142 replies to this topic

[Guy Haines]

I think Trigger Mortis could be filmed, but I wonder if it could be anything other than a period piece? Key to the plot is the start of the US/Soviet space race, which of course no longer exists as such - indeed the US is reliant on Russia at the moment to get its astronauts to the International Space Station.

Perhaps in a present day film of TM, since our villain is Korean it could be a North Korean driven plot to sabotage the US and its space programme? Of course it would also involve North Korean suddenly deciding it was entering cars in Formula 1 races also - unlikely, but with the boy Kim in charge, you never know! ;-)

[marktmurphy]

Bond entering the German Grand Prix in 1957 is hard enough to swallow, but in 2016...!

 

The refugee stuff is more relevant than they probably realised when the book was being written, but the rest is pretty heavily based in the period. It's tricky.

[coco1997]

Anyone done a circa 1966 fancast for a Connery TRIGGER MORTIS film set between GF and TB?

[Guy Haines]

Bond entering the German Grand Prix in 1957 is hard enough to swallow, but in 2016...!
 
The refugee stuff is more relevant than they probably realised when the book was being written, but the rest is pretty heavily based in the period. It's tricky.

Agreed, filming TM in our day and age would be awkward, and I think whoever took on the task of screenwriter would wind up having to make some major changes - but it's not exactly the first time that's happened when even Fleming's novels have transferred to the big screen.

Bond in a Grand Prix race? Not quite that far fetched for me - we've already seen him use fast cars, and fast vehicles of other types on numerous occasions over the decades. And he's not the only one - there have been two episodes of The Saint in which Simon Templar entered motor races to foil a villain's sabotage plot against a driver or car winning a race.

Incidentally, Bond entering in the 1950s would have been more of a risk than today - according to a "Motor Sport" special I've been reading recently about legendary Grand Prix drivers, there was quite an attrition rate of drivers killed or injured then compared with now.

[Dustin]

Incidentally, Bond entering in the 1950s would have been more of a risk than today - according to a "Motor Sport" special I've been reading recently about legendary Grand Prix drivers, there was quite an attrition rate of drivers killed or injured then compared with now.

Till '94 an average of two drivers were killed each season. In some years four, in a few none. But death was quite a regular occurrence in Formula 1/Grand Prix racing. Makes one wonder...

[Harmsway]

I wonder how this is selling.

[marktmurphy]

Anyone done a circa 1966 fancast for a Connery TRIGGER MORTIS film set between GF and TB?

 

 

It's the only Bond book I've read where I've pictured Connery in it all the way through.

[Dustin]

I wonder how this is selling.

Somehow my impression is not too well. It was launched, saw some discount from day one, the usual suspects reviewing it - and now it's already old hat. In two or three years the next one is likely to see a similar fate.

[sharpshooter]

Agreed. It's a good book, but it kind of came and went without much fanfare. Horowitz's comments about Elba received more attention.

[Harmsway]

That's unfortunate. It's the best of the bunch, but the numerous recent attempts to manufacture a Bond novel "event" undoubtedly exhausted public interest.

[SecretAgentFan]

It seems to sell best in Great Britain - on amazon it´s on No. 4 for spy fiction, No. 74 in contemporary fiction.

 

Other countries... well, not so well.  I could imagine that SPECTRE will lift the sales and increase interest for the holiday buying season.

[Harmsway]

I could imagine that SPECTRE will lift the sales and increase interest for the holiday buying season.

Let's hope so.

[Dustin]

Just was at a local bookstore - Hugendubel, large chain here in Germany - and asked the woman in charge of decorating their tables and wall shelves, their most important places to sell. She didn't have anything like a definite overview but according to her it's a pretty bad seller and will soon lose its prominent place on the thriller table.

While she was still relatively young she remembers Horowitz selling far better in the children's/young adult corner with his Alex Rider books. Even his Sherlock Holmes - still a relative oddity in the mainstream market - sold better than this.

I think sharpshooter is spot-on here, his remarks about Elba garnered him more interest than his book. And a good deal of the people discussing whether Elba is supposedly 'too street' didn't even know who Horowitz is, nor did they care for his book.

Note also that in Germany books aren't just sold on discount. If Trigger Mortis doesn't pick up speed soon - and right at the moment it doesn't look too likely - it will disappear from shelves before SPECTRE even premieres. That in turn means the books go back to the publisher. Now, if IFP announce another Bond novel, by Horowitz or by whoever else will want the gig, in two years from now, then publishers will look at their figures and be astonished to note they still have half the print run from the last one in storage. From a year where a Bond film came out.

Conclusion: don't buy; or only at a bargain price.

[Double-Oh Agent]

That's too bad. Trigger Mortis is a good, solid, entertaining read.

 

I suppose not having a successful Bond novel three times in the last seven years has dwindled interest, particularly with different authors every time. It makes it hard to have any consistency or confidence in the product for the general public when that happens. Fool them once, twice, three times they're not going to go for it a fourth time at least until you prove you can deliver.

 

I hope that IFP give Anthony Horowitz another crack at it because he has a good grasp of the Bond character/novel and he is the best of the recent continuation authors (although that is not saying a whole lot. Sebastian Faulks didn't take it seriously and undermined his product, Jeffery Deaver lacked a little something in his updating of the character while giving Bond the overly used current trend of dramatizing the hero's backstory by making the death of his parents suspicious/mysterious, and William Boyd delivered a slow, boring adventure.)

 

Hopefully, Horowitz's next crack comes sooner rather than later. More continuity (and good continuity at that) is what is needed now and Horowitz is off to a good start in showing he can deliver it.

[sharpshooter]

I suppose not having a successful Bond novel three times in the last seven years has dwindled interest, particularly with different authors every time. It makes it hard to have any consistency or confidence in the product for the general public when that happens. Fool them once, twice, three times they're not going to go for it a fourth time at least until you prove you can deliver.

 

I think that's it. The public are fatigued. I think DMC was a success in terms of interest and sales, but it all dwindled with the subsequent books.  

[SecretAgentFan]

The timing of the release maybe was wrong.  The whole Bond publicity machine is just getting started.  To have the novel come out after SPECTRE would have probably helped.

[Dustin]

Probably. Also the promo campaign could have used a little cross-reference from the film. But evidently the lit-Bond branch is now a fairly limited sideline of the The Bond Corporation ™ and merely used every so often to keep it secure in the realm of the brand. It's just a fact that 99 per cent of people on the street associate Bond with the films and nothing else.

Meanwhile the reading public is strongly interested in thrillers, but not necessarily in Bond. If you look at the market you can clearly see author's series are going strong, nearly every paperback now features the author's name in bold letters while the title is several dots smaller. Also mirrors the fact that most authors now have more than one character going; or even don't use a series character.

Bond in this market is more an extension of the classic pulp character, sadly minus any freshness or constant quality. Let's face it, for the most part the books now sail on the back of the films. But the books are not the films and many lack their own specific redeeming qualities that kept the originals going.

[SecretAgentFan]

I´m looking forward to reading "Trigger Mortis" - but I do wonder if it were helpful to tie in future novels with the films in a way that they could imagine missions between the movies, referencing the era of the particular actor.

 

Could help drumming up business - and since the films only come every three years novels could benefit from that.

[Dustin]

The thing is, EON is not into books, they are pretty busy getting a film off the ground every once in a while and that alone costs them most of their energy. IFP...well, if we take a closer look they are not into books either; they are solely into the Fleming canon and branched out with diminishing results. EON has no interest in watering down their product, IFP has not the scope, funds and manpower to really turn the wheel around. Perhaps they even got their hands tied from getting their Bond closer to EON's. So they are stuck with efforts that only go so far. They've got themselves a niche but they can hardly expand from there. And there's another not-so-different example even, the Bourne books seem to follow a similar pattern of being mainly written for the ever smaller number of fans of Ludlum's original. None of them are big sellers or will ever get much recognition beyond their target audience. And few of them will be fans coming from the films.

[SecretAgentFan]

Bummer.  

 

Do you think that setting the novels within the Craig era might even be prohibited by EON?

[Dustin]

It's interesting that the Project X thingy went over board without any much fanfare. When Deaver was announced and details about 'rebooting' leaked everything looked like there would be some kind of effort to turn lit-Bond into its own 'modern' brand. I can imagine that caused some raised eyebrows over at Eon-House.

There is the question of copyright that's playing into all this, a topic that's extremely sensitive and that now led to Bond having become a registered trademark to secure the character firmly in Eon's sphere of influence. Even IFP now uses Bond 'with permission'.

Had IFP followed through on the reboot they would effectively have created their own golem of their property. What influence would this have had on copyright? Can Deaver's Bond seriously be considered as Fleming's? When he's evidently a wholly different person?

Tricky field, very tricky. You can easily spend the net-earnings of all books since Faulks' on lawyers and expert assessments concerning this matter. A can of worms they probably closed just in time with housing all rights with Eon and giving IFP only permission of use. On what conditions though...

[glidrose]

Sales thread up - and the news ain't pretty. In short it's selling better than Solo, but much worse than DMC and CB.

http://debrief.comma...-sales-figures/

[sharpshooter]

The timing of the release maybe was wrong. The whole Bond publicity machine is just getting started. To have the novel come out after SPECTRE would have probably helped.

I was thinking this recently. For me, Trigger Mortis was an ace up their sleeve, and it's a shame it generally came and went. I still think sales would've been on the lower side of the scale (not because it's a poor book), but a closer proximity to SPECTRE's hype train would've had to have had some positive effect.