John Gardner
Before becoming an author of fiction in the early 1960s John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer, a journalist and, for a short time, a priest in the Church of England. ‘Probably the biggest mistake I ever made,’ he says. ‘I confused the desire to please my father with a vocation which I soon found I did not have.'
In the early ’60s he wrote a series of highly acclaimed comic novels featuring a cowardly secret agent called Boysie Oakes, and then moved on to more serious books: particularly those featuring Big Herbie Kruger who is an outstanding fictional character of the Cold War. In the early eighties however he was invited by Ian Fleming’s literary copyright holders to write a series of continuation James Bond novels which proved to be so successful, world wide, that instead of the contracted three books he went on to publish some fourteen titles. After a serious battle with cancer in 1996, John started work on a series of novels set in wartime Britain featuring Suzie Mountford a young female detective in London. The fifth, No Human Enemy was published within weeks of his death and his final novel, provisionally titled Moriarty is due to be published in the Autumn of 2008.
In all, Gardner had fifty-five novels to his credit – many of them best-sellers (his Maestro was a New York Times Book of the Year). Sadly John Gardner died on Friday 3rd August 2007. John was a highly respected and admired member of the Bond family and he will be greatly missed.