106 replies to this topic

[MkB]

Thanks for the good work, Harry!

Well, you leave us with quite a cliffhanger!
But I'm under the impression we'll hear again about this Nadesh Sabah...

Cheers, and keep writing!

[Harry Fawkes]

Thanks MKb. Glad you liked it.

Oh, Nadesh will be in it alright.

And so will the mysterious organisation called Shaheel Peshant

That is, of course, if our man Bond survives to see another day!

HARRY FAWKES'
THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU DIE

[Double-0-7]

Very nice work, Mr Fawkes. I enjoyed it immensely and tended to forget it wasn't a Glidrose-approved author.

I do hope our boy survives his slip in personal security!

[Harry Fawkes]

Many thanks Double-0-7 .

Glad you liked it .

TROUBLESHOOTER is, I may now safely say, an intro to my third and final Bond fanfiction novel called THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU DIE (My Materpiece ) .

This time the story will be more traditional in style but with the usual Harry Fawkes' cliffhanger bits .

JAMES BOND IS GOING TO BE ONE HELL OF A PISSED OFF SPY WHEN (IF) HE COMES ROUND AND THE MAN CALLED APOCALYPSE IS IN FOR ONE HELL OF A SURPRISE

AND SO IS C.E.R.N

James Bond

in

The Moment Before You Die

IAN FLEMING'S MASTERSPY WILL RETURN IN THE FAN-FIC EVENT OF THE YEAR

[MkB]

Fan-Fic Event Of The Year??? So we can expect something in the next months? Cool!
By the way, if I'm not mistaken you've planted some "Easter Eggs" in Troubleshooter, haven't you? I do like it, it's funny to find them

[Harry Fawkes]

Thanks MkB as for the 'Easter Eggs' I am glad you noticed . As for THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU DIE coming out this year: Yep, I should (if everything goes according to plan) be ready to start posting next month.

So, mon ami, hang on and fasten your seatbelt for the ride of your life in the best of the Harry Fawkes' Bond trilogy

(My mum always said I should have been a salesman instead of a soldier )

[Harry Fawkes]

I A N F L E M I N G’ S
J A M E S B O N D
O O 7
_____________________I N______________________

H A R R Y F A W K E S’

The
Moment
Before
You Die

OCTOBER 2008

[Harry Fawkes]

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE
THE ULTIMATE TERROR
THE ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE…

JAMES BOND
IS BACK

James Bond, Ian Fleming’s master spy, has returned and he’s better than ever!

ONE OF THE WORST INCIDENTS IN BRITISH HISTORY HAS OCCURRED PLUNGING GREAT BRITAIN INTO CRISIS

Confronted with a situation they had never dared to imagine: with the second in line to the British throne a prisoner, the demands are high and the deadline breathtakingly short!

BUT THE HIGHLY ORGANISED AND RUTHLESS CRIMINAL ORGANSISATION BEHIND THIS ACT OF SHEER TERROR HAS UNDERESTIMATED ONE IMPORTANT FACTOR:
007

BOND IS BACK in the arms of more beautiful women and on the trail of one of the worst villains he’s ever encountered
BOND IS BACK in one of his most dangerous missions yet
BOND IS BACK assigned by M to step into a world as perilous as any he has ever known and from which he may never return…

I A N F L E M I N G’ S
J A M E S B O N D
O O 7
_____________________I N______________________

H A R R Y F A W K E S’
T R O U B L E S H O O T E R

BOND HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER

[Harry Fawkes]

AUTHOR'S COMPLAIN... NOTE

From the outstanding nil response (Good or bad) I have received on this page from the readers out there (are there any ), something tells me Troubleshooter didn't go down well with the majority of FF fans out there (who can blame them ) .

Well, that was to be expected I suppose . At the end of the day I'm just an wannabe writer who thinks he can try his luck at a bit of Bonding

However, this time, for my very last FF Bond novel I will, instead of going to all the trouble of cutting, pasting and re-formatting the stuff for the FF page (why bloody bother ) (Not to mention the fact that writing and posting my work on the FF site (I know, I know, how arrogant of me to call it that) makes me feel as though I'm having sex without a partner - Was I good darling and all that stuff) I have decided to send it to the readers who actually did respond to NOBODY CHEATS DEATH and TROUBLESHOOTER.

This I shall do via Email attachment.

All FF Readers sigh in relief and together shout: 'No more Harry Fawkes Bond Fan Fiction! Thank God for that!'

Don't worry you four out there (you know who you are ) I will ensure that you receive it in crisp form complete with an amateur cover once it is ready.

This way you will be, in appreciation to your comments and responses to my previous 2 Bond FF Novels, [i]exclusive readers of HARRY FAWKES' THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU DIE, the last of the HF's Bond trilogy.

'Oh no,' the four cry out. 'He's going to torture us privately now!'

[terminus]

Shame if you really feel this way, Harry. Your work is great, I'm working my way through Bond fanfiction and expect to get to Troubleshooter within the next month!

[MkB]

AUTHOR'S COMPLAIN... NOTE

From the outstanding nil response (Good or bad) I have received on this page from the readers out there (are there any ), something tells me Troubleshooter didn't go down well with the majority of FF fans out there (who can blame them ) .

Well, I understand the feeling, but you really shouldn't see it that way. Look at other FF discussion threads: it's just the same. Just visit the Forever Yours With Regrets discussion thread: there are 241 posts dated before
the collection was published, and since then, only... 60 (many of them due to the tremendous effort of MHazard, who wrote an individual detailed review for each story)! It doesn't mean people don't read and/or enjoy, just that they don't seem prone to react.

Don't lose interest, boy, some readers here don't

...instead of going to all the trouble of cutting, pasting and re-formatting the stuff for the FF page...

* whistles innocently *

Mmmmh, about the cutting / pasting / formatting FF trouble, you may find some solace here...

[ImTheMoneypenny]

I'm catching up! Only a few more chapters to go!

As a side note I actually know a James Da Silva! Well he calls himself Jimmy.

This is a great story. A thrill ride, my friend! Don't be discouraged by not a lot of readers, I don't have very many for DA either. But do keep up writing! You're too good to stop.

[Harry Fawkes]

That's very kind of you ITM I am working hard on TMBD at the moment. Glad you are enjoying Troubleshooter. You'll love my last one then!

[ImTheMoneypenny]

Just finished! All I can say is. . .


WOW!! What An Ending!

[terminus]

Part One, Chapter 1

We meet a new 007. Sean D'Arcy - which means I'm picturing James D'Arcy, whose name I've heard batted around as a candidate to play Bond in the future. Engaged in an expositionary dialogue with Grazianizi (a role I can't help but picture Giancarlo Gianini in) we learn about a villainous figure called Salvatore Rossi and witness a Double-Oh platoon assault on his base of operations in Sicily, reminiscent of the St Bartholemew assault in FYEO albeit with a more Craig-esque flavor to it.

[terminus]

Part One, Chapter 2

More fun with Sean D'Arcy who wants to resign and we get out first hint that Fawkes' Double-Oh section isn't Fleming's. The boss is a chap refered to as the Colonel - not the Rear Admiral Sir Miles Messervy of old. And he's being stalked by a beautiful pair of women, a blonde and a brunette.

Part One, Chapter 3

Hopefully this chapter picks up, the writing in the last was good but nothing happened so it was somewhat boring. And we do get some action - with Jano and her Sicilian goons kidnapping Prince William.

[chrisno1]

Dear Harry,

As promised, I am reading my way through your back catalogue and over the course of the last few evenings, I completed Trouble Shooter. May I first congratulate you on an excellent title, one I have always considered a brilliant headline for a movie / book and suits the world of 007 perfectly. Does the rest of the novel live up to the expectation of that succinct title? Well, yes and no.

Firstly, the issues I had with Nobody Cheats Death regarding excessive violence and story structure seem to have been solved. You had a clear linear timeframe and while you may have concentrated too much on the villain of the piece, it didn’t hurt the overall impression, but gave the novel a solid foundation. I wasn’t surprised by Sabine’s (Jano’s) reappearance, but her character is underdeveloped. You don’t add anything new to her persona and in fact you repeat to a greater or lesser extent everything we already saw from her in the first novel. Other than Bond, I felt she was the only significant character, but while Sabine/Jano gallivants around London at breakneck speed, Bond seems restricted to a mixture of desk duty and ‘trouble shooting.’ M pulls him in at a time of crisis, but Bond spends a lot of time going for showers and reading data documents.

Thankfully, there is remarkably less action in this novel and when it does come rather than extending the scenes, the fights and gun battles add to the scenario. I still felt there was an over reliance on killing or maiming. I didn’t do a body count, but it did seem rather high, although the impression I had was that Bond himself only disposed of a handful of villains. What intrigued me most was the suggestion that Bond’s demeanour, his very stare and ‘black market’ interrogation technique, would be enough to achieve the required result (witness Cacciatollo’s hopelessness).

Generally though I didn’t feel I was reading a James Bond novel. Here, even more so than your previous effort, Bond is part of a team. Indeed he doesn’t even appear until something like page 50. This has its pluses and minuses in that it can enable a writer to draw out the significance of other characters, but this can be at the expense of the central one. I don’t think you succeeded in either.

The second part of the novel ‘007’ was, on the whole, the most successful section of the book. You gave a wonderful evocation of Jamaica and Bond’s retired life in it, his sadness over Sam and the restlessness of his station. There’s a little affair for Bond, but its significance to the story is lost on me. Like the ‘death’ of Sabine in Nobody Cheats Death, I wondered if you were concocting your own ‘stalking horse’ for a future novel. During this section, you veered very dangerously towards plagiarism. At some points the writing wasn’t so much Fleming-esque as his ‘greatest hits and bits.’ Some sentences felt lifted from the very pages of Dr No or From Russia With Love and while this provided you with some insight and wonderful atmosphere, I began to question whose novel I was reading. Flattery is fine, theft is not. These pages were so markedly different to the opening gambit, where the Sean D’Arcy character is experiencing similar second thoughts. The plight of the SAS officer felt very real, Bond’s mental agonies slightly forced in construction. I felt there was more than a touch of personal experience regarding Sean D’Arcy’s situation and that needed to be brought into James Bond’s world.

(Incidentally, I thought a Shamelady was a Nigerian flower that stayed closed until you tickled it? That’s what Charles Hood and James Mayo told me....)

The kidnap plot was intriguing and you executed the rescue mission superbly. There was good research (insider knowledge?) on surveillance techniques and SAS/military procedures here. But you made the mistake of telegraphing the success of the rescue by telling us the guards were going to die from their oversights. You repeated this with Sabine / Jano in a later chapter and on both occasions it kills the suspense you are building.

It was after this point I started to lose interest in the novel and it slid a very slippery slope from here. The scenes became shorter and lacked the earlier attention to detail. One chapter (‘Bullet Catchers’) was particularly poor. Parts of it, like Bond and Kylie’s flirtation and the PM briefing, read as though your characters were sharing afternoon tea. I also struggled to believe no-one had followed up that photograph before Bond found it (had the files just been sitting around without anyone researching them? Seems rather remiss of M) and your lead into its discovery was glib and short. The public accosting of Cacciatollo was badly executed, certainly your least interesting piece of action. When you sit this demeaning public scuffle next to Bond’s beautifully executed escape from Karl and his henchmen, I had to swallow a big dose of salt. Was I reading the same novel? By Jano’s demise I had given up on the endless interrogations and running around London. Everything was starting to get repetitive and I wasn’t convinced you had the confidence in the tale either, Harry. Me-thinks you might play it differently now.

You did, however, end the story on a high, and I thought the Epilogue was well constructed and thoughtful. You combined the best of what you achieved in Part One and Two and brought something quite new and different to your take on James Bond. The care worn exterior longing for the soft life still struggled under the guise of the hardened killer, the drudgery of the day-to-day was taking over and making him lazy, his eventual downfall. This was writing of a high standard, Harry, and you needed more of this throughout Trouble Shooter to lift it.

Yours in readership, Chris