After Colonel Sun (1968) by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner was the next writer to be asked by Glidrose (now IFPL) to write further adventures of James Bond. He wrote, like Fleming, fourteen Bond books, plus novelisations of the films GoldenEye and Licence to Kill, from 1981 to 1996.
Before becoming an author of fiction in the early 1960s John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer, a journalist and, for a short time, a priest in the Church of England. 'Probably the biggest mistake I ever made,' he says. 'I confused the desire to please my father with a vocation which I soon found I did not have.'
In all, Gardner had fifty-five novels to his credit - many of them best-sellers (his Maestro was a New York Times Book of the Year). Sadly John Gardner died on Friday 3rd August 2007. John was a highly respected and admired member of the Bond family and he will be greatly missed.
