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ICEBREAKER (1983)
The third Gardner Bond novel deals with 007’s attempt to destroy a terrorist organization called the National Socialist Action Army (NSAA), whose objective is to rid the world of communism. The NSAA is revealed to be an extreme fascist group controlled by ex-Nazi Count Konrad von Gloda. In Finland, Bond teams up with KGB agent Kolya Mosolov, CIA agent Brad Tirpitz, and an agent from the Mossad of Israel, the beautiful Rivke Ingber. After a series of mistaken-identity situations, Bond and Paula Vacker, a girlfriend working for Finnish Intelligence, thwart von Gloda's plans to recreate the Third Reich.

ICEBREAKER happened because I took a driving course in the Arctic Circle. It was sponsored by SAAB. Everyone said, “You fool, you fool!”

Apart from the ode of getting his vehicle stuck on the Russian side of the Russian/Finnish border, John Gardner had a ball researching his third Bond novel. SAAB took him on a driving course in Finland, and the author's imagination took over during the visit. The locations in Finland and Russia are excellent, and the action scenes superbly written. However, the Bond character has lost a great deal of the personalisation that Gardner gave him in the previous book. Furthermore, the plot hinges much too much on mistaken identities - allies not really being allies and villains not really being villains. A second reading clarifies many of the role-reversal shenanigans in this book, but the device may have been a bit overused in this particular case. A first for Bond here was that ICEBREAKER truly dealt with political issues. lan Fleming never really tackled politics in his books.

That's true; he never did, because when he was writing you were dealing with very troublesome waters. The political slant does interest me more in my own books. I think it can possibly become a time-waster, though, in the Bonds. I've used it a couple of times. I'll tell you an interesting story about Russia. I was arrested in Russia in 1964. In Moscow. They take your passport on the aeroplane, you know, so when you arrive on Russian soil, you don't have your passport. I was a journalist at the time, covering the Royal Shakespeare Company's tour of Russia. A woman in a leather coat stopped me in the airport and marched me into an office. She demanded to know what I was doing there. I told her. "I don’t think so," she said, and ordered me to tell her again. This went on for three hours - it was very unpleasant! Eventually someone came in with my passport and told the woman that I was indeed a journalist.

The next day I went to the American Embassy and inquired what I should do about it. I was told to call a number and play “merry hell”, and that I would write about this experience in every newspaper in the West. So, on the way back, I had no problem at the airport - I wasn't searched or stopped in any manner. And I was illegally carrying out personal letters from the members of the RSC to be mailed in the West!

ROLE OF HONOUR (1984)
In ROLE OF HONOUR, Dr Jay Autem Holy, a noted computer expert, and “Rolling Joe” Zwingli, a fanatical US general, have disappeared in a plane crash more than ten years before. Sources have revealed that Holy is alive and working undercover at a computer software company in Oxfordshire. Holy's ex-wife, Persephone (Percy) Proud, gives Bond a crash course in computer programming before he infiltrates the company as a potential employee.

Bond soon discovers that Holy is in cahoots with Tamil Rahani, the new leader of SPECTRE. Holy and Rahani are concocting a computerised plan to knock out the United States' and the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities.

The fourth Gardner Bond had its origins in the world of computer games. Gardner can himself program a little in BASIC, and he has been a fan of computer games since their explosion on to the market in the early Eighties.

Today, the author writes exclusively on a Macintosh, and uses an IBM clone strictly as a flight simulator. But despite the timely subject, John Gardner is not happy with ROLE OF HONOUR.

My dear friend Peter Israel, who was head of Putnam at the time, was on the phone. He asked, "How's it going?" I said, "Well, I'm stuck, Peter." And he used a wonderful technique he became like a Mafia boss and just said, “FINISH IT!!” and put the phone down. And I did!

Anyway, I don't like ROLE OF HONOUR too much, because I think writer's block is a signal to the writer that you've gone very wrong with the book somehow. You've got to go back and see where it went wrong. You've got to shift gears and do something about it. We also had to change a part of the book because it was believed that there would be a conflict with the film Never Say Never Again. We had heard that they were using some kind of computer game in the plot, and so was I. So we changed it to a board game, and it didn't work as well. Then it turned out that the computer game in the film didn't amount to anything!

Jay Autem Holy is a fabulous villain - after working in computer games, I can safely say I know this man personally! He was very real, but Tamil Rahani could have been a bit more fleshed out and Gardner never explains how he gained control of SPECTRE.

You have to accept the fact that the author is God, and if the author says he got control of SPECTRE, then he got control of SPECTRE. You're quite right, though, I should have explained how he did it, but I have no idea how he did - he just did!!

In the first three books, James Bond was driving a SAAB 900 Turbo. Beginning with ROLE OF HONOUR, 007 started driving a Bentley Mulsanne Turbo. One of my contacts at SAAB - who had given me a SAAB - had changed jobs and went to Bentley. He called me one day and said he wanted to see me. He brought a Mulsanne Turbo and said he wanted me to see it, and that he thought Bond should be using it. I went up to Bentley and did a driving course, which was a fairly rigid procedure. I learned more about driving in one day doing that...