A sampling of early reviews for Trigger Mortis

Trigger Mortis cover

Reviews for the newest James Bond continuation novel, Anthony Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis, are starting to come in.

This blog has already run a guest review from the Ian Fleming Foundation’s Brad Frank. What follows is a sampling of other reviews.

FELIX SALMON IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW:

James Bond is a synchronic spy. From the day that the first Bond thriller, “Casino Royale,” was published in 1953, all the way through to this year’s forthcoming “Spectre” movie, Bond has always been thoroughly modern, with all the latest toys. In “Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel,” however, Bond ventures somewhere Ian Fleming, or the movie producer Albert Broccoli, would never go: back, into the past.

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So although “Trigger Mortis” begins two weeks after the end of “Goldfinger,” its protagonist isn’t — could never be — the same Bond. The new Bond is friends with a gay man, chivalrously sleeps on the couch when a woman doesn’t want to have sex with him and even, at one point, drinks a bottle of water at lunch.

THE INDEPENDENT:

Anthony Horowitz knows exactly what ingredients are required to satisfy even the most gluttonous James Bond fan and serves them up with the confidence of the self-confessed aficionado that he is.

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Horowitz is far from the first to take up Ian Fleming’s most famous creation. Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and Kingsley Amis have all gone before. But there are new elements that Horowitz brings that make this a particularly enjoyable, and familiar, read.

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There is a thin line between pastiche and homage, however. Horowitz is an unabashed fan of both Bond and Fleming, as much of his work to date clearly shows, and his plot in less capable hands could easily have erred on the wrong side.

JAKE KERRIDGE IN THE TELEGRAPH:

(Ian) Fleming’s estate has made a canny choice in Horowitz, who proved in his (Arthur) Conan Doyle pastiche The House of Silk – which saw Sherlock Holmes battling a VIP paedophile ring – that he can convincingly replicate another author’s world without sticking too slavishly to his template.

In Trigger Mortis Horowitz has had the ingenious idea of showing us Bond in the act of doing something which we know he does a lot, but Fleming would never have dreamed of writing: all the “It’s not you, it’s me” business of dumping his conquests.