Bond. James Bond. Join me as I read all of the James Bond books in 007 Case Files, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.
Scorpius! He’ll sting you with his dreams of power and wealth. Beware of Scorpius! His twisted twin obsessions are his plot to rule the world, and his employees’ marital health. The Simpsons may not have been inspired specifically by the villain of John Gardner’s seventh James Bond novel, but Hank Scorpio’s near-namesake makes for a killer Bond title.
First published in 1988 by Gildrose Publications, it’s the first original Bond book to not be published by Johnathan Cape, the group who had been printing Bond books since 1953’s Casino Royale. SCORPIUS kicks off with a killer opening — quite literally. When a young woman is found dead, Bond is connected as the only contact in her address book (because it’s the 80s and we still used those).
It turns out that she’s a member of the Meek Ones, a quasi-religious cult led by Father Valentine. Yet Valentine is actually the terrorist Vladimir Scorpius, orchestrating his members to sacrifice themselves in assassinations and public bombings in the lead-up to an election. Bond teams up with Harriett Horner, an IRS agent, and Special Air Service Sergeant Pearlman to take down Scorpius.
SCORPIUS is one of those stories that’s entirely of its time while being an ill portent of the world to come. On the one hand, there’s a thinly connected subplot about Avante Carte, a credit card designed to take down people’s bank accounts. It’s one of those very 80s views of how computers worked, and the fears that came with them: “There was a microchip in that thing which gave them access to the Stock Market.”
“My God! The fellow detonated himself. That’s too horrible. Terrible.”
Yet the Meek Ones have also been seen as a forerunner to the War on Terror in the new millennium, complete with the clash of ideologies and the increased security presence. It might also be playing on the backdrop of the The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the bombing campaign against infrastructure, commercial entities and political targets that rocked headlines in the late 1980s. As such, it’s often been called one of the more violent books in Gardner’s Bond oeuvre.
As a character, Bond is at his archetypical best in this outing — and Gardner is always ready to provide us with factoids about 007. He’s a fan of Charles McCarry’s 1974 spy novel Tears of Autumn. In a winking nod, we learn that the older actor playing a cop in The Untouchables is one of Bond’s favourites. Gardner also solidifies the scrambled egg loving Bond’s love of breakfast as “his favourite meal of the day, an immovable and set feast when he was at home.”
Still, it’s not without its serious weirdness. One of the major elements of the climax is Scorpius forcing Bond and Horner to get married so as to fulfil some preordained need. They go ahead with it to buy time, knowing full well that it’s not legally binding, but Horner is killed by a snake in the escape attempt. It seems that Bond’s brides, no matter how brief or legitimate, are ultimately doomed.
Coming about midway through Gardner’s Bond run, SCORPIUS sees the writer settling into the rhythm of the franchise. Even so, as James Harker points out, the series is often “dogged by silliness” and cites this book’s setting of “the glamourous locale of Chippenham” as a prime example. In every other way, it remains a somewhat dated but engaging outing.
James Bond will return…in Win, Lose or Die.
