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Looking Back: Win, Lose or Die


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#1 Athena007

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Posted 27 June 2005 - 03:24 AM

From CBn's Main Page...

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Looking Back: Win, Lose or Die
John Gardner's eighth James Bond novel



#2 marktmurphy

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Posted 27 June 2005 - 10:29 AM

I sound a bit rough on it in that quote. I found it quite fun, in fact.

#3 Qwerty

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Posted 27 June 2005 - 12:39 PM

Some of these quotes are not as new as others. I tried to find the most recent ones for alot of the members.

#4 Athena007

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Posted 09 July 2005 - 10:55 PM

I sound a bit rough on it in that quote. I found it quite fun, in fact.

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Did you want us to "update" your quote, MTM?

#5 James Boldman

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Posted 10 July 2005 - 04:18 AM

Great run down, on another fantastic Gardner novel.
Despite my comment (on BAST) you managed to pull out. lol

Edited by James Boldman, 10 July 2005 - 04:21 AM.


#6 Qwerty

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Posted 10 July 2005 - 04:23 AM

Cheers Mr. Boldman. :)

#7 hrabb04

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Posted 10 July 2005 - 05:53 AM

I used to love watching this show. Bert Convy was the host, and Burt Reynolds, Loni Anderson, Dom Deluise, and all their friends would show up and play. And who could forget Charles Nelson Reilly?

Oh, wait...that was Win, Lose, or Draw

#8 Qwerty

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Posted 10 July 2005 - 06:07 AM

Close, but no cigar.

#9 zencat

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Posted 07 October 2005 - 11:26 PM

Updated this story with a rarely seen large print edition.

#10 killkenny kid

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Posted 07 October 2005 - 11:58 PM

Very entertaining book. But, Captain Bond?

#11 ComplimentsOfSharky

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:01 AM

Very entertaining book. But, Captain Bond?

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It's Gardner...haha

#12 killkenny kid

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:05 AM

Very entertaining book. But, Captain Bond?

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It's Gardner...haha

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indeed. :)

#13 Qwerty

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:07 AM

It's Gardner...haha

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Indeed, but I actually thought he handled it pretty well. One of Gardner's better books from what I remember.

#14 killkenny kid

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:10 AM

It's Gardner...haha

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Indeed, but I actually thought he handled it pretty well. One of Gardner's better books from what I remember.

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Sometimes, I think there is something in the New York air. :)

#15 Loyal Terrior

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:13 AM

Great book!

#16 ComplimentsOfSharky

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 01:11 AM

It's Gardner...haha

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Indeed, but I actually thought he handled it pretty well. One of Gardner's better books from what I remember.

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He did indeed...never really bothered me in particular.

#17 British Chap

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 12:35 PM

I havnt read this one yet but I have to say, this is an amazing cover.

http://commanderbond..._die/wld_lp.jpg

#18 Qwerty

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Posted 08 October 2005 - 09:41 PM

I havnt read this one yet but I have to say, this is an amazing cover.

http://commanderbond..._die/wld_lp.jpg

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And quite the rare one!

#19 Qwerty

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Posted 26 October 2007 - 01:57 AM

Bumping this up as it's the current book in the Blades Reading Club -

#20 MkB

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Posted 26 October 2007 - 10:12 AM

Win, lose or die.... Well, what can I say?
It's one of the few continuation novels I've read, and I must acknowledge that Gardner lost me at some point. I didn't understand what this episode where Bond is debriefed in a fake OTAN base was supposed to be (how uncredible, moreover!). And the plot seemed to me slightly too complicated (weird?)...

#21 OmarB

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Posted 26 October 2007 - 03:13 PM

Great book! Good opening and ending, it meanders in the middle a bit till he and the girl are in Italy ... wait, is that even the same book? Oh yeah it is.

After reading the books I thought Harriers were pretty cool, turns out they are slow as [censored].

#22 Jeff007

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Posted 11 May 2009 - 08:19 PM

I havnt read this one yet but I have to say, this is an amazing cover.

http://commanderbond..._die/wld_lp.jpg

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>


And quite the rare one!

Nice cover but why show him as a Commander on the cover when he gets promoted to Captain in this book?

#23 chrisno1

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Posted 27 May 2009 - 03:54 PM

I picked up this novel from a second hand book stall recently. These are my thoughts.

Published in 1989, WLOD was Gardner’s ninth 007 adventure and his format starts to show signs of age. There is an interesting parallel with Brocolli’s film productions, which took on an increasingly weary look in the 1980s. The films tended to be episodic and long winded, substituting big set pieces and conundrum-like plots for good characters and a clear narrative. Gardner suffers a similar fate here, as he does with most of his later novels.

Briefly, Bond is sent back to the Royal Navy as Captain, so he can oversee security on a NATO training exercise called Landsea, which is actually a front for a peace conference between the PM and the US and USSR Presidents. We don’t learn this until the end of the book and how we get there takes an awfully long time. Bond is also left unaware of the full details of his mission. This leaves him doing a certain ammount of unnecessary detective work. M already knows exactly what is happening and why he never briefs his top agent properly becomes (again) something of a mystery. In Gardner’s hand this has happened all too often and his Bond is little more than an excitable pawn in an espionage world governed by the men in suits. There is a line, early in the novel, where Bond disputes that espionage is dead “because these days it’s all done by satellites.” Yet there is something about Gardner’s stories which actually seems to back up the statement. Bond doesn’t do a lot of spying any more. He just gets moved around to where the action is – like a chess piece.

The most striking illustration of this is when Bond is sent “on holiday” to Capri, essentially to try and tempt one of the villians into assassinating him. Bond spends most of the first day thinking the young maid Beatrice is the assassin, but she turns out to be an agent sent to protect him. When she is killed, Bond is captured by the villians, who in an elaborate ruse, persuade him they all work for the good guys and Beatrice really was the assassin. Later on we find out who told the truth and begin to wonder, as Bond does, why his people didn’t just capture the villians in the first place.

Gardner subsequently leaves a whole series of plot holes: Bond leaves the aircraft carrier undefended at a crucial time; Bond (and M) is suspicious of Clover (the villianess) from the start, but doesn’t do anything about her security breaches; the security services don’t check on the debriefing outpost at Northanger; a Harrier jet disappears during a test run to be loaded with a sidewinder missile and no one monitoring the exercise notices; it’s never explained how MI6 came across the tagline “Health depends on strength” and when they hear it near the climax, they deliberately ignore it. The list goes on.

The worst aspect of the story is Gardner’s inability to restrict the number of character’s he creates. There must be almost thirty of them and they all have his usual silly names that are impossible to pronounce or even dafter nick-names – e.g. Viper, Cat, Moggy, Desperate Dan, Jack the Ripper, Tawny Owl, the list is endless. He gives us three women who are all described as if they are naive, blushing innocents, when each one is a trained killer. The worst offender here is a Russian called Nikola Ratnikov. (She’s called this just so Gardner can continue with his endless nick-names, he calls her Niki The Rat; see what I mean?) She is a body guard to the President, but she gets gets hysterical when confronted with a dead body and ends up making love to Bond because she “feels so alone, so afraid.” It’s a ridiculous characterisation. The others come off little better and the less said about the main villian, the impossibly named Bassam Baradj, the better. He and a team of terrorists have coined themselves BAST, the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror, a group Bond likens to SPECTRE. But they have none of SPECTRE’s panache, even their acronyn is rubbish.

Gardner also gives us plenty of technical jargon, some of which is interesting, but it slows down his story telling, which plods enough as it is. Even the few moments of genuine excitement seem slow and methodical. Where he does come good is in providing a few traditional Ian Fleming-style elements: Bond does some detecting work in Somerset, he performs a car-swap with Tanner to evade any persuers, he burglar proofs his villa in Italy and his dislike of authority rears its head. There is also a hark back to Goldfinger’s tainted water supply as the inflitrators drug the ship’s food.

Overall though, WLOD is complicated and dull. Gardner has a good idea at the core of his story, but like the films of this time, he has seen fit to embellish it with so much more than is necessary. He seems to be repeating himself (I recognised elements from Role Of Honour, For Special Services and No Deals Mr Bond) but worse, he isn’t adding anything significantly new. Gardner’s James Bond may be a man for the modern age, but his author is losing his modern touch.

#24 godwulf

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Posted 30 April 2010 - 05:27 PM

I've just finished Win, Lose or Die, and I agree with pretty much all of chrisno1's review.

Bond has nearly always been at his best when working alone, living by his wits, trusting no one, and his back always to the wall. In WLoD, he is very much out of his element a good deal of the time - made to try to function as a military cop and gumshoe, having endless meetings and interviews, and - as someone else mentioned, earlier in the thread - looking and acting more like a chess pawn than anything else.

Sadly, one of the very few times in this book that Gardner's 007 shows a trace of the old, cold, cynical fire is late in the story, when he breaks the female sentry's neck. Earlier, when the bogus SIS interrogator insults and threatens Bond, then walks out leaving Bond speechless, I waited for the explosion...in vain. As in too much of this book, Bond seems to have had his fangs pulled; that, or someone is dosing his scrambled eggs with Xanax.

A couple of Gardner's more annoying traits are rampant in WLoD; one is his over-use of popular culture references; he seems to go out of his way to bring them up. Someone mentions gremlins, and Gardner has Bond thinking that most people nowadays would think only of the recent Spielberg movie, were they to hear the word. Gardner has Bond see signs advertising "Pub Grub" and "Good Food", and feels compelled to tell us how negatively Bond feels about them. Gardner's Bond, at times, resembles nothing so much as a grumpy old man, obsessed with the trivial annoyances of the world around him.

Another annoying thing that Gardner does many, many times in this book is to stop in his narrative to "translate" a word or phrase for Americans - as though his publisher had told him, "Look, John, your American readers are too stupid to know what that means, or how to look it up." This tendency reaches a peak of silliness or worse when, while rushing to the ship's bathroom to investigate a bloody murder, Gardner has Bond reflecting on the fact that the term "head", singular, is used to describe such a space in the American Navy, while the term "heads", plural, is used in the British Navy. So what - who cares?

Then, there is the overuse of the double/triple-agent idea, and never really being able to tell, from one minute to the next, who is on Bond's side and who is working for the enemy; as an occasional plot device, this can be effective, but Gardner absolutely beats it to death. All we can ever really be sure of is that, if a woman is involved, whether she turns out to be loyal friend or deadly foe, chances are about 9 to 1 that 007 will have hot, memorable sex with her at least once, and privately wonder whether she is the woman who will share the rest of his life. (To be fair, Fleming's Bond, of course, did exactly the same thing.)

Oh, and have I forgotten to mention that the "criminal mastermind" of this book is a moron? And, by the way, has anyone worked out - because Gardner apparently didn't - exactly how much 600 billion dollars would weigh, and how big the villain's private helicopter would have to be in order to pick it up? If the 600 billion dollar ransom was to be in the form of negotiable securities, or diamonds, or whatever, it would have been helpful to the story's already suspect credibility had that been mentioned.

I'm reading the Gardner novels, in order, for the first time, and I have to admit that the series, at least to this point, certainly does not seem to be living up to the promise of License Renewed and For Special Services.

#25 AMC Hornet

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Posted 01 May 2010 - 01:50 AM

Personally, I rank WLoD very highly - second only to LR, and I thought FSS - like Benson's TFoD - to be overproduced rubbish.

#26 dlb007

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Posted 03 May 2010 - 02:02 AM

I agree with you on one count: Win, Lose or Die was a pretty good novel! On the other hand, I actually liked For Special Services; it was far from serious; a really fun read.

#27 Righty007

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Posted 05 July 2010 - 05:19 AM

Can somebody tell me which chapter has Bond thinking about his parents' death? Thanks!

#28 Righty007

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Posted 06 July 2010 - 01:29 AM

Can somebody tell me which chapter has Bond thinking about his parents' death? Thanks!

Anybody? B)

#29 zencat

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Posted 06 July 2010 - 01:46 AM

No idea. Haven't read that book in a while.

#30 zencat

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Posted 08 July 2010 - 03:06 PM

Decided to re-read this. I'd forgotten so much. It's damn good!