Book Review: Trigger Mortis

By Anthony Horowitz

This fall Daniel Craig returned to the silver screen to star in Spectre, the 24^th installment of the James Bond franchise originally created by Ian Fleming. While Spectre was a bit hit at the box office, the venerable franchise also returned in print, with Anthony Horowitz taking up the pen were Fleming left off, in order to bring back the James Bond that Ian Fleming originally envisioned. The story nestles in between the events in Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only, and is partly based on Ian Fleming´s original notes.

Daniel Craig´s modern Bond is fair haired, handles technology with ease and shows off his ripped torso to a lady with an accent astride a white horse every time he saunters onto a beach. The secret service agent that Ian Fleming envisioned through the generous cigarette smoke at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica was literally none of the above. Bond, in his own words, was supposed to be a plain looking and rather boring man, devoted to king and country. He only went to exotic places and did interesting things because Her Majesty’s Exchequer paid his salary. When I read the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, our favorite secret agent drank so much and smoked so copiously that I was amazed he could even climb the stairs to his hotel room. Besting Le Chiffre at baccarat and bringing down his soviet spy ring seemed like a very tall order indeed. In the sequel, Live and Let Die, Bond limits himself to ten cigarettes a day and takes a sprightly jog down the beach as a concession to reality in order to toughen himself up before he can take down the devious Mr. Big. Horowitz continues, with barely concealed delight, in this same vein. The Moorlands cigarettes from Grosvenor Street, the V8-Bentley, an M played by Bernard Lee and Don Draper´s view of women in the workplace are all duly ticked off. Horowitz´s narrative is focused and believable enough that the fifties touch doesn´t feel overly out of place.

After having foiled Auric Goldfinger´s heist of the century in Ian Flemings original novel, the story in Trigger Mortis starts off with Bond having returned to London. He is accompanied by the charismatic Pussy Galore, the lesbian leader of a criminal gang composed entirely of women, whom Bond seduced while battling Mr. Goldfinger. He barely has time to show her the sights before Old Blighty is once more presented with an urgent threat to its national security. The Soviet intelligence agency SMERSH plans to sabotage a race at the infamous Nürburgring race track in Germany. Their intention is to show off the superiority of Soviet technology by ensuring that their 16-cylinder behemoth of a race car wins. This places the tally ho British race car driver Lancy Smith in mortal danger and Bond is dispatched to ensure his survival. The vintage racing around the Nürburgring is a period montage of dashing brylcreemed drivers jammed into primitive cars so life threatening that Lancy Smith´s own motor would probably have been just as dangerous as any SMERSH assassin.

However, when Bond spots SMERSH´s driver together with reclusive Korean billionaire Jason Sin, he realizes that there´s more on the line than simply the life of a British race car driver. The mysterious death of a rocket scientist from former Nazi Germany and the development of a new high-tech ballistic missile raises the stakes considerably. Being a double certainly O is certainly not easy, but luckily the mysterious and alluring Jeopardy Lane also has a bone to pick with Mr. Sin.

Ian Fleming´s works of fiction were never part of the respectable literary scene, they were accessible adventure stories aimed at the wider market, yet written with a distinctively suave flair. Horowitz has done a splendid job of resurrecting the historical Bond, and Trigger Mortis does feel like a novel that Fleming himself could have written. He has great attention to detail and presents the reader with a fast paced narrative that is reminiscent of what Sean Connery got up to during the sixties. The race at the Nürburgring is the part that is based on Fleming own notes, but Horowitz manages to craft a compelling story with the help of that tasty morsel. The novel could have been a little bit longer, but then Fleming´s originals were rather short as well, so I guess that´s to be expected. In summary, Trigger Mortis doesn´t disappoint would certainly be a splendid read for the holidays.