Barely in the books Q, or magic grumpy wizard Q who fortuitously forsees the precise gadget Bond needs in about 90 minutes’ time?
I suspect it’s the latter; the books give nothing, save opportunity for Fleming to crib stuff from that Boothroyd chap and pass it off as his own (…again). May is a more fundamental character. Obviously dodgy CIA man Felix Leiter has more to him. Dikko Henderson has a ten-volume character arc in comparison.
Evidently James Bond isn’t interesting any more? That’s shiversome, the sort of shivers a dog demonstrates when defecating somewhere it should not.
This reads like one of those Cozy Crime things; they are admittedly popular as this decade’s passing mass-sale bandwagon, but… oh dear. Also rhymes with “huck’s bake”.
The inability to distinguish “uninterested” and “disinterested” doesn’t bode well; in an ideal world, police are indeed disinterested. One wants them to be.
If A Q to a Kill doesn’t turn up at some point, I shall eat my Andrea Anders hat (only £30,000 from the 007 store). If it is old Q though, maybe A Q for a Pill.
At least it gives some hope to my unfinished Bildungsroman “Fifty Shades of Sir Frederick Gray”. “Coming” soon. We’ll know we’ve hit bottom then. As indeed will Sir Frederick Gray.
Oh dear, completely missed this gushing paragraph on the IFP page:
Kelly Smith, editorial director at Zaffre, said: “I have long admired Vaseem’s work so the opportunity to work with him on any project, let alone one as pitch perfect as this, was one I had to grasp. With his unique wit and flair, cosy crime readers and James Bond fans alike will be unable to resist this series and his imagining of Q.”
This tries to piggyback off Thursday Murders and 007.
Indeed. I have no interest in this whatsoever. My belly is rumbling but I’m not taking these scraps. I’ll wait for the proper main meals of Bond 26 and Project 007, even if it means being reduced to skin and bones.
Well…I’ll never say no to a franchise expansion and this may well turn out to be interesting. But, on the list of potential James Bond novels we could have gotten, this one really wouldn’t even make it to most people’s Top 100
I think this is more in the territory of something like the Moneypenny Diaries (which I admittedly haven’t read) than an actual ‘Bond novel’. Even the Sherwood Double O series could be considered a kind of Bond novel because you’ve at least got 00 agents there as the protagonists who are ‘versions’ of Bond in a certain conceptual sense. This on the other hand is something quiet different genre-wise, which just happens to feature a Bond supporting character as the protagonist (a character who’s borderline non-existent in the books I might add).
And I must say, Q is about the last character I’d associate with a ‘cozy village mystery’. I mean, it makes more sense for country-house owning M to get involved in something like that, maybe post-retirement! Hell, it makes more sense for Bond to visit the village he grew up while on vacation and solve a cozy village mystery! Q is a character you associate with technology and, increasingly, cyber-ops. And yeah, there is a flavor of that in the synopsis, but the cozy mystery angle still feels weird.
Anyway, maybe this will surprise me. But I’m holding my breath here for the next full-fledged Bond novel starring whichever iteration of 007 himself that they come up with it…
I’m not going to dismiss this right away (I was initially sceptical about Higson’s Young Bond, too, and had to change my opinion later), but (putting it mildly) my interest in this is close to zero. Sounds like a Miss Marple / MacGyver crossover…
Alas, I can already see myself doing a Marcus Brody: “…no, they’re beautiful. The Museum will buy them as usual, no questions asked.”
Next up from those brilliant minds really giving us what we’re so eager to get: a series about May. Housekeeper’s tales might be splendid and iconic and fan-favorite.
I still haven’t read any of the Young Bonds (although I own all nine of them and hope to get to them soon), but honestly those sounded worse to me (on paper) than this new Q series. The idea of a “young Bond” almost makes it seem like Bond was destined for a life in the service, as if he was preordained to become the 00 we all know and love. Yet reading Fleming’s original entries we get no such impression (“quite the opposite in fact!”). I guess what I’m trying to say is that the notion of “young Bond” going on “Bond-lite” adventures (complete with super villains with devious schemes) strikes me as more of a divergence from the character than does the idea of a Q happening to solve mysteries in his hometown after having been let go from the service. All this presumes, of course, that the plot(s) Q uncovers do not entail “saving the world.” Regardless, a lot of this may just boil down to the quality of the writing and how engaging the book is.
I haven’t yet read those either (I’ve read basically everything other than Higson, Cole, Weinberg, and Sherwood), but I’d suggest that, in general, fans are more accepting of things from the past than whatever the new release is. You see this with Star Wars fans who are willing to accept all sorts of things from the past yet constantly complain about the newest film. Heck (and this may be my most controversial opinion yet!), I’m consistently surprised at how Bond fans willingly embrace all sorts of lows from the early years of the series (TMWTGG, anyone? Or the wildly uneven and inconsistent portrayals of Blofeld and Leiter throughout the 60s and 70s), yet often come across as overly harsh on NTTD (or really a host of things from the Craig era), which are rarely as detrimental to the series as fans would have us believe.
To be clear: I don’t mean to claim that the new stuff is always on par with the earlier stuff (early Connery trumps SP any day of the week), only that fans tend to be more forgiving of things that happened so long ago in the history of the franchise. (In my mind, any Craig entry trumps DAF or TMWTGG.)
That was almost to a t my own reaction when Young Bond was announced almost 20 years ago.
Twenty. Years. Ago.
But I digress…
Most of us here back in the day found it a bizarre and desperate decision, a mix of Potter meets 003 1/2 and Blyton’s St. Clare’s - and in the hands of a lesser writer this might have turned out a disaster.
Higson though takes the premise of a young orphaned boy enduring various adventures outdoors, roughly aligned with the few scraps Fleming provided and simply runs with it. And the results are quite entertaining, often more than some of the ‘adult’ Bond novels.
If you read them in sequence and arrive at the end of By Royal Command you’ll find the Bond character largely formed and complete.
So…it’s about a supporting character and Bond is not at all in the picture?
And this character isn’t even attached to MI-6 anymore, but instead has returned to his “sleepy hometown”?
And this character who’s SOLELY known and loved as the wizard behind hi-tech gadgets leaves his workbench behind to play detective?
I frankly don’t see how this would have ANY appeal to audiences of any stripe, beyond the kind of completists who would, say, shell out for a BluRay disc of “Boat Trip” just because it has Roger in it, or seek out obscure old Bond fanzines printed on mimeograph paper because they had fan art featuring 007. There’s niche and then there’s niche.
Next up maybe we’ll get a novel about Alfred, Batman’s butler playing matchmaker for a pair of young lovers on a vacation cruise thousands of miles from Gotham City. Or maybe one focused on Indy’s sidekick Short Round, now grown up and working as a youth counselor at an inner city high school. Or maybe one where Inspector Lestrade quits Scotland Yard to focus on leading his cricket team to a shot at the championship.
Let’s all have a moment of silence for the trees we’ll lose on this folly.
I suspect it may turn out as harmless as it is pointless.
It does strike one as a cynical enterprise, I fail to spot the artistic novelty, but to be “fair” it has no monopoly on that and it’s possibly a bit rich for one to moan about this on a James Bond message board given that all Bond enterprises for decades have been On His Majesty’s Blatant Fanservice. Anyway, I can resist and ignore and become a beautiful and unique lovely by so doing.
Maybe they could do an origin story, with Q coming from humble beginnings in a small village, solving bicycle crimes with gadgets he invented, and then M comes along, offers him a job, and so Q will become the Q we always loved and knew.
I suppose we’ll find out that Q is Ernst Stavro Bloferhauser’s long lost twin brother and that the two of them concocted a diabolical plan to make sure that all of their competition for world domination was scared into backing down, creating the fictional secret agent named “James Bond” and spread tales of his victories over people like Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger to scare off their competition. In fact, James Bond never existed at all, even in the fictional universe of the novels.
Well, there have been many from many different areas surrounding the franchise that have been telling us that we don’t really need Bond. His relevance has been questioned at every turn in the films, the fanbase goes on and on about how there can’t be a “Bond film” without M, Q, Moneypenny, and the like (even though CR and QOS worked just fine without Q or Moneypenny), and then novel series like The Moneypenny Diaries were fairly well received by the fanbase. IFP is just making a fairly prudent business decision and running all of this to its natural conclusion, which is that it isn’t James Bond that makes the Bond franchise what it is and that things on the periphery will sell just as well as, or maybe even better, than the (former) main attraction.
There big differences here but the idea reminded me of Le Carré’s A Murder of Quality which is focused on Smiley but set outside of the Circus. I really enjoyed that novel for how different the character was and maybe that will work here too.
I have not read any of the non-Bond expansions (and still have a few Bond novels to read in the post Ian Flemming world). I doubt I will read this one either but I am not losing sleep on the idea. Maybe it will turn out to be good.
As an aside, I find it interesting that they have done young Bond, Moneypenney, and now Q but have overlooked the obvious one to write about - Felix Leiter. That character would be an interesting focus for books or possibly a TV show. If I were advising a writer on a Felix novel, I would say give enough commonality with Bond that it sits well with the existing Felix material but focus on what is different. We don’t need Jimmy Bond.
