Tom Nolan

deaver-in-car-CARTE-BLANCHE_smallThe new James Bond thriller is only the latest instance of one writer picking up where a predecessor left off.

American thriller writer Jeffery Deaver took the driver’s seat of the James Bond franchise with Carte Blanche (2011), to glowing reviews. Photo: Jainey Airey.

“Diamonds are forever,” claimed the late Ian Fleming in the title of his 1956 James Bond spy-thriller.

Now, thanks to recent arrangements made by Fleming’s heirs with publishers in at least 14 countries, James Bond himself may become something like forever: achieving perpetual shelf-life through new novels written by an estate-approved writer. This season sees publication (in America, by Simon & Schuster) of Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche: “an adrenaline-fueled thriller…timed to the anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth.”

Bond has been newly updated for the millennium, the publisher’s catalog promises: “This isn’t the Cold War Bond; it’s the best of Fleming and Deaver in one seriously sharp and stylish novel…that takes Bond from the Balkans to London and ultimately to a searing climax on the African Continent.”

Deaver of course isn’t the first author to assume Fleming’s cloak and dagger: Kingsley Amis, as “Robert Markham,” created the 1968 Bond adventure Colonel Sun. Spy-novelist John Gardner wrote 16 Bond books and novelizations in the 1980s and ’90s. Raymond Benson produced nearly a dozen late ’90s and early ’00s Bond titles. This Bond sequel then is but the latest in a growing subgenre of mystery and thriller fiction in which contemporary writers extend the oeuvre of deceased predecessors.

English novelist Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned circa 1999 by the Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers to complete a partial manuscript of a work featuring Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane called Thrones and Dominations; Walsh has since written two more Wimsey-Vane chronicles.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Robert Goldsborough followed in the footsteps of Rex Stout, crafting seven new adventures of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Raymond Chandler’s fragment of a final Philip Marlowe story, Poodle Springs, was completed in 1989 by Robert B. Parker, who then created an authorized sequel to Chandler’s 1939 The Big Sleep titled Perchance to Dream (1991).

And this year, Grand Central published Don Winslow’s Satori, a novel based on Trevanian’s Shibumi.

Winslow (like Deaver, a bestselling novelist in his own right) was a longtime admirer of Trevanian (real name: Rodney Whitaker). “So I approached the possibility…with great trepidation,” he wrote in an afterword to Satori. “First of all, what would the Whitaker family think? And how would his legion of devoted fans respond to a pretender to the throne? But more importantly, could I find a way to be true to the substance and style of the man’s work without falling into the trap of offensive—and ultimately futile—mimicry?” All parties (critics included) seemed to think Winslow did a fine job.

king_beekeeping_ebookBut is it harder to write a prequel (such as Satori) than a sequel? The late Joe Gores felt he had no choice but to do the former if he hoped to approach Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon—because, as he reminded that author’s surviving daughter Jo Hammett Marshall, by the end of Falcon all the main characters (excepting detective Sam Spade) are dead. “Then,” Gores told this writer in 2009, “she said, ‘Okay, do the prequel.’”

He did: Spade & Archer (2009), a novel that follows Falcon’s private eye for the seven years leading up to (and including) the opening pages of that 1930 work. “I ended up with a three-part book, because I thought [19]21, ’25, ’28, you would see [Spade] in various stages of his development as he had a lot of losses and became harder and harder…cooler and cooler.”

Joe Gores (who died early this year) said what he’d most hoped to get right was Hammett’s voice: “I often got a feeling I was channeling Hammett; I mean really, in my own mind. Maybe I was!” Maybe so—for Gores was proud to recount what he thought was his best review for Spade & Archer: “One of my great pleasures is that Jo Hammett said when she was reading it, she sometimes forgot that it wasn’t her father writing the book.”

Sam Spade isn’t the oldest crime-fiction character to receive the attention of sequelists and prequelists; neither is Peter Wimsey. That honor most likely goes to Sherlock Holmes, whose alternate chroniclers have written far more stories about him than did his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Laurie R. King’s books with Holmes—the first of which, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, was published in 1994; the most recent of which, Pirate King, will be out this fall—approach the great detective from a different angle: as the partner of an intelligent and resourceful younger female, Mary Russell.

“I never regarded what I was doing as being Sherlock Holmes pastiches,” King says. “[They’re] Mary Russell stories; and in those, Holmes is a supporting actor. It never occurred to me that they would be taken as, strictly, Holmes stories.” She wrote The Beekeeper’s Apprentice without benefit of consultation with the Doyle Estate, for it seemed to her, she says, that the character of Sherlock Holmes (who first saw print in 1891) had entered the public domain.

“However it’s not quite that simple,” she found. “The laws keep changing, up and down; they’re different here than what they are in the UK. I was not publishable for a while in the UK…. I had to wait until things caught up with me.”

Now King’s well-received works are available in both countries, where, she says, they overcame a certain amount of alarm on the part of devoted Holmesians: “At first [the fans] were very dubious about the whole thing. I think they were a little nervous about whether or not these books were going to be some kind of romance or—Sherlock Holmes erotica, which is really quite an alarming thought! But when they realized that I had a great deal of respect not only for the character of Holmes but for the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, they began to relax a great deal. And in fact they invited me this last year to [join] the Baker Street Irregulars; I am now an invested member.”

AtkinsAce3CreditJayENolan_smallSequels, prequels, and pastiches have been around so long—and have attracted such distinguished practitioners—that one sequelist is himself about to be sequelized. Robert B. Parker, who wrote those two books featuring Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe, was best-known for his many titles with his own private-eye hero Spenser. In the wake of Parker’s 2010 death, the Spenser series is being continued by novelist Ace Atkins, whose first estate-approved Spenser title is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2012.

Atkins—who lives in Oxford, Mississippi, but spent some of his youth in Spenser’s Boston—says he started reading Robert B. Parker’s work as a teenager, and that his first original books were in the Parker mode. All the more reason, he thinks, to keep his since-earned own voice out of his new assignment: “I want this to be a Bob Parker book.… I don’t want to put my own ego on it, my own stamp and that kinda thing. … I’m such a fan of his work, I think what he did was so tremendous—I want this to feel like a smooth transition for readers; I want this to pick up exactly where he left off in Sixkill,” Parker’s 39th and final Spenser novel.

Ace Atkins’ The Ranger (2011), features Quinn
Colson, a soldier who returns to rampant
corruption in his Mississippi hometown.
Atkins will turn to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser
next. Photo: Jay E. Nolan.

Nevertheless, Atkins says: “It was an eerie experience.…to take one of your favorite characters, a character that you’ve known since you’re 15 or 16 years old, and start with ‘Chapter One’ of a new book—number 40 in a series—it’s kind of an odd circle I’ve been brought back to.”

But he took courage from Parker’s own example, he says. “I think, you know: If Bob will write new books for Philip Marlowe, it gives me confidence that it’s okay to pick it up and write new Spenser novels.”

Tom Nolan is the author of Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw (Norton).

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Summer Issue #120.

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