Prequel Problems: Forever and a Day (James Bond)
- cepmurphywrites
- Oct 14
- 11 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
This is the first article I’ve penned in my “Prequel Problems” series for quite a while, so it may be worth briefly recapping the purpose and goal behind these articles. As a voracious reader growing up, I was exposed to a number of examples of fiction (mostly children’s fiction) in which an author had to manage a fictional setting and character histories while releasing books in an anachronic order.
The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis is a good example of this; as I have opined before, today these books are often inexplicably republished in chronological reading order, when they are clearly written with the assumption that the reader has not read the prequel until well after the original first book. A number of revelations will not have the impact they do with the intended reading order if a reader blindly follows the ill-intentioned numbers on the spine from the publishers. In Narnia, C. S. Lewis mostly manages to be consistent in depicting the setting, with a few exceptions, and certainly the tone of the first book stands out a bit from those that follow.
Another example from children’s fiction is Colin Dann’s Animals of Farthing Wood series. Dann is a very skilled author at writing both sequels and a prequel to his original book without much inconsistency and especially (arguably more importantly) avoiding the invalidation of important events and character fates.
As I grew up, I learned that in some ways skilled children’s authors had spoiled me for what to expect from prequel writing. Often there was far less consistency and believability about prequels (and sequels) in adult fiction, whether written or visual media. For example, take Endeavour which is a perfectly serviceable period detective show, but often damages the suspension of disbelief that this is meant to depict the earlier history of the character of Inspector Morse, who is usually shown in the original show as both more intellectual and more old-fashioned and prejudiced than his younger self is. For example, he seems more hostile to the idea of women on the police force in the 1980s than he is in the 1960s! We also never get an appearance from his supposed mentor mentioned in the original series, with him instead getting a different mentor who was never mentioned before. And so on.
I am not too judgemental about this, because I think prequel writing is arguably one of the most challenging tasks for any writer. One must constantly bear character histories in mind, remembering whether a character meeting someone or undergoing a certain experience in the existing fiction was depicted as their first time doing so or not, struggle to depict stakes and tensions when we know some characters must survive, and so on. Conversely, there are opportunities to play with the audience’s expectations as well. Despite there being many problems with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Dune follow-ups I praised their clever use of seemingly setting up the bullfight in which the reader knows a character is destined to die in – before he doesn’t, because we never said it was that bullfight.
So now we come to a fictional franchise whose central character is well known, but with an extensive backstory both on and off camera which any writer will struggle to keep track of. James Bond.
Bond, as most people will know, is the literary creation of Ian Fleming, himself a former intelligence officer in the Second World War. Fleming took inspiration from operatives he had worked with when creating the character, including Christopher Lee, who ironically went on to play a Bond villain (albeit a shadow archetype rather than the more conventional diabolical mastermind) in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), one of my favourite Bond films. Bond first debuted in 1953, the same year as Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation, and it is a measure of the character’s influence that the former well-known abbreviation OHMS (On Her Majesty’s Service, often associated with tragic letters detailing the death of a loved one in war) is now almost always mentally autocorrected to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the original punning title of a Bond book and film.
The Bond books became enormously popular, helped by a boost in the United States when President Kennedy picked out From Russia With Love as one of his favourite books in an interview. In 1962, the Bond books began being adapted to film – out of order, relevantly for the discussion above. They debuted with Dr No, which as a novel is a deliberate sequel to Live and Let Die and brings back a character before killing him off as a shock moment. Naturally, this caused some problems for the filmmakers, who did not adapt Live and Let Die until over a decade later and when Sean Connery had been replaced as Bond’s actor with Roger Moore (after a brief detour to George Lazenby). In the end the character who died in Dr No was brought back in the form of his son for Live and Let Die.
But this article is not about exploring the curious anachronic adaption order of the Bond franchise, nor the many questions raised by Bond’s re-casting and his peculiarly elongated career. This article is not about the Bond films at all, but about the books – of which Fleming penned eleven, along with two short story collections, before his death in 1964.
As has been pointed out by many critics, the books are quite different in character to the films, as indeed is the character of Bond himself in print as opposed to celluloid. If I may quote from a pithy description by SLP’s editor, Tom Black, ‘Every Bond movie begins with Bond blowing up a dumb thing and then saying something both sexy and sexist before slipping into bed with a teenager, while every Bond book opens with "Bond hadn't left his hotel room since his encounter with Duval Surnameflemingdidn'tlike, but the note from M said he was needed at 7 o'clock sharp. Swearing, he ate a plate of eggs, scrambled, with a side of eggs, two slices of eggs, black coffee, and some eggs. He did 1,000 press-ups, naked, then took a hot shower, followed by a longer, colder shower. It was still the best way he knew to shake off the fifteen thousand extremely strong martinis he had consumed since two days earlier. His housekeeper was a Scottish treasure called May, and…"’
Generally, the more popular films have overshadowed the books, especially as the books contain a lot more outdated material in terms of prejudice and language, but the books nonetheless have their defenders. Among them is Kingsley Amis, who cheekily penned an unofficial guide to Bond in the sixties before writing the first Bond follow-up book after Fleming’s death (under the pen name Robert Markham), Colonel Sun (1968). Amis was a great admirer of Fleming and the Bond books but had no time for the films. Colonel Sun even includes a few deliberate jabs at the differences between the two, such as Bond being issued gadgets by Q Section and then never actually using them.
One other distinction is that Book Bond, for all his crassness, also shows more emotional vulnerability than his on-screen counterpart’s more cavalier attitude. While I’m not too keen on the Daniel Craig Bond films, I cannot criticise (as some have) Craig’s decision to bring some of that same vulnerability to his interpretation of the on-screen character.
This brings me to the topic of today’s article. Naturally, with such a well-established character and franchise, there have been attempts to do a Bond prequel, more usually with the films than the books in mind, though the line is sometimes blurred. Charlie Higson’s Young Bond novels from 2005 onwards frame the stories at Eton in the 1930s. Higson’s work was well regarded enough that, in 2023, he was invited to write an adult Bond novel, On His Majesty’s Secret Service (timely considering it came following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III).
I must admit I have not experienced any of Higson’s Bond media so I cannot comment on it. In some ways, however, I feel as though even a skilfully written youthful Bond prequel of this type somewhat misses the point. In my mind’s eye, Bond was not already having exciting international adventures at school; rather he was unremarkable until WW2, had a moderately active Naval Intelligence career in it (like Fleming) and only after the war did he enter the sphere of the true secret agent. I feel as though if one wants to write Bond-esque adventures involving a young protagonist, it should be a new and distinct protagonist rather than trying to wedge it into Bond’s backstory.
This brings me neatly to Anthony Horowitz, who did just that with his successful Alex Rider series of young adult spy novels (2000 onwards). They came out at the wrong time for me, but I recently got into Horowitz’s writing elsewhere and I decided to read the first one, Stormbreaker, as part of that. I was impressed both by how Horowitz manages to make a sense of threat feel real whilst still having a slightly surreal edge to the setting. The villain and his plan are certainly evocative of Bond (both book and film) without being too derivative or parodic. I am not surprised, therefore, that Horowitz was eventually asked to write Bond books as well.
Horowitz admired Colonel Sun (with some qualifications) and took inspiration from how Amis explicitly tied his story only to the book version of Bond, albeit being slightly less blatant about it. There are plenty of other authors between Amis and Horowitz who wrote licensed Bond novels – indeed, a bit disturbingly, there are actually more third-party Bond novels now than were ever written by Fleming in his lifetime.
Horowitz wrote three Bond novels between 2015 and 2022, Trigger Mortis, Forever and a Day and With a Mind to Kill. His philosophy in doing so is fascinating to me. Trigger Mortis, which is my favourite of the three, is carefully sited as an interquel, following straight on from Goldfinger and making occasional reference to it. Unlike many of the third-party Bond books, it embraces a 1950s setting and does not attempt to update things to a later era. As he demonstrated in the Alex Rider books, Horowitz is good at creating villains who are slightly larger-than-life without being ridiculous, in this case a Korean War refugee turned businessman named Jason Sin. He also creates a memorably named ‘Bond Girl’ in Jeopardy Lane. The plot is partly taken from a TV treatment Fleming wrote titled Murder on Wheels, about Bond infiltrating the glamorous world of racing drivers, but also ties in with the nascent US space programme – a recurring element of the Bond books and especially the early films.
As I said, Trigger Mortis is an interquel, but the other two books actually function as a new prequel and sequel to Fleming’s works, providing a beginning and an end for Bond’s career. Though With a Mind to Kill is the best of the titles in my opinion, the book itself is quite harrowing (though well-written) and ends on a deliberately ambiguous note, meaning it’s my least favourite of the three. Forever and a Day is the one I shall focus on here, as a ‘Bond’s First Adventure’ type prequel and one which therefore demands all the skills a writer has to offer. For the most part, Horowitz rises to the challenge admirably.
As an aside, Horowitz has a very compelling but very weird series of detective novels, sometimes known as the Hawthorne series, where Horowitz himself appears in the books as the ‘Watson’ first-person narrator, with the backstory that Hawthorne supposedly worked on Foyle’s War (a – real - TV series which Horowitz created) as a consultant and that’s how they know each other. Horowitz has various asides in these books where he talks about his in-universe fictional self working on other books, and in one he talks about his inspiration for Forever and a Day when he suddenly had the thought of the opening line: “So, 007 is dead.”
A nice WTF opening for any reader who hasn't read the synopsis on the back: this is, indeed, a prequel. The 007 in question is Bond's predecessor, carefully never named (Bond gives his name once and it's censored). It is 1950 and the Double-O section is young; there are only three agents, 007, 008 and 0011 (it's noted M shies away from anything as predictable as a sequential set of numbers). And now only two, as 007 is killed while investigating a mysterious diminishing of the heroin trade among the Corsican mafia in the South of France. But it's OK, because Bill Tanner has a promising recruit and he's currently in Sweden, committing the second of the two assassinations that are part of the entrance exam to gain his Licence to Kill.
Reading this book, I was repeatedly reminded of the sense that it somewhat echoes the first half of the 2006 Casino Royale film with Daniel Craig, albeit done rather better. Like that, it is explicitly written as a prelude to the events at the Royale and begins with Bond committing the second of two killings and gaining his Double-O status. There are also other half-hearted reboot-ish bits from Craig films that are done better here. Bond's love interest is an older woman for once, as was made a huge song and dance about Monica Bellucci in Spectre for some reason before she appears in the film for what feels like about five seconds. The lady in question is known as Madame Sixtine, a sideways reference to her code number from when she worked with the French Resistance during the war. Sixtine tells of how her ex-husband used to insist his martinis were stirred, not shaken, so as not to bruise the alcohol. Now, she gets petty revenge on him by deliberately ordering them the other way. This is a very pleasing Watsonian explanation for where Bond’s favourite tipple comes from (others have pointed out it is actually quite bad if done that way); also pleasingly, it is never explicitly stated that Bond does so afterwards in tribute to Sixtine, but the reader is expected to work it out themselves from context.
Horowitz has a good attitude towards use and misuse of characters here. He does not bring in Major Boothroyd (head of Q section), he portrays Bond as already knowing who Miss Moneypenny is but being a little standoffish as he has not interacted with her directly, Felix Leiter is not used even though the CIA are involved, and there is no tenuous and anachronistic link to Marc-Ange Draco (from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) just because the Corsican mafia is involved. One of the villains, the Union Corse boss Jean-Paul Scipio, maybe feels like the more colourful, gimmicky villains from later Bond, but really I’m just comparing him to Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, considering we already start with gimmicks as early as Mr Big in the next book, Live and Let Die.
As in the earlier-written Trigger Mortis, Horowitz shows an adept hand at being able to write ‘Book Bond’ as distinct from his film incarnation, perhaps more so than the more in-your-face way Amis did in Colonel Sun. In Trigger Mortis, the villain Jason Sin asks Bond if he has any parting witticisms when he’s about to have him buried alive, to which Bond simply replies, “Go to hell!” rather than any of his film counterpart’s one-liners. Forever and a Day features a torture scene in which Bond is tied up and threatened with acid to the face and Horowitz nicely captures Book Bond’s emotional vulnerability, especially so early in his career where he’s consumed with thoughts of being crippled and his life being over when he has so much more to live. That is a nuance missing from a lot of prequels.
There are other scenes that feel very reminiscent of (the book) Casino Royale, on the other hand (thematically rather than derivatively) which is one of the hardest things to get right in a prequel. Mostly, one can believe this is something Bond did as his first adventure without it feeling either contradictory of the Fleming canon or unnecessarily pedestrian, the latter being a common problem with overly cautiously written 'character's first adventure' type prequels. Overall, there is a lot to recommend Forever and a Day and it’s a tribute to Horowitz’s skill with handling someone else’s franchise and characters.
More Prequel Problems articles are on the way!
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
The Twilight's Last Gleaminghttps://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/the-death-of-zeitgeist-and-the-reflective-superheroes-of-the-mid-2000s.7314/
among others.
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