In fact, there was a mutual opt-out clause specifically written into the contract between Gardner and Glidrose to the effect that either one could back out of the contract if they felt it wasn't working. Of course, luckily that didn't happen, but it could have. From this I would deduce that Gardner had no initial plan to write a SPECTRE trilogy from the offset but the fact he was then contracted for another three Bond novels after Icebreaker suggests he returned to SPECTRE as the villainous organisation to cover two of those books. Therefore, I would suggest, based on the scant evidence available to us, that Gardner didn't initially plan to write a SPECTRE trilogy from the offset, otherwise he'd have surely done that from the first book onwards but ended up doing it (possibly by the paucity of another good villainous organisation?) in Role of Honour and Nobody Lives Forever. By the time Gardner came to write Role of Honour in 1983 we know that he had to have two SPECTRE novels in mind as the two books link together with the new leader 'Colonel' Tamil Rahani jumping to freedom from the Goodyear airship. So I think that the split-up SPECTRE trilogy came about more by accident than by design. If you'd like to know more about Gardner's thought processes on writing his Bond novels, I'd suggest reading the excellent interview with Gardner conducted by future Bond author Raymond Benson for 007 Magazine in 1993 which appears in one of the GoldenEye issues. If you'd like I can send you a text copy of the interview by email. Just PM me with your email address if you'd like to read it. I remember Gardner saying in it that Rahani just became the new SPECTRE leader and he didn't go into any detail about how he had taken it over from the Blofelds. It was enough to take the author's word for it and say he'd somehow taken it over! So from all of that I don't think there was any big, organised plan to have a second SPECTRE trilogy. More than likely it was a pragmatic "between a rock and a hard place" creative scenario instead and using an established villainous organisation like SPECTRE was probably seen as being as good a call as any.