Book review - Forever and a Day

Anthony Horowitz’s prequel to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Forever and a Day (2018) starts with M making the observation, ‘So, 007 is dead.’ Of course it isn’t James Bond who is deceased but the unnamed previous incumbent with that Double-O number.  A neat touch, that.

This is Horowitz’s second foray into the James Bond universe, having earlier treated us to Trigger Mortis (2015) – reviewed here

Where the earlier book took place in 1957, shortly after Goldfinger, this one takes us to early 1950s, the beginning of Bond’s career as the new 007; there are only three Double-O men – 008, 0011 and 007, it seems; M deplored using sequential numbers (p4). M’s Chief of Staff reveals that 007 was murdered in the south of France, in Marseille. He’d been investigating the Corsican underworld in the area. ‘It seems that there was a woman involved.’ To which M replies, ‘There always is.’ Dry humour, just the right note. The woman is called Madame 16 or Sixtine, a one-time worker at Bletchley Park and subsequently an agent in SOE. As 008 was still out of action (hospitalised) and 0011 was in Miami, it was deemed necessary to send the new 007 to dig around – James Bond.

Eventually, Bond finds himself in Monte Carlo, playing Vingt-et-un against Sixtine. An amusing aside when a croupier mutters, among other appropriate phrases, Carré, doubtless Horowitz’s nod to John Le Carré. (p59) This scene is also an homage to Fleming’s lengthy discourse in Casino Royale.

We’re made privy to the origin of Bond’s vodka martini being shaken, not stirred (p70); another nice touch. As for his cigarettes, he was introduced to Morlands’ coffin nails in preference to his Du Maurier ‘named after a minor British actor.’ (p122) Finally, we see how Bond acquires his trade-mark gunmetal cigarette case, which also masterfully explains the book title. (p169)

There are two villains, Scipio a grossly overweight Corsican and rich industrialist Irwin Wolfe. Scipio delivers Bond a trenchant speech via a translator: ‘… the arrogance of the British. You are a tiny island with bad weather and bad food also but you still think you rule the world… you are becoming irrelevant…’ (104) Maybe he was an early scriptwriter for the EU negotiators?

Inevitably, Bond is faced with grim ‘torture’, which is only to be expected. However, more than once he seems to escape through no guile of his own; I won’t say more. This didn’t spoil the book for me; I perhaps was hoping for more, which may be my failing.

Horowitz also adopts the Fleming style of chapter headings, often playing with words, among them Killing by Numbers, Russian Roulette, Not So Joliette, Shame Lady, Love in a Warm Climate, Pleasure… or Pain? and Death at Sunset.

Yet again he has captured the flavour and tone of Fleming while adding his own stamp to the proceedings. Initially,

I wasn’t impressed by the title, Forever and a Day, but it makes complete sense now that I’ve read the book. It’s also the title of a 1943 film.

The cover is excellent, the luxury yacht resembling a deadly bullet!

I ended my review of Trigger Mortis with the hope of seeing another Horowitz 007 novel, and despite a few caveats he has not disappointed. I look forward to the next.

Editorial comment

Repetition. On page 33 we’re told ‘Bill Tanner, M’s chief of staff and a man Bond knew well.’

Then on p35 we read: ‘The two men knew each other well.’ The editor should have spotted this, and a few other minor points below…

Clumsy wording: ‘Bond was holding the envelope that he had found in his right hand.’ (p49) At the bottom of p48 we know Bond is holding an envelope which he’d just found. Had he just found it in his right hand?

‘Then he slumped to the ground.’  (p49) This is in an apartment, so it should be ‘floor’ not ‘ground’.

‘… punctuated by a slither of silver moonlight.’ (p144) I’d reckon that should be ‘sliver’.

Consistency. At one point we have eyeglasses (p103), and at another spectacles (p54).

‘His ankles were also secured to the legs of the solid wooden chair…’ And yet further down the same page, ‘Bond hadn’t moved or opened his eyes. (p100) But he knows it’s a solid wooden chair…? Okay, just maybe…

As Bond is ex-Royal Navy, and it’s mostly his point of view, when he’s aboard Wolfe’s luxurious vessel, he wouldn’t note ‘submarine-style hatches’ but simply hatches. (p140). Again, ‘the letter R was printed on the wall one floor down.’ (243) But these are bulkheads and decks, even if in a luxury ship!

Writing - Book titles

We know that a book title can't be copyright. So it can be used often. Naturally, it's advisable not to use it if a book has recently been published with that title.

Like many an author, I've come a cropper with book titles. When I sent my manuscript off for Blind Justice it was pointed out to me that this was quite a commonplace title. So I changed it to Blind Justice at Wedlock, which seemed to have a certain ring to it.

My vigilante book Sudden Vengeance first started out as A Sudden Vengeance Waits, but that latter title had also been published! But even the former title had been used, in 2009. Sometimes, you bite the bullet and let it go, so long as there's no confusion for any potential reader.  As I had planned several books in the 'Avenging Cat' series, it was inevitable that the first book's title, Catalyst, would not be unique. As its successors were Catacomb and Cataclysm, I had to live with that too; the publisher Crooked Cat's excellent themed covers helped identify them as being in a single series.


When Anthony Horowitz wrote the latest James Bond book, Trigger Mortis, I thought the title was both amusing and original. My review of that book is here

But I was wrong. The title was used by Frank Kane in 1958!

So, yes, try to be original when selecting book titles, but don't beat yourself up over it either. 

I discuss book titles and chapter titles in my book Write a Western in 30 Days - with plenty of bullet points! (pp68-71).

Book Review – Trigger Mortis

Of all the recent incarnations, Anthony Horowitz’ take on James Bond, Trigger Mortis (2015) is the closest to the original Fleming novels, in style, content and delivery.

Even if you only have a passing interest in the Bond canon, publicity should have alerted you to the fact that Horowitz has set the story in 1957, a couple of weeks after Goldfinger, and at the beginning of the book he’s entertaining Pussy Galore in his London flat. Then he gets the summons from M – the Soviets are intent on sabotaging the British contender in a Grand Prix motor race in Germany. In the process of countering this threat, Bond stumbles upon an intriguing connection between Soviet general Gaspanov and a Korean millionaire, Sin Jai-Seong. That association sets alarm bells ringing and he decides to investigate.

All of the trademark ingredients are assembled – seamlessly: Sin, an unprepossessing villain, Jeopardy Lane, an ‘ugly-pretty’ female, an enemy lair to infiltrate, hairs-breadth escapes, the following of slim clues to the puzzle, the inevitable capture, a lengthy exposition by the villain, the fiendish choice of death allotted to Bond, and the ‘ticking-bomb’ final act.

Horowitz wanted to reference the earlier books rather than the films, obviously, and succeeds, even to the point of having his characters provide unbroken speech for a page or more, in the manner of Fleming. The settings are perhaps not as exotic, but hold the interest nevertheless: the Grand Prix racetrack, the American rocket launch site, and the subway system of New York.

Both in tone and manner, Bond seems right. I’d be intrigued to know what was excised from the early drafts, however. In one interview Horowitz says that his wife (Jill Green, producer of Foyle’s War) suggested considerable rewriting. She felt that some of the sexism in the book was ‘a little too extreme’. These days there must be a danger of writing a politically correct Bond, which honestly would emasculate the character. I think Horowitz trod this line carefully and pulls it off for his late 1950s characters.

Initially, it seems highly implausible, the idea that Bond – a secret agent with a licence to kill – would be given the mission to learn how to drive a racing car in preparation for a prestigious event, and use that car to thwart the Soviet driver’s murderous plans. (Who said Bond stories had to be plausible, anyway?) Surely, all Bond had to do was accidentally trip the fellow on the stairs, break a leg or two – or if the Soviet racer was a really bad egg, kill him? However, as the 400-500 words of original Fleming text that triggered the storyline (‘Murder on Wheels’) [no pun intended] was about Bond and ‘top-class motor racing’, Horowitz must have felt compelled to wear that particular strait-jacket for this outing. Once the race is over, he gives free rein to his imagination and the pace quickens considerably. And indeed some of Fleming’s Bond adventures began with very little real spying, yet 007’s inquisitive mind often latched onto something sinister that led to adventure, travel, sex and near-death experiences.

The references to earlier Bond adventures – Dr No and Moonraker – are subtle, not even being named but alluded to at appropriate moments.

There are three so-called Bond girls: Pussy Galore, Logan Fairfax, and Jeopardy Lane, and all of them are strong women, capable of looking after themselves. Logan is Bond’s instructor at the English racetrack prior to him going to Germany. Jeopardy’s back-story was interesting (delivered in a page of uninterrupted speech) and she had the potential to go further in another adventure.

A handful of reviewers have criticised Horowitz regarding some inaccuracies. And that’s despite the time and effort he clearly spent in research. (Oh, writing is a thankless task, writing make-believe to appear ‘real’ and being castigated when it isn’t quite real enough!) No matter how strenuous the research, we get things ‘wrong’ somewhere along the line. Having said that, as a reader I rarely let a few minor hiccups blight the story for me – and even if I spotted at least one flaw, it didn’t spoil this fast-paced adventure.

There is a reason for the pun-style title, too. The ending of Trigger Mortis is excellent, by the way. I – and doubtless many other readers – would be pleased to read another Bond adventure from Anthony Horowitz.

The flaw

Despite being a respected journalist, Fleming didn’t always concern himself with accuracy (ask ‘Major’ Geoffrey Boothroyd about that!) so it comes as no surprise that he was using the Soviet organ of assassination SMERSH in his Bond novels up to 1957, although in 1946 it was absorbed into the MGB, the forerunner of the KGB. At that point, Department V of the First Directorate of the KGB took upon itself the assassination role. Perhaps Department V didn’t sound as sinister as ‘Death to Spies’?