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It is not even for sale for the next 5 months and they know it is a bestseller?
I guess it refers to Horowitz, but I agree it is a bit misleading! :)
Fair points! I think if it's a common theme throughout the story, I'm willing to forgive the generic nature of the title. And I suppose it fits with the direction Fleming was taking Bond in those later novels (even if TMWTGG naturally wasn't exactly a fully finished, fleshed out book). Here's hoping it does well. I have enjoyed Horowitz' previous two efforts, and been a fan in general.
that is my curiosity too if he is going to ignore Fleming why not just give us modern bond novel.
It sounds like is Horowitz is probably going to incorporate a double-bluff into the story. After the events of TMWTGG, Bond hasn't quite redeemed himself in the eyes of MI6. The service concocts a scheme to make it look like Bond achieved his goal of killing M and sends him back "into the Lion's Den" as a triple agent to see what he can achieve and stumbles across this nefarious plot by rogue SMERSH agents. M is alive and well.
He's essentially building on what TMWTGG offered but focusing the story on those who brainwashed Bond in the first place.
If this is the case then it is either very clever and will be incredible, or it'll be too clever for its own good and will be rubbish. My hope is obviously for the former!
Or M is really dead, but Bond has been made the patsy in order to infiltrate the enemy.
Yes I think it's that; and if it's not I hope someone else writes that story now! I can't believe I never really noticed that he never gets the people who brainwashed him and it's left as a loose end. I do think the brainwash plot is a rather naff one, but it's in there now so you may as well embrace it.
It might be nice if, when he gets back from Jamaica, he's told that M has since died from unnoticed after effects from the cyanide pistol (even though he actually survived) : MI6 still not trusting Bond and actually manipulating him by pushing him to the edge to get what they want.
Oh yes, I like that. It would make for quite an epilogue between the two considering their relationship. I always loved their dynamic in the books.
Great idea which could indeed be how it pans out in this new Horowitz novel. When I first heard this idea I feared it would be another "lightning strikes twice" scenario a la the John Gardner Licence to Kill novelisation. However, the delay in the effects of the cyanide poisoning could help to explain why Bond was sent on the Scaramanga mission first before dealing with the KGB agents who brainwashed Bond. M justified the Scaramanga mission by saying that if the Soviets were going to throw his best man at him then he was jolly well going to throw him back at them, on a do-or-die mission. Scaramanga was of course a Castro man with links to the KGB in the form of Mr Hendriks. I'm sure Kingsley Amis would be pleased with such an eventuality as M's death anyway given how much he hated M as a character as evidenced in both The James Bond Dossier (1965) and Colonel Sun (1968)! :)
I don’t think Kingsley Amis would have liked Skyfall, or the writing of Judi Dench’s M, as we were supposed to care for her. I didn’t, the writing got repetitive with her, and her death she brought on herself. Kingsley Amis warned us!
No, well of course I was thinking more of the old M from the Fleming books here. Lord only knows what Amis would have thought of the Craig films but I doubt if it would have been all that favourable. He didn't even like Dalton and Licence to Kill all that much, which surprised me. He even said he didn't see much or any influence from the literary Bond in the film! In the division between the Bond novels and the Bond films, Amis was very much a book Bond man.
Oh that's good, I think that if you haven't completely nailed it, you'll certainly be in the right area. Good call.
Sounds good to me! I hope this is the direction it takes. And @mtm I've preordered my signed copy from Waterstones as well; I usually go through Goldsboro but didn't see it listed there.
I imagine there will be at least one alternate cover released at some point, as there was with Forever And A Day.
Does anyone know if the Fleming material is available online to read? How long is it and worth tracking down to buy one of these editions?
I like the title WAMTK, because I always felt TMWTGG just kind of moved on without exploring Bond's head space which went from grief to amnesia to brainwashed.
Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day both included plot aspects in their covers (the plans and the ship). I wonder if there's a clue in the bullet hole in (what looks like) glass?
I wonder if it's the armourplate glass in M's office, described in TMWTGG?
I don't know if it's online, but to give you some idea here's a page from the extra Fleming section in the Waterstones special edition of Trigger Mortis. As you can see, it's basically a facsimile of Fleming's typed up notes from an episode of the cancelled James Bond TV series. There's seven pages of this in the Trigger Mortis special edition, (black cover, not grey), and the episode is titled 'Murder on Wheels'. There's an explanatory paragraph by Fleming at the end about the story.
In Forever and a Day there's only two facsimile pages, titled 'Russian Roulette'. But the typing is very dense, much denser than the picture here, so it's a little deceiving to say 'only two' pages. It still outlines the full episode.
These rough TV scripts were woven into the Horowitz stories, so even if you don't have the special editions you will still get to read the plots. Trouble is, you won't know which is the Fleming bits unless you have the Waterstones specials. Do any others on here know which short stories came from the TV episode outlines? (It might be worth starting a thread on this if there isn't one).
I gather other plots for the TV series became published short stories.
Sorry the page looks pinky, it isn't, it's the lighting in my flat.
Another interesting angle is that so far the unused teleplays that have been adapted have dealt with an aspect of the character hinted at, but never fleshed out previously (Bond's interest in auto-racing), and a plot line we have come across several times in the EON films but never before from Fleming (a rogue Russian Officer threatening to start a nuclear war). It is exciting to imagine what the remaining three contain. Mountain Climbing (again, used by EON, mentioned a few times in Fleming, but never an actual story featuring the activity)? Maybe Bond in his military capacity, in uniform? I would love to get my hands on those drafts. Another treasure is that each episode gives us a new Fleming penned Bond/M scene.
Did I get all of that right, @Revelator @Dragonpol ?
https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/literary-anthony-horowitz-confirms-more-unpublished-ian-fleming-material
Horowitz. .
"For me, as an Ian Fleming freak and a huge fan of James Bond, there is nothing more exciting than to read something that nobody else in the world has read. I was at the British Library when I read the original manuscript for a short story called 'Trigger Finger' which gave me half the title of my own book. To have something that came out of his typewriter with his handwriting on it, for me, that's incredibly exciting."
Sounds intriguing.
Gives me hope that we could one day see TMWTGG opening faithfully adapted on screen, and this novel could be an ideal way to adapt it.
That is really cool, thanks for pointing that out. It would be unbelievable to have a page from Fleming’s typewriter, and with his handwriting… I wonder what Trigger Finger is about…
I'll always be hopeful for an impossible reality where we get all of the novels and short stories faithfully, accurately adapted with the same cast and crew for cohesion.
Oh, you mean it could actually happen within TMWTGG? Interesting thought.