With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel

Product Information

The second guy is given the same task, he looks very unhappy, but goes into the room to find his wife, but he just can't bring himself to do it and walks out with his arm around her, both in tears, apologising to the CIA management that he's not their man.

A spy is dead. A legend is born. This is how it all began. The explosive prequel to Casino Royale, from bestselling author Anthony Horowitz. Katya Leonova is a far more rounded Bond lady than the norm for these novels, and Horowitz, I think, does well to make her changes of view and emotions believable. As for the villains? They’re all, quite rightly, thoroughly nasty bastards! Before traveling from Leningrad to Moscow by train, Bond reminisces about his encounter with Red Grant aboard the Orient Express.

Interactive

At the same time, he knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any other woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking "a room with a view". For James Bond, the same view would always pall. What makes the Horowitz books so compelling and unique is that they really feel like modern versions of Fleming's texts. Horowitz is the only Bond continuation author who was able to use unpublished Ian Fleming material and weave it into wholly original adventures. In Trigger Mortis, this results in some actual Fleming prose lifted from a manuscript called “Hell on Wheels,” which gives one racecar sequence a heart-stopping zing. In Forever and a Day, some of Fleming’s travelogue prose is incorporated, as are some concepts from an unmade James Bond TV series. While these details give the Horowitz Bond novels an extra touch of legitimacy, you’d hardly notice which aspects came from Horowitz and which came from Fleming. The prose style of these books is perfect. If Horowitz were James Bond’s tailor, he’d be like Eva Green in the 2006 movie version of Casino Royale, able to size up Bond and create the perfect suit for him with just one glance. In addition to the flashes of psychological realism, Horowitz’s Bond is also more politically progressive by default, mostly because this version of Bond doesn’t only encounter homosexual villains, but instead has cool gay friends like the agent Charles Henry Duggan, introduced in Trigger Mortis. As Duggan says to Bond, “The trouble with you, James, is you’re basically a prude.” It's a smart inversion of our perception of the famous secret agent. It’s not that James Bond is this sex god, able to do whatever he wants. He’s actually kind of vanilla. This is why, at the end of Fleming’s Moonraker, Bond is super-sad that Gala Brand doesn’t want to be his girlfriend. In fact, the ending of Moonraker— “He touched her for the last time and then they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives”—actually proves that Fleming nestled a sad version of Bond inside the more confident one we’re familiar with. But Horowitz is consistently better at making you believe that Bond is there; he removes the matryoshka doll lid more often, revealing the smaller Bond beneath. But not so often as to prevent the escapist adventure from happening.

Whenever I read a James Bond novel, I always wonder which version of 007 I will see. Once I understood the timeline of WITH A MIND TO KILL, which wraps up Anthony Horowitz’s Bond trilogy, I had my answer.

Exciting high drama. Horowitz stays loyal to the fabulous Fleming formula. And for that he surely deserves another mission guiding the fortunes of the world's favourite superspy. Daily Express The third guy, also offered the same task, simply takes the gun, walks into the room, and they hear 6 gunshots, followed by some loud words then a crash a bang a scream and then finally silence.