Since the first of the year, I've managed - in the time left to me by work, family, and reading other things - to enjoy, in order, all of Fleming, Amis, Pearson, and, now, Gardner, and have started on Benson...my goal being to have digested the whole canon before Jeffrey Deaver's entry appears in the Spring.
With Gardner, things looked very promising from the beginning. I really enjoyed
License Renewed, and, with the exception of
Icebreaker, the plot of which I thought unnecessarily convoluted, I was generally pleased with the stories and Bond's place in them - for the first six or seven volumes, at any rate. (My major problem with the series, to that point, as I've expressed elsewhere on the board, was and remains Gardner's following Fleming's bad example of causing far too many of his American characters to speak like half-witted stereotypes from a '30s B movie.)
Beginning, I think, with
Win, Lose or Die, Gardner's books appeared to be far less James Bond stories, than simply thrillers - very loosely defined, in some cases - that happened to have a character named James Bond in them. All sense of who and what Bond is would disappear for long stretches, and he would be just one more bland, rather two-dimensional cog in the machinery.
The Man From Barbarossa may have been the nadir, in that respect; I found it sad that virtually the only scene in that book in which the "old" Bond, the real Bond, seemed to make an appearance was one in which he kills an unconscious officer in order to steal his uniform and identity, and experiences a moment of moral unquiet and regret for having been forced to do so.
Gardner's other great and annoying fault, which seemed to grow worse as the series went on, was his tendency to pause in the middle of the action in order to muse upon some trivial oddity of culture or language, or to make a rather lame and juvenile joke about it. One example, from
Win, Lose or Die, comes to mind: Bond, aboard a Naval vessel, is hurrying toward the scene of a gruesome murder, and uses the time to muse upon the difference in how British and American sailors designate their bathrooms. I hate to say it, but too much of the time Gardner sounds like (and, worse, makes
Bond sound like) an elderly man beginning to lose his focus. I'm quite sure that Gardner, in the course of travelling around and researching his books, came upon much that interested and amused him; unfortunatly, too often he seems to be attempting to transpose those interests and proclivities onto 007, with embarrassing results for the character.
For what it's worth, Gardner's last,
Cold (or
Cold Fall, as it's known in the States) is probably the best of the latter half of JG's entries in the series. To be honest, I read Benson's short story,
Blast from the Past the same night that I finished
Cold, and immediately wished that I had more Gardner to read.
