On His Majesty's Secret Service (James Bond 007)

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The new novel, titled On His Majesty's Secret Service, was commissioned specifically to celebrate the royal occasion. Charlie Higson was approached at short notice to create the work in time to meet this specific deadline, and penned the new thriller in just one month. The best-selling author has also slammed the last Bond film, No Time To Die. Speaking with The Sunday Times, Higson shared his feelings about the modern James Bond movies: Instead, royalties from the new novella will go to the National Literacy Trust, which works with disadvantaged children, so everyone’s happy. Despite these somewhat faddish interests – though the author insists the super-fit spy would naturally do anything to keep his edge, including taking an interest in the “gut instinct that gives you the non-thinking, split-second advantage” – his 007 remains ruthlessly unstoppable. In Higson’s words, he is “a fist, clenched and ready to strike”.

I don't think anyone has quite managed to put Fleming's Bond into the present day. Certainly not Deaver or Raymond Benson. Perhaps this is as good as it gets - John Gardner's stories were very good, but certainly his Bond was far removed from Fleming's. I was pleasantly surprised with the release of this albeit short novel and hope that the literary heirs have got Higson on their list for another Bond novel but give him this time a lot more time to create a story.A description of a character as promoting Covid/ vaccines/ mask wearing, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxism, climate change denial all show how the author has let his political beliefs impact his writing and the story. I was half expecting it to be a farce of a book.

My criticism isn’t about Higson competing with Fleming but if you take any of the IF short stories, Octopussy, Living Daylights, Quantum, these are spectacular character pieces, brilliantly original, they do not follow a traditional Bond formula and they are all short stories as what was intended by Higson. What he has done by using the perceived typical plot of a Bond novel actually reads more like fan fiction or what someone who hasn’t read Fleming would think a Bond novel should be. The voice and character of Bond comes across as mostly authentic but there are also some lines that made me cringe, and not in a fun Roger Moore way. I found myself re-reading them because I found them jarring and didn’t necessarily sound like something Bond would say. I didn’t want to write him as a slightly stuffy man out of time with fifties’ attitudes - the Jacob Rees-Mogg 007. I wanted him to be a contemporary young man. Fleming strayed just once from his own formula, he explains, in The Spy Who Loved Me, told from a female perspective.Contemporary Bond - you can write contemporary Bond without shoehorning in words like Nutella and Toblerone, it’s set during the kings coronation, I know it’s modern, I don’t ever want to read the word Nutella in a Bond novel, no matter what year it’s set. Everything you want from a Bond story is in there – sex, violence, cars, a colourful villain with a nasty henchman, and of course, Bond himself, so well-known and yet so unknowable,” Higson added. But I’ve been thinking about writing an adult Bond adventure ever since working on the Young Bond books, and he came bursting out of me with both fists flying. It was all I could do to keep up with him and get his story down on paper. Fleming famously wrote fast, and I channelled that energy. And now it’s so exciting for me to finally enter the world of grown-up Bond.

Charlie Higson, author of the bestselling Young Bond series, has been commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications to write a new James Bond adventure to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III, it is announced today, Friday 31 March.Bond has a moment of introspection about disliking a hired killer, and the author states that this could be due to some self-loathing because they both kill people. Perhaps we should not have been surprised to discover that the pace of production did not hinder the book’s quality: let’s not forget that Fleming wrote his first drafts in a matter of weeks, not months. And some of the best Bond films have been produced to punishingly tight schedules. Happy birthday 007 and May you return soon from the pen of decent writer of the same or better quality than Charlie Higson, which would spoil us literary fans a lot.