John Gardner, at 80; wrote 14 James Bond novels
NEW YORK -- John Gardner, a prolific British writer who wrote more novels about Bond -- James Bond -- than Ian Fleming did, died Aug. 3 after collapsing near his home in Basingstoke, England. He was 80.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Alexis Walmsley.
By turns an Anglican priest, Marine commando, drama critic, and semi-professional magician, Mr. Gardner wrote four dozen books in a career of more than 40 years. He was best known for the 14 Bond novels he wrote in the 1980s and '90s, which officially continued the work of Bond's creator, Fleming. (For his part, Fleming wrote 12.)
In Mr. Gardner's hands, Bond is every inch a late-20th-century man. He smokes low-tar cigarettes and, in an authorial choice that anguished 007 purists, drives a fuel-efficient Saab instead of his Bentley Mark II Continental. Perhaps most shocking of all, he drinks only in moderation.
Though the reaction of critics was mixed, the novels were embraced by all but the most orthodox Bond fans and appeared regularly on The
Among Mr. Gardner's Bond titles are "License Renewed" (G.K. Hall, 1981); "Win, Lose, or Die" (Putnam, 1989); "Brokenclaw" (Putnam, 1990); and, most recently, "Cold Fall" (Putnam, 1996).
John Edmund Gardner was born Nov. 20, 1926, in Seaton Delaval, in the Northumberland region of England. His father, Cyril, was a priest in the Church of England, and the family later moved to Oxfordshire, where Cyril took a pulpit.
As a boy, Mr. Gardner longed to become a writer, but his first job was in magic. An enthusiastic amateur magician, he auditioned in 1943 for the entertainment department of the American Red Cross.
At 17, he was traveling to hospitals throughout England, performing for wounded American soldiers.
Toward the end of World War II, Mr. Gardner served in the Far and Middle East as a Royal Marine commando. He was, by his own account, "the worst commando in the world." (While learning to fly, for instance, Mr. Gardner bent an airplane, not an easy thing to do.) But his slapdash career would serve him well later, when he began to write thrillers.
After the war, Mr. Gardner earned a bachelor's degree in theology from Cambridge, followed by study at Oxford.
He joined his father's profession, receiving ordination as an Anglican priest in 1953. But he soon realized the vocation was not for him, and left the priesthood after five years.
In the late 1950s and early '60s, Mr. Gardner worked as a drama critic for the Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald.
In 1963, he published his first book, "Spin the Bottle" (Muller). His only work of nonfiction, it is a memoir of his battle with alcoholism.
His first novel, published the next year, was "The Liquidator" (Viking Press, 1964). Its hero, Boysie Oakes, is an anti-Bond. Recruited as a secret agent entirely by mistake, Oakes is inept, vulgar, and so cowardly that he hires a subcontractor to do his killing for him.
Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Anthony Boucher wrote, "Gardner succeeds in having it both ways: he has written a clever parody which is also a genuinely satisfactory thriller."
Seven more Oakes novels followed. Mr. Gardner created other series characters, among them Herbie Kruger ("The Nostradamus Traitor," Doubleday, 1979), a brilliant but deeply flawed intelligence operative. He wrote two novels, "The Return of Moriarty" (Putnam, 1974) and "The Revenge of Moriarty" (Putnam, 1975), featuring Sherlock Holmes's archnemesis, Prof. James Moriarty. (In Mr. Gardner's account, the professor survives his tumble into Reichenbach Falls.)
After Fleming's death in 1964, his literary executors searched for a writer to continue the series, eventually settling on Mr. Gardner. (Writing as Robert Markham, the distinguished literary novelist Kingsley Amis had produced one Bond novel, "Colonel Sun," published by Harper & Row in 1968 to tepid reviews.)
Despite the success of his books, Mr. Gardner suffered a serious financial reversal a decade ago as a result of medical problems. In the 1990s, while living in Charlottesville, Va., he underwent extensive treatment for esophageal cancer, which bankrupted him, his daughter said.
Returning to England in 1996, he sought to revive his career. His new books included "Bottled Spider" (Severn House, 2002), the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford, a policewoman in wartime London.
Two of Mr. Gardner's novels are scheduled for posthumous publication next year, "Moriarty," from Harcourt; and "No Human Enemy," a Suzie Mountford book, from St. Martin's.
Mr. Gardner's wife, the former Margaret Mercer, whom he married in 1952, died in 1997. Besides his daughter Alexis Walmsley of Overton, England, he leaves a son, Simon, also of Overton, both from his marriage to Mercer; a daughter from another relationship, Miranda, of Los Angeles; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Gardner was engaged to Patricia Mountford, an old flame who was moved to get in touch with him after many years when she discovered he had borrowed her surname for the heroine of his most recent books.
