No Deals, Mr Bond by John Gardner

Well, this one was shit.

As regular readers of the blog will know, in June 2026 my mother in law very unexpectedly died, which necessitated a sudden and very emotionally fraught trip to Canada.

My 23 month old toddler and I travelled solo (my partner leapt onto the first available flight after the news arrived) and what was meant to be a dicey but not reckless 2-hour transfer window in Ottawa’s strangely small airport expanded (due to a delay) into a 23 hour one. I was kinda prepped for travel chaos, and brought three things with me to be entertained around the moments my toddler slept during our travels: a Nintendo Switch with a new copy of Tears of the Kingdom (which I’m absolutely never going to complete and probably won’t play again for several months after getting home from that trip a few weeks ago), the second book in The Expanse series which absolutely did its job, and this: yet another John Gardner James Bond expansion novel.

If you’ve never encountered one of these before, let me try to explain in the simplest way possible: for some reason that is utterly inexplicable to a reflective eye, in the 1980s the literary estate of Sir Ian Fleming hired a mediocre and unrespected thriller novelist named John Gardner to pump out follow-up James Bond novels, which he did basically annually for almost two decades. I have read a few of them, and they’re all shit.

Nb: Ian Fleming is the only Knight of the British Empire who TriumphOfTheNow.com ever refers to by title, and one of the reasons why that happens here is because Ian Fleming wasn’t knighted and it feels like an oversight. “What’s your evidence for this being an inevitability?”, people often ask me – they don’t, obviously, I don’t really talk to people – but if they did I would repeat the same three word phrase that I repeat every time in my head with awe whenever I open the Disney Plus app: Dame. Jilly. Cooper. (Because all I watch on Disney Plus is Rivals, and also films in the Predator franchise when my wife is away and I’m in an emotional uplift sufficient to watch a simple entertainment without crushing shame (this has happened twice).)

John Gardner just, basically, doesn’t really understand what James Bond is, and what people like about those books.

John Gardner writes about food like someone who starts sweating when he eats garlic (I mean because it’s too spicy, not because he’s a vampire).

John Gardner writes about booze like someone who likes the kind of overly wet and unchilled beer that people with beards drink and thinks wine is for [insert some kind of archaic homophobic and/or sexist slur].

And, most crucially, John Gardner writes about sex like someone who makes me feel like I’m maybe not that repressed after all.

The violence in these novels is often confused, and efficiently brutal, if emotionally vague.

People are either killed in horrible, visceral, immediate ways, or they’re barely injured a few moments after sustaining what might have been a major injury. The plots are also wafer thin, and often trying to be more Le Carré than Fleming and failing.

The story here in No Deals, Mr Bond (a shit title) is that the British are in trouble because of a previous attempt of theirs to infiltrate East German political and military targets through “honey trap” moles that would seek to turn their partners into British intelligence assets. That plot – a mission absurdly and stupidly referred to throughout by all characters in the novel as “Operation Cream Cake” – did not seem to have worked and it ended in midnight escapes for all of the honeytrapers when the authorities clocked it (James Bond helped with one of these escapes), and now a few years on, all of the beautiful young men and women they’d recruited for that Operation are being hunted by Russian intelligence agents, getting murdered and then their tongues are being cut out.

James Bond is sent to find the remaining people and, of course, he fucks one of the women, maybe even two of them, I can’t remember…  maybe actually the second one propositions him and he turns her down because she’s the one who will later turn out to be evil and John Gardner’s James Bond is so un-James Bond that he would rather cultivate a short term relationship elsewhere than shag any beautiful woman who is even half-heartedly available to him.

John Gardner’s James Bond also keeps referring to things that happened to him in Ian Fleming’s novels from 30/40 years earlier, but in a way that quite directly implies a straightforward continuation of time, meaning Bond here is meant to be approaching 70, or at the very least isn’t not doing so.

And James Bond is also told that he’s not officially on MI5 business and his licence to kill has been revoked, just like in more than half of the James Bond films since the 80s (or at least more than two of them, but who’s counting?), and that he can’t get any official help.

He does get help from Q Branch (now fronted by an attractive woman who he has previously shagged and may do again), though on the DL, and he uses his work contacts as he travels around (mainly Ireland and Hong Kong here; late 20th century colonial interests) trying to find the people tracking down and executing the Operation Cream Cake gang. Along the way, Bond is pleased to discover that the honeytraps had managed to turn one of their targets, a senior German spy who is now a British asset, but that the German-Russian intelligence people had also managed to turn one of the Operation Cream Cake gang right back (OH NO!), as well as one of Bond’s presumed key allies in Ireland, though none of these twists really come as a shock because the characters are so facile and thin that any behaviour could be behaved by any of them and it wouldn’t seem out of character; there is no twist because no one seems to be any deeper than a vector for the action or speech they are actioning or speaking at that very moment.

However, all this aside, I would say that there is one moment in this novel that may well sit with me in my conscious mind for a very long time: a scene where James Bond and M go to dinner and James Bond produces his own HIGHLY ELABORATE salad dressing while M sits in silence and watches.

The moment is so long, that it bears quoting in full:

Bond ordered grilled sole with a large salad, asking for the dressing ingredients to be brought, so that he could prepare it himself. M nodded approval. He knew his agent’s likes and dislikes as well as his own, and appreciated that it was difficult to get a dressing made to your own liking.
The food arrived and M waited in silence as James Bond carefully ground half a teaspoonful of pepper into the small bowl provided with the ingredients. This was followed by a similar amount of salt and sugar, to which he added two and a half teaspoonfuls of powdered mustard, crushing the mixture well with a fork before stirring in three full tablespoons of oil, followed by one of white wine vinegar, which he dribbled in carefully. He added a few drops of water before giving a final stir and pouring the mixture over his salad.

This has no place in literature. No place in a thriller. And no place in James Bond.

–///–

Elsewhere, there’s nonsense like:

“Big Thumb Chang was so called because of a deformity to his right hand. The thumb was almost as long, and twice as thick, as his index finger.” (p. 175)

Somebody says to James Bond on p. 146: “You have been resurrected against much criticism, I gather” which is a clear metatextual, whingy, comment from Gardner about the disdain everyone (rightly) has had for his shit books (which I do keep reading).

On p. 135 James Bond and a lady are on their way to a hotel. “I’m sure you do everything in a professional style,” she says. And then on p. 139 they have sex: “His hands slid down to the neat silky little buttocks […] When he was washed clean she stepped into the narrow tub, sliding onto her side and lifting one leg over his so that he took her beneath the warm water […] it was obvious that she was far from inexperienced […] they made love to one another three more times, once with a stormy wildness; then with passion – Ebbie above him, reciting a sensuous poem to the rhythm of her own body; and finally with intense tenderness”

p. 62, when the woman who will turn out to be evil propositions Bond, “She looked so vulnerable that it took a great deal of will power for Bond to refuse the offer.” I don’t think anyone who is meant to be viewed even slightly sympathetically should be depicted as seeing “vulnerability” as attractive. A bizarre choice.

On the novels read by the easily fooled losers who work at Passport Control: “Very few of them graduate to Margaret Drabble or Kingsley Amis.” (p. 134) Drabble, of course, is a serious writer of serious books (and still alive!). Amis is most known at this point as a writer of “light prose”, and he was also the first non-Ian Fleming to write a James Bond novel, the catastrophic Colonel Sun. Clearly not someone in the same league as Drabble (in terms of legacy), I very much doubt that they would have been considered peers even at such a culturally destitute moment as 1987…

On p. 116, Bond is in a physical fight to the death with a dog and “For one brief moment, Bond allowed his natural love for animals to creep into his consciousness. But for no more than a second.” He then, obviously, kills the dog. But what was that sentence meant to mean? What is the “natural love for animals” that James Bond has? Or is that implying that all people have that, and only have to reckon with it when in the process of killing a dog? It is – imo – unclear. (Btw the dog killing happens in a chapter called “Dog Eat Dog”.)

On p. 128, in the lead-up to the sex scene mentioned above, Bond was “so close to Ebbie that he could smell the fresh scent of her body.”

Gardner makes his James Bond sound like a pervert, going around smelling women…

And I don’t know if that’s cultural shift, and in the 1980s, perhaps, this was a totally standard way for male desire to be expressed; the men of that era yearned for vulnerable women they were able to smell. On p. 37, for example, Bond meets a woman and “He looked at her for a moment, pleased with her slender build and the femininity which lay under the well-cut grey suit set off by a pink blouse”… “Pleased”. “Pleased”.

In flirty banter with the woman who runs Q Branch on p. 33, “Q’ute” says: “Nowadays […] everyone wants it smaller, with a longer range, and more memory,” to which Bond replies – as if they’re definitely talking about cocks – “Speak for yourself.” What does he mean here? What is the memory he doesn’t want his dick to have? Why does he wand a short range penis? What would that even be? Why why why?

–///–

It’s a travesty. It’s a horrorshow. It’s a nightmare seemingly without end.

But it does have an end. A narratively flat and a literarily pointless one.

Would I like to read another James Bond novel by John Gardner? No. I don’t want to. Will I? Yes. Yes, alas, I inevitably will.

On p. 116, Bond is in a physical fight to the death with a dog and “For one brief moment, Bond allowed his natural love for animals to creep into his consciousness. But for no more than a second.” He then, obviously, kills the dog. But what was that sentence meant to mean? What is the “natural love for animals” that James Bond has? Or is that implying that all people have that, and only have to reckon with it when in the process of killing a dog? It is – imo – unclear. (Btw the dog killing happens in a chapter called “Dog Eat Dog”.)

On p. 128, in the lead-up to the sex scene mentioned above, Bond was “so close to Ebbie that he could smell the fresh scent of her body.” Gardner makes his Bond sound like a pervert. And I don’t know if that’s cultural shift, and in the 1980s, perhaps, this was a totally standard way for male desire to be expressed; the men of that era yearned for vulnerable women they were able to smell. On p. 37, for example, Bond meets a woman and “He looked at her for a moment, pleased with her slender build and the femininity which lay under the well-cut grey suit set off by a pink blouse”…

In flirty banter with the woman who runs Q Branch on p. 33, “Q’ute” says: “Nowadays […] everyone wants it smaller, with a longer range, and more memory,” to which Bond replies – as if they’re definitely talking about cocks – “Speak for yourself.” What does he mean here? What is the memory he doesn’t want his dick to have? Why does he wand a short range penis? What would that even be? Why why why?

–///–

It’s a travesty. It’s a horrorshow. It’s a nightmare seemingly without end.

But it does have an end. A narratively flat and a literarily pointless one.

Would I like to read another James Bond novel by John Gardner? No. I don’t want to. Will I? Yes. Yes, alas, I inevitably will.