By Anthony Horowitz

Jonathan Cape, out now

007 is dead, murdered while investigating drugs in the South of France. Is James Bond ready to assume the mantle?

I’ll say up front that I enjoyed Anthony Horowitz’s first Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, and many of the same compliments and criticisms that I levelled at that book in my review here are applicable to Forever and a Day.

In Trigger Mortis, Horowitz interpolated an adventure into canon; here he provides a prequel to Casino Royale, depicting 007’s very first assignment in his new role. There are a few elements – notably Bond’s relationship with Sixtine, the female protagonist – that would need quite a bit of tweaking to make this a standard Bond story, and it may be that side of the tale that Horowitz wanted to tell that made this have to be a prequel (without spoilers, it’s hard to see him viewing her quite the same way post-Vesper).

Of course, as it’s a prequel, there’s a deemed necessity to explain elements of Bond’s persona that we find in Fleming – so we get an explanation for shaken, not stirred, and why he smokes the Morland cigarettes, neither of which are earthshattering – and he’s certainly less hardened in this story than we find in the later stories. It’s not the first Bond prequel, of course – Charlie Higson and Steve Cole have provided some excellent stories in the Young Bond series, and I’d half hoped there would be a mention of events in Shoot to Kill, or at least its villain, given where the story finishes.

Horowitz provides another great villain for the Bond pantheon in Jean-Paul Scipio, the morbidly obese Corsican who only speaks through a translator, and a strong “Bond girl” in Joanne Brochet, aka Sixtine, very much Bond’s equal (if not superior) for most of the time. The locales are vividly described (once again, Horowitz maintains Fleming’s use of the present tense for such things), and the action sequences flow well. There’s a few places where a little tighter copy editing might have helped, but that’s a minor niggle. The Fleming material is interesting – it’s incorporated as a narrated tale by Bond – but more of a curiosity than a vital part of the tale.

Verdict: Another enjoyable adventure for the secret agent as created by Ian Fleming. 9/10

Paul Simpson