Ask the Author: Jeremy Duns
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Jeremy Duns
A few years ago I'd say this was definitely Casino Royale, which had been sidelined as a result of the film chaos as well as it not being what most modern readers expected from Bond (also related to the films). But Daniel Craig has put paid to that. I think it's perhaps still that novel, though, as it's got a starkness of tone to it that the others don't and that makes it stand out. It hasn't received the literary attention it deserves, I think, especially in the way it modernised the British thriller. I was reading a British spy thriller recently that was published in the same year and it was like something from the ancient past, in the stiffness of the prose style, the humour and the colonialism/outright racism. Fleming looked to some of his forbears and the American pulps to give the British thriller a harder edge, as well as much more sophistication and psychological depth to what were becoming clichés. In doing so he created an enduring icon in fiction, and I don't think he's had nearly enough credit for that. Away from the novels, I think several of his short stories are wonderful, particularly Octopussy and The Living Daylights. The latter is a superbly tense tale set in Berlin that prefigures the work of John le Carré.
Jeremy Duns
I find it hard to pick between The Tango Briefing and The Ninth Directive. But for me everything he wrote up to around 1990 was at the peak of thriller-writing, and there was only a bit of a dip after that. But I love The Tango Briefing's desert feel, while The Ninth Directive is an assassination thriller that predates The Day Of The Jackal and which I think is its better in many ways.
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Aug 25, 2019 04:39PM