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John Gardner biography

 

 

John Gardner

(1926 - 2007)

John Edmund Gardner (20 November 1926 – 3 August 2007[1]) was an English spy novelist, most notably for the James Bond series.

In 1964, Gardner began his novelist career with The Liquidator, in which he created a richly comic character named Boysie Oakes who inadvertently is mistaken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency. Oakes is, in actuality, a devout coward with many other character failings who wants nothing more than to be left alone and is terrified by the situations into which he is constantly being forced.

In 1981, Gardner was asked to revive Ian Fleming's James Bond series of novels. Between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels, and the novelizations of two Bond films. While the books were commercial successes, Gardner was ambivalent about writing novels with a character he hadn't created. In 1996, Gardner officially retired from writing Bond novels. Glidrose Publications quickly chose Raymond Benson to continue the literary stories of James Bond.

Information source: wikipedia