James Bond is back

Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel

By Anthony Horowitz, Harper, 320 pages, $28

Scanning the dim interior of Le Caprice, the writer failed to see anyone answering the description of the man he was looking for. There were the prosperous bald lunching with the dangerously chic. A scented cloud of Guerlain hung over the room. “You would be ... ?” asked the girl at the desk, looking steadily at the writer from beneath heavy mascara.

“The reservation should be under ...” He tailed off, wondering if 007 had booked under his real name. Unlikely, he surmised. He was already feeling uncomfortable. It was unseasonably warm for April. Normally he would have lunched tieless but 007 was Old School, so he had suited up and knotted a dark red silk tie at the strangling collar.

A light tap on the shoulder. The writer spun round to find himself faced by a feral smile set in a lightly bronzed face. The writer took mental notes: chin, cleft; eyes, chestnut with little specks of gold in the iris; black hair thickly swept back; sardonic eyebrows. “Mr Horowitz, if I’m not mistaken?” The voice was low, studiously charming, a burr as soft as Scottish heather. Bond separated the syllables as if the writer’s name was a private joke: Mister Horror-Wits. “Shall we?”

Perspiring freely, Horowitz followed the dove-grey silk and wool suit to a corner table. “Now tell me, Mr Horowitz, what makes you think you will succeed where others have stumbled? Not quite your usual line of work is it?” The cat smile again. “And the stakes are so high, aren’t they? Mind you, I like a man with a taste for risk.”

The writer felt a bead of sweat form on his brow and prayed it would not run down his nose. All appetite lost, he wondered for the first time if this had really been a good idea.

Oh yes, it was! Anthony Horowitz has written a humdinger of a Bond story, so cunningly crafted and thrillingly paced that 007’s creator would have been happy to have owned it. The screenwriter and novelist, a life-long fan, knows that, when he wanted to, Ian Fleming could turn on the literary juice with the best of them.

The French beach scene that opens “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” is a brilliant piece of atmospheric writing, at once innocent and sinister like Fleming’s whole project, and the ending of “You Only Live Twice”, with its debt to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fable “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, is so unexpectedly off-kilter that, in the film, producers Saltzman and Broccoli had to replace it with the psycho-ferret Donald Pleasence version of Blofeld whizzing through his fake volcano on — the latest thing! — a monorail.

But from his brilliant first chapter on, Horowitz is a pitch-perfect mimic of the Fleming one-line punch: “Rain swept into London like an angry bride.” “Silence sat in the room, an uninvited guest.” He even gets the clichés spot on. “Just he and the Maserati, plunging into the green hell.”

“Trigger Mortis” (down to the tacky title, for Fleming revelled in tacky) is what you would call a Loving Tribute. Horowitz is a purist, so the mood is martini-nostalgic even if he gets the recipe a little off. The time is the 1950s, the Cold War; M is still pipe-smoking and dyspeptic; the Soviet secret service Smersh is up to no good and there are rockets to be interfered with.

The book is the best Bond movie you’ll ever see without actually having to see the movie. There is a nail-biter at the Nurburgring racetrack, the mother of all chases deep in the New York subway, and the obligatory procession of excitingly hard women.

The uber-villain gets to deliver the usual lengthy autobiographical narrative explaining how he has come to be dead to all human feeling, and Bond, also as usual, responds in the most insulting way he can by brushing off the pathos as the self-indulgent ravings of a sociopath. As a result he is consigned to the kind of elaborately sadistic fate from which the wide-eyed reader cannot possibly believe 007 will escape, even as we all know he must.

Is this all too vague for you? Of course it is. But anything else would be a criminal spoiler and take it from me, you really don’t want “Trigger Mortis” spoiled.

“Well done, Anthony,” said Bond as he extended a hand. “You certainly pulled it off. I must tell you there were doubters but of course I wasn’t one of them. So now you won’t take it amiss, will you, if I point out just one or two little errors ... ? Nothing serious, of course ... Your Bond might indeed have been delighted to see a Château Pétrus 1950 on the menu of an English country establishment but, my dear Anthony, he would never have drunk it, not a mere seven years after the vintage. The 1945, on the other hand, was coming round nicely.

“And you know I wouldn’t have perused the front page of ‘The Times’ for news because in 1957, you recall, there wasn’t any on that front page ...” The smile gleamed over the rim of his glass. “Next time, why don’t you send me the manuscript? Then I could save you your blushes.” He lifted the chilled glass. “Your very good health.”

–Financial Times