Pun Salad

I recently completed a reading project: read (or reread) Ian Fleming's James Bond books. I did that in order to prepare for reading Anthony Horowitz's Bond novels. I'm a fan of his Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery series. And Mrs. Salad and I really liked the Brit TV shows he was involved with: "Midsomer Murders" and "Foyle's War". So:

Good news, this book fit right in with the Flemish ouvré. It actually includes some of Fleming's actual prose, as noted in the Acknowledgements: 400-500 words in Chapter Two, describing a meeting between Bond, M, and M's Chief of Staff. And Horowitz did a pretty good job, I thought, of settling into Fleming's writing style.

The book is set soon after the events in Goldfinger, somewhere around 1957. Bond has returned to London, and has set up an uneasy cohabitation with his nemesis/ally from that book, Miss Pussy Galore. His new assignment involves foiling a SMERSH plot to murder a famous Grand Prix driver during a German race. The unlikely method: Bond is to enter the race himself, and do in the Russian driver/assassin before he can complete his murderous scheme.

Which (small spoiler) Bond does, but in his preparations for the race, Bond notices a new face that seems to be collaborating with the SMERSH goons. This turns out to be Korean villain/psychopath Jai Seong Sin, who has hatched a nefarious (also: convoluted and unlikely) plot involving the USA's efforts in the "Vanguard" satellite project. It involves massive death and destruction in the heart of New York City!

There's a lot of action, an unlikely-named female sidekick ("Jeopardy Lane"), near-death escapes, all the usual 007 ingredients. Including the usual villain flaws: instead of just shooting Bond in the head, Sin engineers a complex death scenario that Bond is able, barely, to thwart. It wouldn't be a Bond book without that, I guess!