Licence to kill ending1/22/2024 ![]() ![]() “Had sex” is a phrase Fleming didn’t use he preferred “made love.”įleming also would have given the torture scenes in the Magic Room not just greater detail but more sensual immediacy. I also note a handful of anachronisms and infelicities. Overall, there are a few too many spelled-out references to past books and characters. Horowitz reuses two Fleming chapter titles (“The Finger on the Trigger” and “The Inhuman Element”) and his chapters in Russia are inspired by the meetings and architectural descriptions in From Russia With Love. Readers will find plenty of direct callbacks to prior adventures as well. As he did with Tracy DiVicenzo and Tiffany Case, Bond provides the therapeutic combination of someone to talk to and a lover. Katya Leonova, like so many other women in the series, is a bird with a wing down. Hence Scaramanga’s lifesaving bullet, embedded in the narrative and Bond’s body.įurther in the Fleming tradition, Bond wins his way to a woman’s heart by listening to her story. Bond’s mental takedown of Schönefeld Airport is perfectly in keeping with Fleming’s knowing tone.Īs in Fleming, pain is important, not merely for the sake of sadism, but to provide a heightened sense of existence and reality. Horowitz’s use of detail astutely evokes Fleming’s, whether in describing the source of black roses, a bugged Selectric typewriter, BOAC flight details, or the repugnance of a Russian spy (“His lips were bulbous, the words spat out like grape pips”). A few others stand out: “The car was a two-tone Hillman Imp, grey on beige, the colours trapped in a loveless marriage.” ![]() The first line-“In death, as in life, the navy leaves nothing to chance”-is a fine one. Whatever the differences, I think Amis and Fleming would consider With a Mind to Kill an effective Bond thriller. Kingsley Amis was a literary novelist whose pace and approach to character and style were more deliberative than Horowitz or Fleming’s, as shown even in a genre book like Colonel Sun. Fleming was a stylist and wrote his thrillers in a headlong rush with less concern for plot he compensated with pace, detail, and the quirkiness of his imagination. Though not a stylist, his functional prose never gets in the story’s way. Horowitz is a natural storyteller: prolific and good with plot. But that hardly matters with a book this strong. ![]() The worst thing about the book is the title-not since the days of John Gardner has a Bond continuation novel sported a memorable one. What Fleming didn’t do, whether from illness or disinclination, Anthony Horowitz has done in With a Mind to Kill. Instead, Bond went to Jamaica and battled Scaramanga in what is regarded as the weakest Bond novel. One could hardly wait for the follow-up: inevitable capture by the KGB, questionings and torturings and brainwashings, break out (aided probably by some beautiful firm-breasted female major of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate), the slaying of Colonel-General Grubozaboyschikov of SMERSH, and perhaps of Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of RUMID for good measure, in revenge for what happened on the Orient Express in 1957, and final escape over the Wall. In his New Statesman review of The Man with the Golden Gun, Kingsley Amis described the expectations set by You Only Live Twice: If you haven’t read the book, do so before proceeding further! Note to the reader: this review discusses several twists and surprises. ![]()
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