Raymond Benson discusses 007

Raymond Benson, whose James Bond continuation novels were published from 1997 to 2002, has done an interview where he discussed what it’s like to write 007 tales. You can read the entire interview by CLICKING RIGHT HERE.

Some excerpts follow.

On the differences between his novels and the novelizations of three James Bond films:

With the first (novelization), “Tomorrow Never Dies”, I tried to fit it in with the continuity after “Zero Minus Ten” (my first Bond novel) and mentioned that 007 had been to Hong Kong etc…. but then after that I realized it wasn’t worth the trouble. EON didn’t care about the novelizations fitting in with my original books, and neither did IFP. They were treated like separate entities, just tie-ins to the respective movies, which is what they were. I don’t consider the three novelizations part of my “oeuvre”, so to speak.

On an interesting angle related to his first short story, Blast From the Past and why it directly referenced events from Ian Fleming’s 1964 novel You Only Live Twice:

(I)t’s mentioned at the end of Fleming’s book that Kissy Suzuki is pregnant with Bond’s child…. and then we never hear what happened to it. John Pearson, in his “James Bond–the Authorized Biography of 007” (1973), said the boy was named James Suzuki. John Gardner never could use the character because the film company bought all rights to Bond’s offspring. But we figured that if the character was DEAD, then it was fair game. So James Suzuki appears as a corpse in my story!

The interview is on the Buzznews site.