Anthony Horowitz's Bond novel - Forever and a Day

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Comments

  • Posts: 520
    What a debacle, The Pussy has just received an e-mail saying that for logistical reasons (ie lack of sales) the launch evening has been relegated to the level 5 function room.
    Ticket prices are slashed to £15 and admission is general, there is no reserved seating - therefore no guarantee of entry.
    The abysmal marketing of this event has reaped its own reward!
    PussyNoMore's blood is boiling.
    "007 Forever. Politically Correct Never"
  • Posts: 12,837
    I liked Trigger Mortis a lot so I'm looking forward to the new one but the one thing I'm not keen on about Horowitz is his titles. Two duds in a row now imo, a naff pun for a title followed by one that sounds like a romance novel.

    I haven't read DMC, but I think that's a genuinely great title, one I wouldn't mind them nicking for a film in the future.
  • Agent_99Agent_99 enjoys a spirited ride as much as the next girl
    Posts: 3,176
    What a debacle, The Pussy has just received an e-mail saying that for logistical reasons (ie lack of sales) the launch evening has been relegated to the level 5 function room.
    Ticket prices are slashed to £15 and admission is general, there is no reserved seating - therefore no guarantee of entry.
    The abysmal marketing of this event has reaped its own reward!
    PussyNoMore's blood is boiling.
    "007 Forever. Politically Correct Never"

    I'm not too bothered by this, because a) I'm very cheap, b) more intimate setting and c) now I can choose who I sit next to.

    Maybe it will be you!
  • edited May 2018 Posts: 17,756
    What a debacle, The Pussy has just received an e-mail saying that for logistical reasons (ie lack of sales) the launch evening has been relegated to the level 5 function room.
    Ticket prices are slashed to £15 and admission is general, there is no reserved seating - therefore no guarantee of entry.
    The abysmal marketing of this event has reaped its own reward!
    PussyNoMore's blood is boiling.
    "007 Forever. Politically Correct Never"

    Better they change it to a smaller room than having a lot of empty seats. Still, it's sad to see the marketing for the event is so bad. Now, I haven't followed this very closely, as the event is in a different country and all, but I've only ever come across information about the event once - and that was here on the forum!
  • Posts: 623
    Why do you think your entry isn't guaranteed? It's ticketed.
  • Red_SnowRed_Snow Australia
    Posts: 2,538
    An interview with Anthony Horowitz on 'Open Book' on BBC Radio 4.
  • Posts: 2,917
    BTW, if you recieve (or learn in a review) a edition of the book which include the original Fleming treatment, please precise the name of the edition in this topic...

    Still no word on a special edition, but a friend who's read the book tells me that chapter 9 ("Russian Roulette") is based on Fleming material.
  • Posts: 632
    Revelator wrote: »
    The reviewer also offered FRWL as an example--is anyone going to say that was one of Fleming's weakest books?

    It's one of my least favourites of his. Sure, the skill is there, but I find myself speeding through the first third just to get to Bond, which is the whole reason why I'm reading the book in the first place.
  • Posts: 2,917
    An interesting opinion, but not widely held I daresay. Even Fleming said FRWL was his best book.
  • DoctorNoDoctorNo USA-Maryland
    Posts: 755
    Revelator wrote: »
    The reviewer also offered FRWL as an example--is anyone going to say that was one of Fleming's weakest books?

    No, no one is going to say that. So what? That validates him in your eyes?
  • Posts: 632
    Oh, I'm definitely in the minority with that opinion. I'm okay with that, though. I even skip those parts in the movie, too, if I'm watching it by myself. Gunbarrel, main titles, then straight to Connery and Gayson's picnic.
  • edited May 2018 Posts: 2,917
    DoctorNo wrote: »
    No, no one is going to say that. So what? That validates him in your eyes?

    Well, it negates your statement "to say [FAA] should be more adventurous like TSWLM (which Fleming was not thrilled with and while different, was one of his weakest books), shows he's a snot aspiring to be knowledgeable." I've already said that the review has problems and is too nitpicky, but faulting Horowitz for not being as adventurous as Fleming is a valid criticism, even if one doesn't agree with it.
  • Posts: 520
    Revelator wrote: »

    I've already said that the review has problems and is too nitpicky, but faulting Horowitz for not being as adventurous as Fleming is a valid criticism, even if one doesn't agree with it.

    Revelator is correct, the criticism is valid but if Horowitz continues, he may well (IFP permitting) become more adventurous.
    One could say that doing a prequel is adventurous in itself ?
    PussyNoMore doesn’t know how Horowitz’s works sell in other markets? In the U.K. he does extremely well. TM relit the spark after Solo and Pussy suspects he drew many new readers to the franchise. Particularly those that grew up with his ‘Alex Ryder’ series and that has to be a good thing.
    With the launches coming up the competition for the summer espionage dollar is going to be tough but IFP/Cape marketing incompetence withstanding, he should do well.


  • Posts: 520
    Red_Snow wrote: »
    An interview with Anthony Horowitz on 'Open Book' on BBC Radio 4.

    Thanks Red_Snow.

    PussyNoMore found it pedestrian due to the interviewer, Frostup’s obsession with the #metoo thing. All deeply ironic given that she is the ex-presenter of ‘Sex Box’ and former member of ‘The Primrose Hill Set’. What will we have next, Kate Moss relaunching herself as a nun ?

    Sigh, still the show must go on and Horowitz kept his end up.

    “007 Forever. Politically Correct Never”

  • Posts: 17,756
    Revelator wrote: »

    I've already said that the review has problems and is too nitpicky, but faulting Horowitz for not being as adventurous as Fleming is a valid criticism, even if one doesn't agree with it.

    Revelator is correct, the criticism is valid but if Horowitz continues, he may well (IFP permitting) become more adventurous.
    One could say that doing a prequel is adventurous in itself ?
    PussyNoMore doesn’t know how Horowitz’s works sell in other markets? In the U.K. he does extremely well. TM relit the spark after Solo and Pussy suspects he drew many new readers to the franchise. Particularly those that grew up with his ‘Alex Ryder’ series and that has to be a good thing.
    With the launches coming up the competition for the summer espionage dollar is going to be tough but IFP/Cape marketing incompetence withstanding, he should do well.

    I'm of that 'Alex Ryder generation' myself (if you can call it that), and I read the first five books in the early 00's. Remember they were quite good compared to other books aimed at that age group. He's written more books about the character since then, so I'm sure there are (and will) be younger readers making the jump from those books to his Bond novels.
  • Posts: 2,917
    The Guardian has just reviewed Forever and a Day--surprisingly (since the Guardian tends to treat Bond as the spawn of Satan) the review is more positive than the Sunday Times's.

    Excerpts are below--spoilers have been removed and replaced with ellipses:
    We meet again Mr Bond … but this time 007 is still learning the ropes of spycraft, in this enjoyable spinoff authorised by the Fleming estate

    by Steven Poole

    One of the many pleasures of Ian Fleming’s Bond books is the fact that he doesn’t bore us with too much of his hero’s background. There is no tiresome origin novel featuring a teenage Bond experimenting with murder techniques on small forest animals. To the reader of Fleming, Bond is a fully formed force of nature, elegantly inevitable.

    Horowitz is therefore taking a risk in writing, as his second “official” Bond novel, a story set before Casino Royale, at the beginning of which Bond isn’t even 007 yet. Indeed, it turns out there was a previous 007, and it’s only when that one turns up face-down in the waters of the French Riviera, riddled with bullet holes, that M decides Commander Bond merits promotion to the ranks of dinner-jacketed executioners. His test run, the killing in Stockholm of a wartime traitor, is adjudged to have gone well (though it is a rather unnecessarily messy stabbing), so off the new 007 is dispatched to find out exactly what is going on in the south of France.

    This is, then, Bond Begins. It is, naturally, not long before he meets a femme who might or might not be fatale. She is named Sixtine, and is first encountered where else but in a grand casino... There’s also a somewhat unconvincing explanation of why the later Bond happily introduces himself by his real name...

    Horowitz has, though, come up with an excellent villain: a tremendously corpulent Corsican drug-dealer named Scipio. “I have total control here in Marseilles,” he announces villainously. “The port, the city, the police, the justice system? It is all mine!” ...Horowitz is good at action scenes, which he helps along with emotive adjectives: Bond driving a jeep draws “a savage arc in the dust” or swings the wheel “viciously”...

    As with his previous Bond effort, Trigger Mortis, Horowitz was given some original material by the Fleming estate: the outline for a TV series that was never made. Helpfully, Horowitz in his acknowledgments points out which chapter uses this stuff, and it turns out to be an excellent little yarn... Horowitz takes care to disclaim responsibility for any old-school views that might have leaked out through the use of this material (“many of the attitudes expressed are Fleming’s, not mine”), and Sixtine herself is certainly a post-#MeToo Bond playmate... This Bond, in general, is still rather unformed, a wide-eyed ingénu. He feels uncomfortable in Monte Carlo, even though later he is said to be “completely at home in casinos and first-class hotels”...

    Inevitably, the prose throughout is more verbose and cliched than the brutal efficiencies of Fleming, but Forever and a Day is still an enjoyably compact thriller, with an absolutely killer last line. Scattered throughout the book, too, are some pleasingly echt Bond moments...My favourite of these scenes came early on, when the morose spy is seen in a restaurant, “stabbing at a bad filet mignon accompanied by a worse glass of Burgundy”. We’ve all been there, even if we weren’t allowed to murder anyone because of it.
  • Posts: 520
    Revelator wrote: »
    The Guardian has just reviewed Forever and a Day--surprisingly (since the Guardian tends to treat Bond as the spawn of Satan) the review is more positive than the Sunday Times's.

    Interesting.
    PussyNoMore remains excited.


  • Posts: 787
    Well I'm pleasantly surprised by that, too. It seems like The Guardian increasingly opts to write reviews that have little to do with the movie/film in question and more to do with litigating some other tangentially-related social or political issue. By their own standards they've shown a hell of a lot of restraint here!
  • Posts: 520
    octofinger wrote: »
    Well I'm pleasantly surprised by that, too. It seems like The Guardian increasingly opts to write reviews that have little to do with the movie/film in question and more to do with litigating some other tangentially-related social or political issue. By their own standards they've shown a hell of a lot of restraint here!

    PussyNoMore loves octofinger’s description of The Guardian’s role in life !
    He only omits to mention that their writers are normally aged ten and a half and look at you with swivel eyes.
    They have shown a hell of a lot of restraint here and it makes you wonder what their real agenda is ?
  • Posts: 7,653
    Finally pre-ordered the English edition. together with the re-release of "the 007 diaries filming Live and let die" the Hardback version.

    Looking really forward to both with the Diaries having a release date of the 1st of June.
  • marketto007marketto007 Brazil
    Posts: 3,277
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg
  • 00Agent00Agent Any man who drinks Dom Perignon '52 can't be all bad.
    Posts: 5,185
    Holly Molly, I want that cover!
    Are there any differences in content?
  • Posts: 632
    Not too shabby!
  • edited May 2018 Posts: 17,756
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg

    That's actually one of the better US edition covers I've seen in a while. Looks kind of like a mix of a 60's crime paperback and a holiday ad from the same era.
  • Posts: 520
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg

    That's actually one of the better US edition covers I've seen in a while. Looks kind of like a mix of a 60's crime paperback and a holiday ad from the same era.

    Oh noooooo!
    PussyNoMore thinks this one looks like the front of a club med travel brochure.
    Whatever are they thinking about ?
    Surely its only merit is to try and make the UK edition look good which it isn’t !

  • RemingtonRemington I'll do anything for a woman with a knife.
    Posts: 1,534
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg

    Beautiful.
  • edited May 2018 Posts: 17,756
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg

    That's actually one of the better US edition covers I've seen in a while. Looks kind of like a mix of a 60's crime paperback and a holiday ad from the same era.

    Oh noooooo!
    PussyNoMore thinks this one looks like the front of a club med travel brochure.
    Whatever are they thinking about ?
    Surely its only merit is to try and make the UK edition look good which it isn’t !

    Seen them worse, to be honest. One thing though; if they've tried to make it look like a retro early 50's cover, I think the riviera image looks a bit too modern (could have toned down the colours a bit, for example). Would have been interesting to see a more illustrative approach - if only an illustration of a boat at speed, or something else relating to the story.

    I like the simplicity of the covers of a couple of Horowitz's more recent books:
    The-Word-is-Murder.jpg
    41TDQZ5XDsL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
    Not an illustration style suitable for Bond, necessarily, but it's interesting to see that illustrations have been used for some of his other titles.
  • Posts: 520
    US cover for Forever And A Day

    cHS5DH4.jpg

    That's actually one of the better US edition covers I've seen in a while. Looks kind of like a mix of a 60's crime paperback and a holiday ad from the same era.

    Oh noooooo!
    PussyNoMore thinks this one looks like the front of a club med travel brochure.
    Whatever are they thinking about ?
    Surely its only merit is to try and make the UK edition look good which it isn’t !

    Seen them worse, to be honest. One thing though; if they've tried to make it look like a retro early 50's cover, I think the riviera image looks a bit too modern (could have toned down the colours a bit, for example). Would have been interesting to see a more illustrative approach - if only an illustration of a boat at speed, or something else relating to the story.

    I like the simplicity of the covers of a couple of Horowitz's more recent books:
    The-Word-is-Murder.jpg
    41TDQZ5XDsL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
    Not an illustration style suitable for Bond, necessarily, but it's interesting to see that illustrations have been used for some of his other titles.

    PussyNoMore agrees with you that these two artworks are superficially more attractive. Pussy uses the ‘superficial ‘ word because he doesn’t know what lies between the covers. If they portray the essence of the stories that they represent, they could even be considered good.

    FAAD on the other hand is just mind numbingly average on both sides of the Atlantic but if Pussy has to choose, and He has to, it would be the U.K. edition.

    The last good US hardback first edition was actually DMC. It had a nice strong ‘Mad Men’ type retro feel to it. The Pussy kept that in preference to the U.K. release which was dross.


  • DoctorNoDoctorNo USA-Maryland
    Posts: 755
    Amazon US shows UK Cover version for sale... I prefer the new one, but like them both well enough.
  • edited May 2018 Posts: 859
    Talking of cover, I recently saw that the UK version is a dusk jacket. Can we take a second for explain me why these kind of thing STILL EXIST? I mean, dusk jacket have literraly have all disadvantage possible and no advantage at all. Do you like have a flying/removable cover in paper that you fearing to lost one day ? Do you like the constant fear of tear up the paper each time you hold the book ? Do like have a cover in paper? Or do you like the fact that it's always falls off of the book? In any case: why do they think that I would to have the possibily of remove the covers of my books?

    I mean the only advantage the dusk jackets could have if it's the real cover (in cardboard) under it was beautifull. But no, it's never the case : the real cover of dusk jackets are always horribles, just simple monochromes. So why the heck is so popular and Bond's book continue to have these?
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