British author John (Edmund) Gardner died of heart failure on 3 August 2007. Born in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, England, on 20 November 1926, he wrote fifty thrillers (including more than a dozen James Bond novels between 1981 and 1996).
According to The Independent, “his fictional characters included the cowardly secret agent Boysie Oakes (introduced in The Liquidator in 1964, the first of a series of books Gardner described as ‘born in the hope of being an amusing counter-irritant to the excesses of the many imitators of 007’) and Big Herbie Kruger (who first appeared in The Nostradamus Traitor in 1979). He also expanded and developed Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty in The Return of Moriarty (1974), The Revenge of Moriarty (1975), and a third volume, provisionally titled The Redemption of Moriarty, which he had just completed before his death.”
Gardner took over the Bond franchise in 1981 after the literary copyright owners, Glidrose, approached him. “What I wanted to do,” he said, “was take the character and bring Fleming’s Bond into the Eighties as the same man but with all he would have learned had he lived through the Sixties and Seventies.” His first Bond book was Licence Renewed (1981) “in which M reminds Bond that the 00 section has been abolished; however, M retains Bond as a troubleshooter, telling him ‘You’ll always be 007 to me.'” The entry Gardner considered his best was The Man from Barbarossa (1991).
Gardner announced at age 8 that he wanted to be a writer, but he had a very varied career before turning to professional writing. He started out as an Anglican priest, but after five years had a crisis of faith, which led him to serious drinking problems and a brief career as a Marine commando. “I must have been the worst commando in the world,” he reported. “I bent an aeroplane I was learning to fly. They say a Tiger Moth’s undercarriage will stay intact no matter how hard it bounces, but I am the living proof that it doesn’t.”
For a time he was a magician, too, and was admitted to the Magic Circle “at the highest level possible for someone not earning his living from magic,” according to his daughter, Alexis Walmsley. “It started when he was 13 years old, and when he met my mother [Margaret, whom he married in 1952] she would sometimes be his stage assistant.”
Before writing his first book, which was the non-fiction Spin the Bottle (an autobiographical exploration of his alcoholism), he was a drama critic. He is survived by his two daughters and one son. His wife, Margaret, died in 1997.
During the years he was writing James Bond, he told friends: “Unhappily, I feel I’m probably going to be remembered as the ‘guy who took over from Fleming’. I’m very grateful to have been selected to keep Bond alive. But I’d much rather be remembered for my own work than I would for Bond.”
His full bibliography is available on Wikipedia, and his personal web site is www.john-gardner.com.