Bond. James Bond. In the 007 Case Files, join me as I read all of the James Bond books, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.
“Head or no head, good help is hard to find these days.”
With that thinly veiled innuendo, writer Raymond Benson began his run. By the time he was done five years later, his James Bond works would encompass nine novels and three short stories.
Following COLD (aka Cold Fall), John Gardner’s 15 year tenure as a Bond continuation author came to a close. Yet when Benson put out the first of his new stories in 1997, it was not to the future of the franchise to which he looked but (as the title would imply) to Ian Fleming’s past.
Benson was no stranger to avid Bond readers. In 1984, around the time Gardner released Role of Honour, Benson published The Bond Bedside Companion. The biographical and critical work covered Fleming, Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun, and Gardner’s books up until that point. Benson was also a scenarist for modules in the James Bond 007 role playing game. Suffice it to say, before he became a Bond continuation author, he was one of us.
BLAST FROM THE PAST, a short story first published in the January 1997 issue of Playboy, serves as a direct sequel to Fleming’s You Only Live Twice. (In fact, it’s the first James Bond short story published since Fleming’s own Octopussy, which posthumously appeared in Playboy in 1966). Later in life, Bond receives a message from someone purporting to be James Suzuki, a son he fathered with Kissy Suzuki, requesting that he comes to New York. Bond arrives to find his son dead, and is rapidly involved in a revenge plot from the long-thought-dead Irma Blunt, a former sidekick of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Benson’s story requires us to make several leaps. The conception of James Suzuki is only mentioned in passing at the end of You Only Live Twice, and his name comes from the largely apocryphal James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007. His ‘return’ – only to be unceremoniously killed off – already feels excessive. That’s before we’re asked to accept that Blunt survived her last explosive appearance, albeit severely disfigured, by clinging to a helium-filled weather balloon. I mean, it’s par for the course in some of the more extreme Bond films.
Yet the bigger leap is one of style. Sure, we’d gone through the better part of two decades of Gardner’s Bond, and it could get pretty out there at times. It might just be that this was written specifically for a Playboy audience, or that Benson was still finding his footing, but between the lengthy descriptions of adolescent sex fantasies and overly dramatic dialogue, I found myself inadvertently laughing out loud more than once. Given the franchise we’re talking about, it might not be a shock that it all feels a bit silly.
Case in point is the addition of Special Agent Cheryl Haven, the SIS station branch head in Manhattan. Benson spends his time introducing her, like Gardner before him, with adjectives that involve fullness, swinging, and tight-fitting sweaters. The whole thing naturally ends with Bond seducing her – and this is after she’s got through telling Bond’s that his dead son shamelessly flirted with her. It’s as though objectification was an obligation.
If you’re reading this in an original copy of Playboy from 1997, the one you bought with Marilyn Monroe on the cover (for the articles, of course), then it’s an abridged version. Benson later said that about a third of the short was cut for space. So, modern readers are best served by grabbing The Union Trilogy anthology, which republishes the short uncut along with three of Benson’s later novels. While it doesn’t come with Gregory Manchess’ Sherlock Holmesian illustrations, you can probably more confidently read that collection on public transport as well.
Benson ultimately had a prolific if uneven first year on Bond, with two more books published before 1997 was over. Along with Zero Minus Ten, his Bond debut proper, he also penned the novelisation for Tomorrow Never Dies. So, in many ways BLAST FROM THE PAST feels like something that he needed to get out of his system before moving onto more substantial Bond.
James Bond will return…in Zero Minus Ten.
