Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche: A clunky James Bond reboot. - By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney - Slate Magazine:
After his death his wife, Anne, who detested Bond, wanted the character to join Fleming in the grave. She was overruled by his family and the Fleming estate recruited the novelist Kingsley Amis, an ardent Bond fan, to write the first post-Fleming novel under the pseudonym Robert Markham. Published as Colonel Sun in 1968, it was written in the same style of witty pastiche as Faulks's effort 40 years later: 'James Bond sat in the bar of the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens and waited for something to happen.'
I've only read two of the post-Fleming Bond books, in a burst as part of reading all the Fleming stories: John Gardner's
License Renewed, and
Icebreaker. I thought both were worthy additions to the canon, but sort of lost interest and had no idea how many he'd gone on to write, or that there were prior and subsequent official Bond novelists. The greatest shock is that I've somehow missed all these years that the first post-Fleming Bond novelist was none other than Kingsley Amis. My 'To Read' pile is huge, and I'm not sure how much more, figuratively speaking, that shelf can bear while pick at my current reads a few pages here, a few pages there, over periods of weeks or months; still, I plan to read the new Sherlock Holmes novel, which is by an author I'm not familiar with at all, so I think the combination of Amis and Bond warrants a go.
