Advance copies just arrived at IFP…
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Pre-order for the Kindle edition placed!
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I pre ordered the signed Waterstones edition. Thanks Mr. Stromberg for mentioning that version!
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I’m hoping to finish the Gardner books by then. I finished Brokenclaw yesterday, and I didn’t mind it overall. I’m apprehensive about The Man From Barbarossa, however. But as soon as With A Mind To Kill is in my hands I’m starting it regardless.
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I cannot wait to read it!
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There is a second “exclusive edition” from Waterstones with a stenciled edge available. I think I will stick with my pre-ordered signed edition though!
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From the man himself.
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Not long now! I’d better get down to Waterstones and reserve a copy!
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I wonder when we will get reviews for WAMTK. It has to be soon.
A gaggle of closely connected Bond fans seem already to be in possession of the proof copy!
Ajay Chowdry seems very much to like it…
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23rd…
A new interview with Horowitz in the Times (the title isn’t quite true).
There are some minor spoilers regarding the premise of the book. I don’t feel they’re major enough to warrant tags, but if others feel differently let me know
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Anthony Horowitz: Fleming wasn’t sexist and nor is James Bond
The writer talks to Alex O’Connell about his new 007 book, why killing off the spy was wrong — and the truth about Bond girl
By Alex O’Connell (The Times, May 11)
You know there’s been a huge geopolitical shift when, in 2022, a Russian psychopath is the baddie of choice in a new James Bond novel
Anthony Horowitz, 67, licensed to write new stories about 007 by the Fleming estate following books by Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd, has hit a timely nerve with the third in his trilogy of Bond novels
Trigger Mortis focused on 007’s mid-career; Forever and a Day on his beginnings. The new one, With a Mind to Kill, published later this month, is positioned at the end of James Bond’s working life, where Fleming’s final, 1965 novel The Man with the Golden Gun (finished with a little help from Kingsley Amis) ended
Horowitz’s new story begins with a funeral. After a botched attempt to kill M by a brainwashed 007 in Golden Gun, M’s “burial” is now arranged and faked to fool the Russians, allowing Bond, who has now got his patriotic senses back, to go back behind the Iron Curtain to collect intelligence
Bond must ingratiate himself with evil Colonel Boris, an expert in mind control with a place called “the magic room” in his lair, where 007 has already endured isolation, psychedelic drugs and torture
If Boris can be made to believe Bond’s mind is still washed, that he is still on his side, 007 can discover the details of Russia’s dastardly plot to destroy the West. Colonel Boris, a walk-on character in Golden Gun, dazzles in Horowitz’s hands, with his odd-coloured eyes and his cold, beautiful clinical psychiatrist sidekick, Katya
“It is sort of scary, how it reflects the age we’re living in, the publishers are quite nervous about that,” Horowitz frets. We are talking in an office block in Clerkenwell in central London, where his wife, the TV producer Jill Green, whom he met while making his much-loved drama Foyle’s War, works. Horowitz has no city base at present while they renovate a house in Richmond. He apologises for the presence of his young black labrador who has accompanied him to town from their home in Suffolk
“I wrote it long before the invasion [of Ukraine] began. And I’m just aware that I don’t want to be, as it were, promoting it on the back of what’s happening. It’s difficult, but it is timely, that’s for sure,” he says
He goes on to say that one of his favourite Bond novels, From Russia with Love, starts with a chapter in which the Russians debate which country they wish to destroy. “They talk about doing the Israeli Secret Service, the Americans and the French . . . but it’s the British that they really hate because the British are so good.
Horowitz — who looks like an American film producer in a baseball cap, crumpled linen jacket and T-shirt — has three books coming out this year: a pile-up due to Covid delays. Where Seagulls Dare, the latest in his Diamond Brothers children’s series in June; The Twist of a Knife, the fourth of his “metafiction” Hawthorne detective novels in August — and, first up, the new Bond
Colonel Boris, with whom he has always had a fascination, was the key to its success. He appears at the beginning of Golden Gun and is also mentioned, in passing, in From Russia with Love. “So then you’ve got a sort of a James Bond villain created by Ian Fleming, who has never been seen or has never spoken. And that was just too good an opportunity. So that immediately dictated not only when the book would be set, but where it would be set, because obviously it had to go back to Russia.
Horowitz, who found fame with the Alex Rider series about a teenage spy and the TV series Midsomer Murders, has worked with many literary estates: Agatha Christie’s, Tintin/Hergé’s and Conan Doyle’s. “The Fleming estate was just great,” he says. That’s not to say they haven’t had debates. “When I did Trigger Mortis, they were uneasy about the idea of bringing back Pussy Galore
“And my favourite discussion was about what Bond wears in bed. I said he slept naked and they said, ‘No, he doesn’t!’ They said he should wear a bed jacket,” Horowitz says, laughing. “So I looked at what a bed jacket is and it’s a pyjama top that comes from your neck down to your knees. I thought: ‘how to make Bond completely non-sexy in two words’. I just got around that.
One issue with placing the book in Cold War Russia was the drabness of the setting. Bond requires glamour, and Horowitz, who had visited the Soviet Union in the 1970s, struggled to find it. Even Sixties London threatened to be grey. “When Bond is captured at the beginning of the book, after having tried to kill M, I was thinking of sending him to Wormwood Scrubs.” He was inspired by the incarceration of the spy George Blake there. “But it’s also grim and shabby and unpleasant and I thought, ‘Put Bond into prison? Really?’
In the end he found colour in a thrilling action scene at the Berlin State Opera and in a fancy restaurant where Katya takes Bond. Katya is an excellent Bond girl and Horowitz does not hold back in his descriptions of her, including the line: “Bond found himself assessing the shape of her bottom. It was a very pretty one.
Faulks has said that nowadays he feels unable to describe women physically in his fiction for fear of objectifying them. Horowitz has no such reservations. He sighs
“Fleming has a fixation with women’s bottoms. I’m ventriloquising Fleming. I’m not writing my own view of women. I don’t write sex scenes in any of my books.” He pauses. “Maybe in Magpie Murders,” he corrects himself, referring to his detective novel that his wife has recently made into a TV series starring Lesley Manville
“I think all of Bond’s women are very underrated,” he adds. “I mean, people often talk about Fleming being a sexist writer and Bond being a sexist character. But that’s not actually true. Most of the women in the Bond novels are extremely intelligent and independent. And yes, they do go weak at the knees when Bond walks into the room. But, nonetheless, they hold their own against him,” he says
In fact, Bond almost didn’t hold his own against anyone. There was a point at which Horowitz considered whether James should die in this story. “I thought: should I ask the estate for permission to kill Bond? Maybe in a plane that is plunging into the sea or into the ground.
He chickened out. After his death in the last film, No Time to Die, can you have Bond dying differently, on-screen and in print, I wonder? “I never refer to the films. I don’t include information or even lines from the films.” He says he hadn’t even seen No Time to Die when he was writing this book. “I didn’t do it because, first of all, I think it would be impertinent of me to kill a character that I hadn’t created, and secondly Bond shouldn’t die, Bond is for ever.
He also feels a duty to stay true to Fleming; but haven’t the films scotched that as well? “Their job is to reflect the period in which they are made,” he says carefully. So was it right to knock him off? “I was sad they did. But it was their decision. I wouldn’t have done it. But that’s only because . . . I just think that Bond belongs to everybody.
When I ask who should follow Daniel Craig he looks downcast. “I don’t know how they will have a new Bond since they killed him . . . And the ownership has changed.” In March, Amazon bought MGM Holdings, the studio that makes the Bond films, for almost $9 billion. The Fleming estate only controls the rights to the books
“Will they go back to the beginning and start remaking From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Dr No, as a television series?” Probably. It’s already been announced that Prime Video is making a TV show, 007’s Road to a Million, a Bond-style take on a race around the world, which will shoot later this year
I wonder what he makes of talk of a female Bond. “I have no animus against a female Bond, although I would much rather someone made Modesty Blaise,” he says. He is referring to the heroine of Peter O’Donnell’s comic books that were made into a pretty terrible film in 1966, starring Monica Vitti
“They destroyed the franchise in one,” he says. He tells me of a rumour suggesting that the director Quentin Tarantino optioned the books and, when the rights were about to run out, made a low-budget film, never released, to retain them for a future project
Talking to him you get a sense of what a comfort Bond is. Horowitz had a sad childhood. The son of Mark Horowitz, a wealthy businessman and fixer to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, he lived with his siblings and servants in the grand estate White Friars in Harrow in Middlesex. As a child he was packed off to boarding school, Orley Farm in Middlesex and then Rugby
At prep school, the Bond books gave him everything his life didn’t have. “Sunshine, beautiful women, good food, travel, freedom, adventure, escape. I was ten when Dr No came out,” he says. He still has those paperbacks with his mother’s autograph inside each next to his own ten-year-old signature (she had to sign them to show he was allowed to read them). “They were the only colour I remember in my life at the time and when I write them now they have the same sense of a lifeline.
Today he is lithe, what some might call a silver fox. Then, he was overweight and ridiculed. “I was a kid who had no talent at all and was repeatedly told so, and that I was ugly, fat and stupid. Prep schools then had a very good way of getting into your mind and completely destroying you. Then I discovered I did have a talent for telling stories.
Later his life turned into its own tall tale. When Horowitz was in his twenties and his father died of cancer he realised that the old man had been living a lie. He has said that the bills came in, but there was no money to pay them. The family fortune had disappeared mysteriously and, eventually, the family estate was lost
Horowitz’s sons have not had to endure such ordeals. His and Green’s successes have helped to refill the family’s coffers. Nicholas, 33, and Cassian, 31, who works as a social media guru for the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, are thriving
The siblings co-founded the Clerkenwell Brothers, a creative agency. I ask him whether he and Cassian share political allegiances. Horowitz says he never talks about politics with Cass but that, as he said in a diary in The Spectator last week, he’s had enough of it all. “This spiral of deceit and decay, I don’t see any way out of it.” he says. “I think we are stuck with Johnson. He’s the worst PM, easily, in my lifetime.
I wonder why he hasn’t written a memoir: wouldn’t he like to consider that lifetime and join his own dots? “Everything about my childhood is incomplete,” he says, sighing. “Why did my parents send me to this wretched school? What was my father’s work? Why was I pretending to be a motorbike dispatch rider delivering vast quantities of money to offices around London for him
“There is almost a war between me and my childhood. I don’t really think about it ever.” He effects the sort of pause that would make one of Pinter’s feel snappy. “I see it from time to time. Life for me is getting through and not dwelling. My own life is much less interesting than Bond’s.” I wouldn’t be so sure
With a Mind to Kill is published by Jonathan Cape on May 26 at £20.
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It seems to me that if a author doesn’t become a Fleming ventriloquist, like Horowitz (and to a degree Faulks), they get torn apart on websites like this. Just look at Jeffrey Deaver and Carte Blanche for evidence of that, on this website alone. While it was considered a mixed bag of story, mainly if Bond could work well in a murder mystery, Deaver made his writing style known. And he got (somewhat unfairly) ripped up by Bond fans. What I’m saying is that being a James Bond continuation novel writer is one of the most double edged swords in writing series. Both sides have their opinions, and often they don’t match up. That being said, the article was a great read. One of the most unique backstories of any Bond person. I’m happy we did get some stories and material from him. I wouldn’t be surprised if EON and Amazon were going to look at him for future use. I think this will be the last time we get a novel from him. Hopefully he goes out on a high note.
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Great interview! His insights on No Time to Die were particularly interesting. I think Horowitz, unlike an increasing number of creators (and readers/viewers) today, hasn’t quite wrapped his head around multiple timelines/continuities, which seems to be why he has such a problem with the idea of killing Bond (and rebooting the film franchise post Bond’s on-screen death). Though he does make a good point about not wanting to take ownership of Fleming’s character that far. I guess there’s no question of right or wrong here - he and EON (as well as Daniel Craig, Cary Fukunaga and everyone involved with the film) have different perspectives on this which I think are both equally interesting and valid.
I guess the plot-point about M was something we all expected. The overall premise looks more than interesting and I do hope EON cuts a deal with Horowitz at some point to adapt this novel, at least loosely. His book seems to be an ‘ending’ of sorts for Bond (albeit one that won’t end in death), but I can also see this as a great way to reinvent Bond for the next cinematic reboot - a symbolic ‘rebirth’ after recovering from brainwashing, and straddling the line between who he is and who the enemy tried to turn him into.
Can’t wait for May 26th!
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What the reviewer does not find intriguing I very much do.
Funny, too, that the Russian villain is called Boris.
Isn’t he a character from TMWTGG, and mentioned in FRWL?
Though I’m aware that Horowitz, let’s say doesn’t care for the current British PM, so he could’ve used that particular character for the name…
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I believe that this is a character from Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun.
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Too bad. Then again… still funny that Horowitz used that guy again.
Nah, I know. But let me have my petty fun.
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I like that Horowitz is basically crafting a sequel to Fleming’s original run of novels and is dealing directly with Bond’s attempted assassination of M. If only the film franchise had the foresight or the intestinal fortitude to attempt this in the next film.
The new information that we get in the article listed above makes this novel sound much better than the original round of publicity was making it sound. I’m game for a sequel to The Man with the Golden Gun.
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