So, a third James Bond continuation novel by Anthony Horowitz is scheduled for May 2022. Horowitz’s Bond stories are set in the original Ian Fleming timeline.
According to early publicity material for With a Mind to Kill, “It is M’s funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger and who is now in custody, accused of M’s murder – James Bond.”
While we’ll have to wait until May, naturally the blog has questions.
What kind of security does MI6 have, anyway?
With a Mind to Kill begins after the events of The Man With the Golden Gun, Fleming’s last Bond novel. That book (published in 1965, after Fleming’s death) began with a brainwashed Bond unsuccessfully trying to kill M.
The whole point of the 1965 novel was for Bond to be un-brainwashed and given a suicide mission to show his loyalty. So Bond turns around and tries to kill M, again? And this time it works? That doesn’t say much for MI6 security.
What does this mean for Colonel Sun?
Colonel Sun, written by Kingsley Amis under the name Robert Markham, was the first Bond continuation novel. M gets kidnapped and Bond has to rescue him.
So does that not count now? For that matter, does With a Mind to Kill write off the John Gardner continuation novels?
You have more questions?
Does that mean the Gardner novels are now, officially, their own universe? Does that apply to all the other continuation novels aside from the ones Horowitz has written?
Truth be told, it has been shaping up that way for some time. Gardner and Raymond Benson basically timeshifted Fleming’s Bond. Jeffery Deaver essentially did a hard reboot but that was never followed up. Horowitz and other continuation authors set their stories in the Fleming timeline.
Still, Colonel Sun had been special. It was the first continuation novel. And it’s the only one acknowledged by Eon Productions, which produces the James Bond films. Eon used a torture scene from Colonel Sun in SPECTRE and had a “special thanks” credit to Amis’s estate.
It could be in the new novel that M’s death is a fakeout. It should also be noted that a detailed description of the book surfaced in September on the website of HarperCollins before being taken down. (Don’t click on the link if you don’t want to know.)
Still, there are a lot of questions.
Filed under: James Bond Books | Tagged: Anthony Horowitz, Colonel Sun, Ian Fleming, Jeffery Deaver, Kingsley Amis, Raymond Benson, The Man With the Golden Gun novel, With a Mind to Kill |
The Spy Command 
It’s always good to hear and read that there’s another james bond novel soon to be published by author anthony horrowitz. But if i was him. I would wonder if there would be a possibilty in the near future one of my novel’s would be adapted to motion picture treatment. Which in my opinion, would be much better than what fans are getting now.