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There you go then.
(I had to say it cause been year I haven't see it consiered like an issue to adress).
Back to the topic at hand : I still haven't seen With A Mind to Kill in the local WH Smith, nor have I seen it in Cardiff. Nor is there a french edition announced. But a german edition is :
https://www.amazon.fr/James-Bond-Absicht-t%C3%B6ten-German-ebook/dp/B09YMPT4CP/ref=sr_1_11?crid=10UN8QX2ASJQJ&keywords=anthony+horowitz+james+bond&qid=1657172009&s=books&sprefix=anthony+horowitz+james+bond%2Cstripbooks%2C51&sr=1-11
Out in november 2022.
The search function looks for every mention of a specific term, which makes sense. It doesn't differentiate between thread or mere comment. Hence, the google search "MI6Community + [term]" is the better option. Frankly, I don't understand why people sometimes mock us for suggesting this. There's a way to look for a thread (via your browser) and a way to look for individual comments (via our search function). What more do we want?
Also, we're keeping threads in their proper categories. An old-fashioned browsing session through the various categories is sometimes more than enough to find the right thread. "But there are so many threads in each category!" Yes, that's what happens when people open different threads for "Is CR the best Craig Bond film?", "favourite Craig Bond film", "favourite Bond film in the 2000s", "most viewed Craig Bond film", "rank the Craig Bond films", "which Craig Bond film would you recommend?"... which, when you think about it, could all be in one single thread. And if we close yet another one of these, we're called "fascists" or have to answer for "the problematic search function that doesn't work". All we ask is to give some consideration, before opening a new thread, to the possibility that we may already have one that's good enough to cover that topic.
But @Creasy47 was right in saying that sometimes, people just seem to want to birth new threads. The way they come after us (via PM, typically) when we've closed their new (yet duplicate) thread can be quite frightening. We've dealt with some serious hissy fits and angry outbursts in the past, for example when one member thought it wise to open no less than half a dozen threads for various aspects of Star Trek. These people aren't looking to generate new content; rather, they want to host as many threads as possible for some mysterious reason. Even worse is a new thread that merely starts with a member's opinion. Not a question, not rules for a new game, not a specific line of reasoning to be pursued by others. Just an opinion. Like a blog post. We have tons of threads for that already. You don't set up a new thread unless there's clear potential for good discussion, debate or amusing rankings or games. If we then close the thread and ask the poster to copy his opinion into an existing thread, and if the poster subsequently gets all worked up over that, then yes, his intention was not to contribute to the forum but to open up a new thread. Why? I don't know what the appeal is. But it certainly is a thing, and @ColonelAdamski,
you really mustn't mock us for pointing this out.
Lastly, we don't complain, do we? Someone opens a new thread, we decide it's redundant, close it and link to an acceptable alternative. We don't call names, warn people (unless they make a habit of it), or anything of the sort. We merely clean things up a bit. We don't get paid for keeping the forum clean. We don't earn "mod credit" for tidying up. We're not even asking for a thank you. But we do put that little extra effort into it to make things more pleasant for all of us.
Well it's not hard to see, back at my exemple. There is in fact a DB5 thread that is there : https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/10513/the-most-famous-car-in-the-world-db5-thread
Now try to find it via the search fonction of the forum (with no Google). If you can't succeed to do it (and I know you can't succeed) : well you must admit the search fonction of website is at the actual state is bad. No need to go far to see where the problem lie. Yes you can pass by Google for exemple, it will work fine but it's not a solution : it's like buy water bottles in store until the end of the day cause you don't see a point to fix the broken faucet you have at home...
But for be constructive, how to fix it? The majority of the forum of the internet what are build in preconceived architecture have a system that give you the options to (do all the things bellow, and not just one) :
- Search a word in messages + topic titles.
- Search a word only in topic titles.
- Search any of the word of a sentence.
- Search the complete sentence as written.
- Search the message or the topic posted by this particulary user.
- Search this word only in the topic/post of this or this category only (films, literrature, etc...)
- Display results by the last message of topics.
- Display results by the creation date of the topics.
- Display results by revelance.
- Display results by the size of the topic (number of answers to it).
No need to be creative mind : just to take what works elsewhere.
I don't want to seems "mocky" and I can understand that implement this kind of features could be diffucult in a pure technical point of view, but don't say we don't do it because we don't see the point of it or because it's seems a bad idea.
It's just a bit that niggled me a little. Such a pivotal moment in the book too.
I can empathize with your view on this matter. (Furthermore, the one time I asked for a thread to be reopened, I felt the exchange was very civil and reasonable, and I would have felt the same even if my request hadn't been granted. Unfortunately, the reopened thread, which at least to me seemed viable, hasn't amounted to much at all.)
The one thing I disagree on is that the search engine should in fact differentiate between threads and posts. Other sites do provide a dropdown list to choose between the two. Then there's the fact that, as mentioned, the search engine disaggregates a searched sentence into individual words, thus rendering the search pointless. It's not the first site I've seen that has a poor search engine, and there's an easy workaround with Google, but there it is.
And yes, I know that's out of the moderators' control.
It’s also a good thing he never got an itchy cheek at any point.
I'm not quite finished with With a Mind to Kill myself. I'll post some thoughts when I get there. But overall I share your sentiments on Horowitz. He knows how to write to prose, no doubt about that, but I just haven't found his trilogy terribly original. I'm not sure who it was (edit: apparently it was you, @Risico007, haha), but I recall someone else picked up on the Gardner similarities. Trigger Mortis was basically a best hits of Gardner compilation. Again, Horowitz's prose reads well, so it could always be worse. But as a fan of Boyd's Solo, I also know that the continuation Bond novels could be so much more. I'll have to reread Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day when I finish this latest one to see if my initial thoughts hold up, but I am definitely looking forward to a new voice.
Horowitz isn’t up there with Fleming when it comes to description but he does just as good a job in terms of character development and suspense.
My only complaint, albeit minor, was that I felt that there were too many references to past books/characters excluding YOLT and TMWTGG which of course were necessary.
It’ll be interesting to see where the Fleming estate goes from here in terms of young and adult Bond. I’d like for them to bring Higson back and have him continue with young Bond one year followed by adult Bond for the next and so on… If not Higson, then maybe Cole. He did a good job with Young Bond, too.
I don't see how a comparison to Gardener is warranted or fair. I just watched Calvin Dyson review "No Deals Mister Bond" and he quoted a section where Bond felt suspicious of rugs. LOL! There are some rather dire writing and plotting in Gardener books, but he was churning them out with frequent regularity. I imagine it would be tough to write so quickly.
No doubt. Unless you re Fleming.
Yeah, ‘With A Mind To Kill’ is a real page turner.
I think that the Gardner comparison to Horowitz is mostly because they're both examples of the same approach to Bond continuation novels and thriller writing in general. That would be the "thriller factory" approach of an industrious ant of an author who churns out thrillers at a quick rate. As I always say, it really takes a thriller writer to write a thriller, the likes of Kingsley Amis aside.
Incidentally, both Gardner and Horowitz wrote Sherlock Holmes/Moriarty continuation novels and Horowitz is on record as saying he's a Gardner fan. The other thing to bear in mind is, as you say, how quickly the Gardner Bond continuation novels were produced (one a year apart from 1985) and in 1989 he wrote an original Bond novel and the LTK novelisation as well. On top of all these annual Bond novels, Gardner also continued to write his own novels such as "The Secret Generations" trilogy and some of his Herbie Kruger spy novels. In all, between 1963 and his death in 2007, Gardner wrote 55 books, his first being his autobiography Spin the Bottle (1964) and his last being the posthumously published Moriarty (2008).
To my eye and reading sense, I think Horowitz is closer to what Fleming wrote. His novels to me could be read in order of the Fleming novels and I think you would see much of a difference.
Anyway I shall pop back into this thread once I have read the whole book!
Completely. I made the same comment before on here somewhere. We've been very lucky with having Horowitz at the helm for the last three literary Bond adventures.
Does anyone here who's read With a Mind to Kill, think that there were whole passages written that actually corrected the glossing over of the brainwashing in TMWTGG? Because I certainly felt that way.
Yes, it definitely filled in the gaps. There could be decent movie adaptations now of TMWTGG and WAMTK which could span 2 continuous films.
Lets remember that TMWTGG was not fully edited or fully fleshed out by Fleming before his death. This most likely lead to the under-written sequences that you are referencing here.
I really enjoyed the dive into "brain-washing". Both on the English and Russian side of things.
When it comes to literary Bond making the transition onto screen, I almost wish they'd do a lower budget TV series of six adventures a year. It'd be great to see solid Bond novels made into high quality screenplays that we could regularly enjoy every couple of months, culled from the best of the continuation novels.
This is what I've been banging on about for years. You can still incorporate what's left of Fleming, or even Horowitz, whether its a scene or even the overall story, but add lots of action set-pieces to keep it cinematic and attract the audiences - exactly what they did with CR. This is the winning formula, not silly retcons, nanobots or `Brofeld', dreamt up by P&W and a committee of illiterate halfwits.
Stick to a story that has already been written by an author, because most of the plotholes would have been ironed out already, something that scriptwriters often fail to see (well, P&W anyway).
Yes. Trade the action set-pieces for exceptional cinematography and you'd be on the right path. Condense the novels into ~40 minute episodes (they're short books anyways), and you'd have a really nice companion to the novels I think.
Just started With A Mind To Kill and I'm enjoying it so far. Bond is referred to as 007 early on by M and I can't remember him getting the designation back in TMWTGG after being 'promoted' to 7777 in YOLT, but it must have happened.
Sadly I don't think it's a commercially viable option. Hardcore fans would love it but I don't think the general public would be all that invested. Great video on YouTube about how writing for a novel and writing for the screen is different and adaptions will inevitably have to veer off course with the written word.
You're sadly right. The fans would love it, it'd be a dream come true, but don't think it'd attract many eyeballs like a big budget, action-packed new Bond installment would.
I admit I'd probably pick up either of his two previous 007 books again over this one just because they're a little more action-packed and a little lighter, but this was still a very enjoyable Bond book, and one which fits in so well with the Fleming stories that now this story has been told it actually seems bizarre that we didn't notice there was a gap there before. Of course Bond needed to go back to Russia and sort out Colonel Boris - it was unfinished business that Fleming left behind.
I very much enjoyed the ending too,