Ian Fleming's Jamaican hideout where he wrote Bondįor the most part, Horowitz makes a good fist of capturing Fleming’s tone of casual cynicism. The same is true of Horowitz’s Bond girl, Jeopardy Lane his Pussy Galore is so much more fun that you start to think he should have stuck with her for all of the book. Sadistic, eccentric (his New Jersey residence is a replica of Keats’s house in Hampstead) and so overconfident that he is handily and ridiculously reckless in his schemes, Sin follows the pattern of Fleming’s villains, but perhaps too closely: he feels a little ersatz and ultimately proves underwhelming. What follows is good fun but never quite reaches the same level of intensity, as Bond heads to the US to tackle Korean supervillain Jason Sin and his plot to sabotage a rocket launch that is set to give America a vital lead in the space race. This sequence proves to be a superb action set-piece, fully worthy of Fleming, and the book’s highlight. Sean Connery on the set of Thunderball, 1965īond’s attempts to offload Pussy are interwoven with a more authentically Fleming-esque storyline – based, indeed, on a treatment Fleming wrote for an unmade Bond TV series – in which 007 is required to race on the Nürburgring in order to protect a popular British driver from the machinations of SMERSH.

But he didn’t like to be reminded of it and he certainly resented the slight mocking quality in her voice.” Bond starts to panic when Pussy takes to preparing his breakfast egg: “Boiled for three and a third minutes, just how you like it.” Worse, she appears to have a sense of humour: “Yes, he had his fads. But in the Fleming canon, Pussy goes the way of such predecessors as Tiffany Case, Solitaire and Honeychile Rider, and has disappeared without explanation, despite Bond’s avowed passion for her, by the start of the next novel.īeginning the book with Pussy ensconced at Bond’s pad in Chelsea, Horowitz has precisely captured the schoolboy petulance of Fleming’s Bond, displayed when women start to have designs on him. The novel opens two weeks after the action of Fleming’s Goldfinger (1959), a book which ended with Bond triumphantly overcoming the lesbian predilections of the trapeze artist-cum-cat burglar Pussy Galore.

In Trigger Mortis Horowitz has had the ingenious idea of showing us Bond in the act of doing something which we know he does a lot, but Fleming would never have dreamed of writing: all the “It’s not you, it’s me” business of dumping his conquests. Fleming’s estate has made a canny choice in Horowitz, who proved in his Conan Doyle pastiche The House of Silk – which saw Sherlock Holmes battling a VIP paedophile ring – that he can convincingly replicate another author’s world without sticking too slavishly to his template. For James Bond the phrase “You Only Live Twice” has proved a serious underestimate: Anthony Horowitz is the eighth authorto have resuscitated 007 since Ian Fleming’s death.

James bond trigger mortis