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[chrisno1]

I bought most of these novels when they first came out, but I lost interest in them in the late '80s (they were very hard to get hold of) and they sit on my book shleves looking tired and lonely. So I took to re-reading them this year. I am a slow reader due to work and stuff but Ive manager LR, FSS, IB, ROH, NDMB and am currently on Scorpius. I rather like the plots of all of Gardner's novels, although like Fleming's they have dated, but my constant frustration is with the insistence on cross and double cross. It just becomes so boring. And also he has no turn of name like Fleming. Pussy Galore is a misogynist joke, but it has more of a ring to it than Percy Proud, who sounds like an Old Compton Street Queen, not a special agent. Someone should really have had a word! I also think Gardner struggled to make 007 his own character in the first few novels, but this was one of his attractions, marrying the new to the old. It worked well in LR and IB, but less so in what should have been an emotional FSS, but was spoilt by Leither's daughter and a plethora of unforgivably cartoonish villians. By ROH I think he was creating a real 1980s Bond, and as he persisted down this route his novels seem to become more like TV shows. Scorpius is a good example. There is almost too much going on and I am already bored by the plot which has taken half the book to develop...and then the villian is right on Bond's doorstep; as if! Fleming would turn in his grave. Having said all that Gardner's saving grace is always his ability to write good action scenes, its just his plots that are stodgy. My personal favourite is Ice Breaker, which is more like a movie than a novel, but which works really well, despite the obligitory distasteful characters. I dont have many of the other novels, but I guess I could track them down at book fairs.