I like this series, Qwerty.
I was always partial to a bit of Gardner.
(See my Gardner cherry broken here)Well, my heads up on Role of Honour was actually before I read Icebreaker.
See my Icebreaker cherry broken here!But Role Of Honour was special.
Firstly, I feverishly read the odd passage on the odd trip to WHSmith bookshop in Brent Cross Shopping Centre - one of the UK's first shopping malls (I could not afford paying the hardback price - and my parents were in a non-negotiable mood - guess they'd hoped I'd have grown out of it my now!). I loved the cover and was eager to read it. I had tried to order it from my local library (I had only just realized that books came out in hardcover first!) but it was taking ages.
Anyway, time rolled on. The day after Live Aid in July 1985, my twin
brother and I went went to Heathrow to fly (alone!) to the USA for a long holiday. As is standard practice, airport bookshops (beyond the departure gate) have pre-release paperback books. As there, surprising me, was the blue blackground, roulette wheel pre-release Coronet paperback of ROH. Needless to say I bought it and devoured it on the long trip. I loved it - the ASP 9mm was supercool, as was the Bentley (edu-tainment: a Mulsanne Turbo is a little over 6.5 ft wide), the airship finale, the less overt action, the lack of double-crossing and the descriptions of what we now all know as Virtual Reality!
Staying with my cousins in California, I discovered comic shops (we don't really have them in the UK) and proper shopping malls! My grandma bought me Raymond Benson's Bedside Companion (not out in the UK!) and it was an epiphany! I bought the current issue of the best Bond fan magazine ever, Bondage, with John Gardner on the cover (and read that he was not really that pleased with ROH!). I then went into a Wallmart or something (amused to see a counter selling all kinds of guns and other weaponary in amongst the watermelon bubblegum and grape soda!) and saw racks of those rust coloured, silhouette-adorned Berkely paperback ROH's (they were never piled high like this in Blighty!). A cursory glance informed me that the US version was
different! I got it immediately (hey, holiday pocket money from a doting grandma sure came in handy!) and enjoyed it all over again, picking out the slightly extended text and enjoying the melancholic last paragraph not in the UK version. In all these shops, my brother and I were like Peachy and Danny from
The Man Who Would Be King when they were first presented with the wealth in the jewel rooms!
Upon my return home, I saw the standard UK paperback was a chunky affair with huge type and was different to my version.
The summer of 1985 was great. I saw AVTAK and then
went to the Golden Gate bridge! Saw City Hall! And it was the summer of Role of Honour.
Both events were not my introduction to Americans (had met my American family and knew a bunch of Americans from school).
But it was my introduction to America. And what a wonderful introduction it was too! Americans are one of the finest, most misunderstood and greatest peoples in the world, reminding me of that speech in
Superman, Marlon Brando as Kal-El's last message to Jor-El in Superman* about humans ("Their capacity for good...").
I have been fortunate to count a bunch of Americans as my friends.*that and
the terrific closing speech in the woefully under-rated
The American President
?
