Rank the Raymond Benson novels

Books Other Continuation Authors
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This week’s edition is ranking the Raymond Benson novels. As always, novelizations are eligible to be included.

So how do you rank the Benson continuation novels? My list goes like this:

  1. HIGH TIME TO KILL – One of the very best continuation novels, heck one of the best Bond novels period, takes James Bond to places he (and, consequently, the reader) has never been–most specifically, climbing to almost the very top of Mount Kangchenjunga the third highest mountain in the world located in the Himalayas of Nepal. Bond must face not only the rugged elements of one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, but he must deal with sabotage within his own team, all while trying to safely outrace both the Russians and the Chinese to reach their objective of retrieving a microdot located somewhere aboard a crashed airplane near the summit. The entire climb, Roland Marquis, and Le Gérant of the Union are highlights. Thrilling stuff.

  2. ZERO MINUS TEN – Bond is sent to investigate when a rash of assassinations in Hong Kong has taken place in the days leading up to the handover of Hong Kong to China. Clues eventually lead Bond to another new 007 location–Australia–and he has a walkabout after crash landing his plane. In the end, Bond must stop the villain from setting off a nuclear bomb at the height of the handover festivities back in Hong Kong. Highlights are Bond’s airborne fight with ‘Harry’ Chang, Bond’s dealings with Gen. Tsu Kam Wong, Xu Nan Li, Sunni Pei, and I really like the three albino Asian henchmen.

  3. DOUBLESHOT – And another unique adventure, this time with Bond dealing with the after-effects of a head injury suffered on his previous mission in HTTK. As a result, Bond is suffering headaches and occasional blackouts as he is far from being in tiptop shape. Then, when he has another blackout, he wakes up to find his girlfriend dead in the room with him, and he soon becomes the police’s #1 suspect. All this leads to a fantastic plot by the Union as they seek their ultimate revenge on 007 by not only framing him for his girlfriend’s murder, but also as the chief instigator in a political assassination thereby allowing Spain to reclaim Gibraltar. Highlights are Bond encountering a bull in the ring and his foiling the plot in Gibraltar. Once again, Le Gérant is entertaining and so is the other villain Domingo Espada, but the best is Margareta Piel–one of the best femme fatales of the series. Doubleshot is doubly good.

  4. TOMORROW NEVER DIES – As a fan of the film, I am also a fan of the novelization. This is Benson’s best effort of the three novelizations he did. I like his background detail for Elliot Carver and the additional details for how Wai Lin gets involved in the story. Other than that, the novelization pretty much follows the film. And Wai and Carver are both great.

  5. NEVER DREAM OF DYING – Bond must stop the Union from blowing up the Cannes Film Festival. On the surface, that sounds a little small stakes for 007, however, the story leading up to it more than makes up for that. You not only have Bond in the most serious relationship of the Benson novels, not only do you have 007 having a bit of a reunion with his father-in-law Marc-Ange Draco, not only do you have one of Bond’s best friends suffering a debilitating injury, you also get his final showdown with Olivier Cesari aka Le Gérant and the Union. There’s lots to like here especially, Tylyn Mignonne and Cesari.

  6. THE MAN WITH THE RED TATTOO – Bond gets another reunion here, this time in the form of Tiger Tanaka who, after this adventure, I’d have to say is clearly 007’s best Asian friend. (René Mathis is his best European friend, Felix Leiter is his best American friend, and Bill Tanner is his best overall friend.) This time Bond must stop a Japanese terrorist from assassinating the leaders of the G-8 summit via mosquitoes infected with a deadly virus. It’s an intriguing and scary premise. Highlights are Bond tangling with The Kappa in a train tunnel, anything involving the mosquitoes, Bond resuming his good rapport with Tanaka, as well as Reiko Tamura, and the diminutive assassin, Junji Kon aka The Kappa.

  7. THE FACTS OF DEATH – Bond must stop a deadly terrorist organization from wreaking havoc around the globe by unleashing a deadly virus in various cities. This is probably the most film-like of all Benson’s original novels. But even though it’s the most cinematic, it’s still good. Highlights are Bond’s cable car fight with Markos and Ari, his underwater escape from Hera Volopoulos’ boat, and pretty much all the women. Hera is another great femme fatale; Ashley Anderson is fun; Felix’s girlfriend, Manuela Montemayor, is a entertaining; and Niki Mirakos more than holds her own. This is my least favorite of all Benson’s original novels, but it’s still a very solid read. He never had a bad story. I would readily welcome him back to the 007 authorship keyboard.

  8. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH – I like the film Die Another Day just little bit more than TWINE, but when it comes to the novelizations, I find TWINE just edges out DAD. I like the added backstory to Viktor Zokas aka Renard, which makes him seem a little more evil and fleshes him out a little bit more than the film did. The highlights are Bond’s boat chase along the Thames after Giulietta da Vinci aka The Cigar Girl, the entertaining Valentin Zukovsky, and, of course, Elektra King.

  9. DIE ANOTHER DAY – This is not a bad novelization, but I just don’t like it as much as the other stories above. The DAD novelization is over the top just like the film is, but I don’t hold that against either one. Bond can be over the top, just not all the time. One of the best parts of this story is how Benson shows how Bond gets to Hong Kong after escaping from the British warship. Other highlights include the Bond vs. Gustav Graves sword fight, Bond’s car chase on the ice with Tan Ling Zao, as well as Miranda Frost and Zao himself.

So how do you rank the Benson novels?

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The non novelisations:

  1. HIGH TIME TO KILL
  2. DOUBLESHOT
  3. NEVER DREAM OF DYING
  4. THE MAN WITH THE RED TATTOO
  5. THE FACTS OF DEATH
  6. ZERO MINUS TEN
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DoubleShot.

The rest are insufficiently competent.

Apart from Never Dream of Dying which is one of the worst things committed to creation, including cress, the Honda Accord and Akron, Ohio.

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When Raymond Benson took over from John Gardner - a fact I learned from a Bond reference book I bought by chance - I initially was excited about the return of some of the ‘traditional’ 007 paraphernalia, the outdated gun, the rank, even the Aston (that hadn’t been done to death yet). It’s important to remember Benson’s brief at the time seems to have been an attempt to write litBond as if it were novelisations of films. Those were the commercially successful Brosnan years and the Glidrose aim was probably to at least not make their product worlds apart from what people just watched at the cinema.

As with John Gardner, I bought and read every Benson as soon as I could lay my hands on them. The Man with the Red Tattoo I even bought as hardcover because I just happened to see it in a London bookstore at the time. By that book the initial enthusiasm had been significantly dampened on all sides, possibly also because of that cinematic approach.

Benson took great pains in trying to reconcile the worlds of film 007 and page Bond, sadly not to the best results. He brought back numerous characters from Fleming’s books, which often just resulted in showing how unbridgeable the gap in time, tone and reader expectations has become. Some of his ideas offered potential that was downright wasted in their respective books, Marc Ange not being dandy with having lost his daughter for example. Others were too tired old tv tropes like the doppelgänger scheme even Star Trek had used a couple of times before. The selective approach to take or ignore whatever Gardner and Amis wrote before also didn’t help.

Ranking the Bensons is hard. They exist in that twilight zone of fan fiction that tried to have it both ways, the gadgets and gizmos stuffed Jaguar with the original Fleming characters and everything updated with topical terrorist and populist villain action. If you’re okay with that basic concept they can be fun, no doubt about that. But most of the books also have at least one scene or element that took me out of my suspend of disbelief.

For personal reasons I prefer High Time to Kill above most of the others, with DoubleShot a close second. I simply remember too little of The Man with the Red Tattoo and only a few scenes from The Facts of Death.

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Benson’s novels, for the most part, had wonderful ideas that would have made for great Bond films. Where they suffered was in actually putting those ideas into motion, which was largely disappointing.

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It’s been said it was a shame Benson didn’t get the chance to write his Bond with about ten years additional writing experience under his belt. I tried reading his Splinter Cell book at the time but didn’t finish it. The main attraction of Benson’s writing - back then - was that he got to use Bond as a huge fan who actually enjoyed the task.

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Remain a bit mystified why he has never been used for the films; even if not adapting one of his books but just generally as a writer. Maybe he has and we don’t know.

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This perfectly encapsulates my feelings on the Benson Bonds. And I prefer Benson to Gardner by a fair margin (Gardner just never seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself, at least after the first few).

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Okay, I could not resist starting to read the Benson Bonds (or is it the Bond Bensons?) now.

First up: ZERO MINUS TEN.

Entertaining at first, but after those two chapters having to learn so much about Mahjong I was almost ready to give up. Trying to go on.

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Keep going. Yes, the mahjong game is a bit of a chore to get through, and I still don’t fully understand the game, but once you get past it, it should be smooth sailing from there. Zero Minus Ten is worth reading.

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Zero Minus Ten was my least favorite Benson entry. As this may have been his first novel ever, I’m not surprised that it felt a bit unpolished. Still, he seemed to demonstrate more enthusiasm than Gardner did during the second half of his (Gardner’s) tenure.

In general, I found Benson got better as his tenure went along. Certainly his writing improved. With the exception of High Time to Kill (which is my favorite), I’d probably rank the Bensons in reverse publication order in terms of quality.

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