I don’t really think of it as a prequel, but I certainly think of it as an ‘origin’ novel. It examines how Bond became Bond.
Author takes us back to a time before James Bond got his licence to kill
He was just a schoolboy, enduring the misery of a North London boarding school that he remembers as “a brutal, cold, unpleasant place.”
But then Anthony Horowitz encountered James Bond.
More than half a century later, Horowitz is still haunted by his own desperately unhappy childhood. So even today, as he enjoys international success with his writings, there remains a painful immediacy to these memories. But with them comes the moment when he met Agent 007 on screen.
“I’m lonely, miserable and failing,” he says, looking back. “And then, into this horrible world ... comes a film, Dr. No, which takes me to exotic islands where there’s wonderful food and sunshine and beautiful women. There were no beautiful women in my life in boys’ school — but here was adventure and escapism.”
Horowitz has arrived to talk about his new thriller, Forever and a Day, which goes back to the early days of British secret agent James Bond and how he earned his 007 insignia — and with it his licence to kill. It will startle readers with its portrait of a more vulnerable, less hardened Bond, and Horowitz is proud of it. However, it’s also the product of a lifelong love affair with the 007 books and their creator, Ian Fleming.
Dr. No, starring Sean Connery, was the second of Fleming ’s Bond novels, but the first to have been made into a movie. And it entranced this lonely but precocious youngster.
“It led me to the bookstore where I bought the book of Dr. No. I still have it today with my 10-year-old’s signature on the inside of it. From then on, I’m reading the books, and each one is a revelation. More films come out. Goldfinger remains my favourite Bond movie ever — it just doesn’t get better than that.”
Today, Horowitz is one of Britain’s most prolific and popular writers. He’s the creator of two acclaimed television series — Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders. His more than 40 books include a hugely popular young people’s series featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, racking up international sales approaching the 20-million mark.
“I suddenly had this idea — wouldn’t it be great if Bond was a teenager? And that led to the birth of Alex Rider — and Alex Rider made my fortune. So I owe a great deal to Fleming and his world and his books.”
Horowitz has moved from strength to strength as a writer, and recently launched a new series of crime novels featuring unorthodox detective Daniel Hawthorne. But he had always yearned to write an actual Bond novel, a wish granted in 2015 when the Ian Fleming estate invited Horowitz to do exactly that.
Since Fleming ’s death in 1964, his estate has periodically commissioned new 007 novels from other writers, among them such high-profile names as Sebastien Faulks, William Boyd and the late Kingsley Amis (Colonel Sun, written under the pen name Robert Markham). When the Fleming estate approached Horowitz, he had already demonstrated his gift for entering another author’s world with a pair of successful Sherlock Holmes mysteries (The House of Silk and Moriarty).
James Bond was, as they say, an offer he couldn’t refuse, and his initial 007 thriller, Trigger Mortis, was a bestseller.
“I wanted to be true to Fleming,” Horowitz says now. “I wanted to reanimate his vision and hopefully head people to rediscover the original books.”
That same urgency drives this new Bond novel, Forever and a Day. Its publisher, HarperCollins is billing it as a “prequel” to Casino Royale, the 1953 Fleming novel that introduced Bond to readers.
“I don’t really think of it as a prequel, but I certainly think of it as an ‘origin’ novel,” Horowitz says. “It examines how Bond became Bond.”
A scene in Casino Royale provided a springboard. “That’s when Bond tells about the two missions he had to carry out to qualify for a double zero. He shot someone with a sniper rifle in New York and kills someone more brutally in Stockholm. Those are the basic facts which I was able to expand on in my opening chapters.”
Having passed these gruesome tests, the youthful Bond is dispatched to the south of France, where the bullet-riddled body of the previous 007 has turned up in the waters of the Mediterranean. This leads to a hair-raising confrontation with a monstrously overweight Corsican drug dealer named Scipio, who proves to be one of the most memorable villains in the Bond canon.
“I loved doing Scipio,” Horowitz says. He notes that Fleming relished grotesque villains with bizarre characteristics — “a third nipple, missing hands, agoraphobia …
“But curiously he hadn’t done fat, and I had this idea of a massively fat villain, and I knew at exactly the same moment how he needed to die.”
Horowitz also delivers a unique contribution to the 007 gallery of formidable females. Her name is Sixtine and in creating her, Horowitz was mindful that Bond’s womanizing image does not easily win favour these days of the #MeToo movement.
“I try not to use the term ‘Bond girl’ in connection with her,” Horowitz says. “To objectify a woman in that way and to suggest she’s a piece of property is demeaning. Sixtine is far from being that. She’s an independent, strong woman, 10 years older than Bond. I decided — let’s have an older woman in the story and take things to their logical extremes. She’s more experienced in bed than he is. She’s a mother — I don’t think Bond has ever slept with a woman who has a child.
“Still, I do try to treat the story as very much of the ’50s and true to the outlook of that period while at the same time trying not to do things that would obviously annoy and upset a modern audience.”
This younger Bond lacks the harder edges of the Fleming books.
“He’s 90 per cent there,” Horowitz says. “But he’s less experienced, less sure of himself, more humane. Murder and blood and violence are not natural to him at this stage. He’s still haunted by the memory of cutting that man’s throat in Stockholm.”
Which was more challenging? Re-creating the Victorian world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or honouring the legacy of Ian Fleming ?
“Fleming’s style is very much more different to capture,” Horowitz says. “I think people have forgotten to an extent how very good his books are, how well-written they are, how stylish and original. At the time they were revolutionary.”