6. Mark Gatiss

Speaking of British TV comedians (See Charlie Higson below)... I have seen League of Gentlemen. (Not to be confused with the horrid Sean Connery movie based on the sublime Alan Moore comic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) LoG is a wonderfully deranged, side-splittingly sick little British sketch comedy show that developed into so much more. But it has nothing to do with spies. (Well, that’s not quite right. There are a lot of little spy references sprinkled throughout the show, like a pair of workmen named Wint and Kidd... but it’s got next to nothing to do with spies.) But one particular member of the trio of gentlemen seems to have a lot to do with spies lately...

Mark Gatiss is the tall skinny one. If you’ve seen the show, you probably know him as Hillary, the butcher. (Who, he revealed in a radio interview, was named after Sir Hilary Bray, so there’s another spy connection.) Outside of LoG, Gatiss is a very prolific writer and fan. He wrote some episodes of the new Dr. Who series, and also wrote the novel The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff. And what a wonderful bit of fluff it is! The Vesuvius Club is the first in a planned series of novels about Edwardian dandy-cum-spy Lucifer Box. The second, The Devil In Amber, is apparently already completed and due out in November in the UK and January in the US.

According to old interviews, Gatiss plans to do a Lucifer Box trilogy. The first book is Strand Magazine style Victorian/Edwardian adventure, a (sort of) send-up of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes and Fu Manchu and all that. The second, set a few decades later, will be Gatiss’s take on John Buchan/Sapper sort of pre-war spy stories. And the third is supposed to be set in the early Fifties when Lucifer is quite old and be a Casino Royale-inspired Ian Fleming sort of tale!

Gatiss is evidently quite a fan of all of these types of story. The Vesuvius Club is not a parody, but a genuinely thrilling page-turner in its own right which happens to also be quite funny. It’s not an Austin Powers-like spoof of the genre, more a loving pastiche. (A lot like that other brilliant British TV comedian’s spy novel, The Gun Seller.) The humor doesn’t come from turning the cliches of the genre on their end, for the most part, but reveling in them. In every sentence it's clear how much Gatiss loves this stuff, and its just as much fun to read as he clearly had writing it.

The general idea seems to be that this could be an actual, long-lost book originally written in Edwardian times. Even the design of the book lovingly reflects this. The British hardcover (well worth tracking down for a book-lover) bears a dust jacket meant to look aged and creased, like the battered cover of a volume you found in a used bookstore. There’s even a bookseller’s price "pencilled" in on the inside flap. Beneath the jacket, the cloth cover itself is stamped with the period-style cover illustration. And the endpapers bear fake ads like you might have found in the Strand Magazine or "penny dreadfuls." (Strangely, Alan Moore’s aforementioned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also did this!) Chapter headings begin with a large, ornate capitol letter. And there are a few full-page illustrations scattered throughout.

The American paperback edition also maintains this spirit. The cover isn’t as wonderfully garish, but it’s still charming. The full-page illustrations are gone, but instead we get entirely new chapter illustrations by the same artist.

Of course, the book isn’t entirely an accurate artifact of its period. [Minor spoiler alert!] In an interesting twist, Lucifer Box is bisexual, something that never would have seen legitimate print at the time! [Spoiler over.]

Based on the cover image on Amazon.co.uk, The Devil In Amber will continue the period-appropriate dust jacket art. It easily looks like a 1920s or 30s book! There was also a graphic novel version of The Vesuvius Club, illustrated by the same artist who did the spot illustrations for the book. It’s a fun supplement to the novel, but unfortunately cuts far too much out. I wouldn’t recommend reading it instead of the book unless you’re just dead-set against words. There’s an abridged audio version performed by Gatiss, which I imagine would be a lot of fun, based on his radio work, but I haven’t heard it.

Mark Gatiss’s spy connections don’t end with his books. A clear lover of both Edwardian adventure (supposedly he dressed only in fashion of the period for a whole year) and Sixties British TV, it’s not surprising to see him pop up on the special features of the recent Adam Adamant Lives! DVD.

Released only in England so far, this extremely well put-together set collects every surviving episode of the BBC series on five discs. Adam Adamant was the BBC’s black and white answer to ITV’s The Avengers, and they take the formula a step further. Instead of merely behaving like an Edwardian gentleman like John Steed, Adamant actually is one! He was frozen and then thawed out in Swinging London, and paired with a young, hip female sidekick.

The episodes I’ve watched so far are hugely entertaining. I’ve heard about this series for years and always wanted to see it, and it lives up to all of my pre-conceived hype. If you like The Avengers, definitely seek out Adam Adamant. It’s by far one of the very best of the many, many Avengers wannabes that came along in the Sixties. (Avengers mastermind Brian Clemens even writes an episode!) I haven’t gotten to it yet in my viewing, but at least one episode is directed by a young Ridley Scott.

The DVD set also includes an exhaustive 64-page book by Andrew Pixley on the history of the series. Well beyond a simple episode guide, I can’t possibly call this tome a "booklet" as they do on the back of the box. It could have easily been published on its own if the market actually warranted such a book, which, sadly, it probably doesn’t. The book is illustrated with color and black and white stills. Due to the BBC’s policy of "wiping" old programs to save room in their tape vaults, about half the original episodes were regrettably lost. Fortunately, their scripts are included here as PDFs on the DVD ROM features, along with full PDFs of Adam Adamant comics, stories and annuals. And, finally, there are commentaries with the original cast and an hour-long documentary and featurette hosted by Gatiss. Great spy show!


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

5. Anthony Horowitz and Charlie Higson

Spy kids’ books! Higson and Horowitz have cornered a market I didn’t even realize existed. (I wish it had existed when I was a kid!) Both of them write best-selling adventures of teenage spies. Well, that deserves a clarification: Higson writes the adventures of a spy as a teenager; Horowitz of a teenager as a spy.

Anthony Horowitz came along first. Presumably seeing the success of Harry Potter, he hit on the idea of a Potter-like series about an orphan boy who, instead of being taken in by wizards, is taken in by a spy agency. (Although that’s an over-simplification of the Alex Rider backstory.)

Horowitz’s basic formula was to rewrite Ian Fleming Bond books replacing Bond with his teen spy, Alex Rider, and upping the outlandish action to the level of the 007 movies. His first book, Stormbreaker, is Fleming’s Moonraker, beat for beat, even down to the rosonant title.
You all know the plot of Fleming’s Moonraker, right? (Hint: it’s nothing like the movie!)

Well, here, instead of a half-English foreigner bent on revenge against his adopted homeland building a rocket called the Moonraker as a gift for England, we have a half-English foreigner bent on revenge against his adopted homeland building a computer called the Stormbreaker as a gift for England! Horowitz eschews Moonraker’s exciting-but-overly-serendipitous card game, but retains the idea of a British security man dying mysteriously on the villain’s compound. Here, that security man is really Alex Rider’s uncle, spy Ian Rider. Like Bond, Alex is sent out to the rural compound as a replacement (Cornwall instead of Dover), and, like Bond, Alex discovers that the villain is receiving a deadly extra ingredient for his project from a foreign power via submarine. (Now a deadly virus to come out of the computers instead of a nuclear warhead for the rocket.) The plots follow the same basic beats, both leading to a climax in which the villain is joined by British officials and makes a head-scratching public speech full of double-meanings only to be thwarted by the hero in his hour of triumph.

The second Alex Rider book, Point Blanc, whose clever pun of a title was changed for the American edition (Point Blank) to no longer be clever and no longer be a pun, is based on Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. With Moonraker, Horowitz could likely assume that his young adult audience would be familiar only with the movie, which had a completely different plot, and not with the book. He took a slightly bigger gamble with OHMSS, since the movie follows the book quite closely, but probably wisely assumed that not many of his readers would have seen Lazenby’s sole outing.

I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr. Horowitz by implying he borrowed his plotlines; I suspect that he would be the first to admit it. Rather, I think it was an ingenius idea. Fleming generated wonderful plots; why not reuse them in kids books for readers not yet old enough to graduate to the real thing? Both Stormbreaker and Point Blanc are fun, ultra-fast reads, but Point Blanc is far better. I’ve read as far as the third book in the series so far, Skeleton Key, and Horowitz seems to have abandoned his formula. Skeleton Key isn’t based on a single Bond book, but certainly incorporates elements from Doctor No, Live And Let Die, and lots of the movies.

Another thing I should mention about the Alex Rider books is that they’re surprisingly, refreshingly dark at times. Alex doesn’t choose to be a spy; instead he’s basically blackmailed into it by MI6, like Harry Palmer. And Horowitz doesn’t shy away from death and violence. Sure, this is fantasy, but not of the Spy Kids variety. Even though Alex’s superiors refuse to arm him for his missions, he does find a way to actually shoot a gun by the climax of Stormbreaker.

Anyway, Ian Fleming Publications, the current literary rights holder to James Bond, seems to have seen the success of the Alex Rider series and gotten a bit jealous, wondering "Why didn’t we think of that?" The regime had changed since their days as Glidrose Productions, and a new continuation author hadn’t been named since Raymond Benson stopped writing new original Bond novels in 2002. Also influenced, no doubt, by the publishing phenomenon that is Harry Potter, they decided to take 007's literary adventures in a new direction and hire someone to write a series about young Bond. Like many others, I cringed when I first read about this. It sounded like a bad idea through and through. Sure, I love the Harry Potter books, and they’ve made me realize that good children’s fiction still exists (something I’d long ago given up on, having sold hundreds of Goosebumps titles while working at Borders during high school and college). But that’s not right for James Bond!

Well, then the details got more interesting. IFP’s Young Bond series would be set in the 1930s! So they’d be about Fleming’s Bond as a boy, not "young Pierce Brosnan"! Very promising. After apparently going after Horowitz to write the series and being turned down, they announced Charlie Higson as the writer. Since his most famous TV work, The Fast Show, had never been broadcast in America, I was completely unfamiliar with him.

When SilverFin, the first adventure of young James Bond, came out in 2005, I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed it. Then, the next year, I enjoyed the second one, BloodFever, even more! Charlie Higson seems to have been the perfect choice. He’s made it clear in interviews that he and IFP were on the same page in that Young Bond should be set in the ‘30s when the future 007 was at Eton and that under no circumstances should Young Bond be a teenage spy. (Thank goodness!) So we’re not asked to believe that Bond was already working for the secret service as a boy. (Although I guess that would make some of Fleming’s ever-changing continuity make sense!) We are asked to believe that the teenage James Bond happens to stumble into amazing adventures on his own every school break, like the Hardy Boys, but let’s write that off as a conceit of the genre.

Higson really writes the best stories about a Young Bond we could possibly hope for. He gets Fleming. Fleming’s books are, after all, Boys’ Own Adventures for grownups. And Higson’s books have the same exact feel to them. Best of all, he really, really gets the character of James Bond! I actually do feel like this boy could grow up to be the same man whose adventures I’ve read of in Fleming. It was the chapter in SilverFin that deals with the orphan Bond’s feelings about his parents’ deaths that really won me over. Furthermore, Higson really does his best to make these books work within established Bond continuity. He elaborates on just about every scant detail Fleming provided about his hero’s youth. (Although I can’t imagine he’ll be able to keep the bit about Bond losing his virginity and his wallet to a Parisian hooker at 15!)

Yes, the sex is certainly toned down quite a bit (though Higson still manages to get away with Bond and the "Bond girl" washing up naked on the beach together at the end of BloodFever!), but the books are still surprisingly violent. (One villain dies an especially gruesome death involving sea urchins in BloodFever.) I guess that’s more acceptable in the realm of children’s fiction. "Nothing compared to the video games," I suppose, as the cliche goes...

Higson’s first two Young Bond novels rank among the very best of the non-Fleming Bond continuation titles. (For the record, my other favorites include Amis’s Colonel Sun, Gardner’s Nobody Lives Forever and Benson’s Doubleshot, but that’s a topic for another time.) I can’t wait to read the rest of Higson’s Young Bond adventures.

The Charlie Higson books are a bit classier than the Anthony Horowitz ones. They’re a bit more educational, I guess (not to say that they’re ever anything less than thrilling), a bit more realistic, and certainly offer better prose. They’re overall closer to the original Bond books, whereas Horowitz’s stories are closer to the Bond movies, even if they lift their plots from the books. Horowitz had the idea first, but then he wouldn’t have had his idea if it weren’t for Ian Fleming, whose estate commissioned the Higson series...

It’s probably not worth comparing the two series. Both are worthwhile and recommended reading for spy fans.


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

4. Nick Fury
Speaking of comic books (see previous post below).... Nick Fury is the ultimate comic book spy. A spy sooooo far removed from the realism of Tara Chace in Queen & Country it’s impossible to compare them. Fury at his finest out-Bonds Bond in terms of outlandish gadgets and over-the-top scenarios. (The "finest" I speak of would be Jim Steranko’s classic pop art Sixties run on the character, collected in two trade paperbacks from Marvel.) But the Fury of the current Marvel Universe is a little more Smiley than Bond... if you can possibly imagine Smiley in a jumpsuit.

Fury is (or was, until quite recently) the head of SHIELD (which stands for something... but it hardly matters what), a spy agency answerable to the United Nations. While he hasn’t been out in the field in his own adventures much lately, he’s really been the puppetmaster of the Marvel Universe, pulling all the strings behind the scenes. He’s currently sitting out Marvel’s big "Civil War" all-universe event (which, like 52, I too am sitting out), but I have a feeling he’ll play a big role in its aftermath.

So why is he on the currently relevant spy list if he’s lying low at the moment? Just because he’s become so prevalent in the modern Marvel Universe. (And also in the "Ultimate" universe, where for some reason his alternate self looks and sounds like Samuel L. Jackson.) He’s an enigmatic, eye-patched figure, capable of being a real bastard. He’s recently been seen tricking or coercing superheroes into serving his agenda in titles like Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow, New Avengers (no relation to the TV show, the real New Avengers!), Ultimate Spider-man and the abysmal "Secret War." No matter how much of a son-of-a-bitch he is, he remains the epitome of cool as a non super-powered guy who manages to bend a universe full of costumed heroes to his will through cloak-and-dagger means.

Fury’s very best recent portrayal was actually in another "alternate universe" kind of title, Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 which recasts the Marvel heroes in Elizabethan times. I know, it sounds silly, but Gaiman is a top talent and he really makes the book work, especially in casting Fury as a Francis Walsingham-like spy chief to Queen Elizabeth I.

Fury changes a lot in the hands of different writers. Some use him as an authoritarian, almost fascist voice of Bush Doctorine, post-911 Big Brother spy agencies. Others cast him in just the opposite role, as a voice of sanity who stands up for the Intelligence community against politicians and Rumsfeldesque militarists who would rather the intel suit their agenda than be accurate. While some of the more liberal rants do sound a bit odd coming from a military careerist-cum-spy chief (no matter how much they ring true), the character always remains the badass epitome of cool in the Marvel Universe.

He may not have his own book anymore, but he’s more omnipresent than ever in Marvel titles.


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

3. Greg Rucka
Thank God Greg Rucka’s once again relevant enough to make this list! How did it happen? A new issue of his spy comic book Queen & Country finally came out this week! If that doesn’t excite you, then you’re really missing out. Queen & Country is the best current, ongoing spy saga in any medium. It’s a supposedly bimonthly (but really more like tri-monthly or quarterly) black and white comic put out by indie publisher Oni Press. Story arcs typically run four issues or so, and once they are finished they are collected into a trade paperback. There are currently about eight or nine volumes, I think, counting the Declassified stories. There are also two amazing Q&C novels, A Gentleman’s Game and Private Wars.

Q&C is not in the James Bond family of spying. It’s a "realistic" kind of spy story, set firmly in the real world, owing more to Deighton, LeCarre, and, most of all, the gritty 70s TV series Sandbaggers than to Ian Fleming. The heroine is Tara Chace, one of three "minders" for MI6. That’s the "special section." (Why are there always three in the fictional special section? Three 00 agents in Fleming, three Sandbaggers, three minders... Either they’re all inspired by each other or else somebody found a grain of truth and latched onto it.)

A typical Q&C story half focuses on Tara out in the field in some topical hot spot (yeah, that’s "topical," not "tropical." Remember, it’s not Bond!) and half focuses on her superior, Paul Crocker, the cynical, aqualine Director of Operations for SIS. (Yes, it’s exactly the same formula as Sandbaggers. Some people have even speculated that it’s intended to be a "sequel" of sorts. The similarities don’t detract from either series; both are utterly brilliant.) As Chace navigates the dangers of her mission, Crocker navigates the equally treacherous corridors of political power in Whitehall and MI6 Headquarters. It’s a testament to Rucka’s writing that I’m usually even more captivated by Crocker’s storyline. It takes real talent to mine such great suspense from office politics and bureaucracy. If only 24 could get that right! Rucka shows that you can get intense drama out of actual, realistic office politics at a spy agency. Yet on 24, they don’t even try. Instead, they resort to soap opera theatrics and repetitive pissing contests to generate tension at CTU, and every time the show cuts from Jack Bauer back to CTU, it loses me. Rucka actually makes the office politics the most interesting part!

Of course, it helps that he crafts some of the most lifelike characters in all spydom, real people with real issues trying to do the best they can at an unusual job. Read the first several arcs of Q&C and you’ll be hooked. You’ll so quickly be invested in Tara, Crocker and the supporting characters that you can’t possibly get enough of them!

Which is the problem.

Rucka is a very busy writer. In addition to putting out one novel a year (this year it was one in his "Atticus Kodiac" mystery series instead of Q&C), he’s probably DC Comics’ most prolific writer. And unfortunately he’s embroiled in their ambitious 52 project, which chronicles an entire year in the DC universe week by week. (He’s also writing CheckMate, a comic that tries to do "Queen & Country in the DC Universe," but I gave up after a few issues because unless you follow every DC title religiously, trying to keep up with the convoluted politics of the DC Universe is even harder than keeping up with the real life global politics that serve as a backdrop to Q&C!) I’m sure that he does a good job with that stuff, too, and I’m sure there are grateful DC junkies, but I’m not one of them. I selfishly keep hoping he’ll turn his back on Batman and friends to give us monthly Queen & Country again!

That’s the frustrating part. The comic book comes out so infrequently these days that it’s next to impossible to keep up with the complex storyline from one issue to the next. For that reason, I recommend reading the series in trade paperback collections instead of individual issues. Buy the first two volumes together, and you’ll breeze through them. Read them in order, pausing to read Declassified Vol. 1 between Q&C vols. 4 and 5. Continue in order, and then read the novels in order after you’ve read all the currently published comics. Trust me, if you’re a spy fan, you’ll be rewarded!


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

2. Roger Moore
Why Roger Moore, you ask? Why is he the only other Bond on this list? Well, the list is of people who are of some spy-related importance right now, and Sir Roger makes the cut because he is the only former Bond to have recorded new audio commentaries for MGM’s big Bond DVD re-release.

The new discs hit November 7 to coincide with Casino Royale. MGM dvds are now distributed by Fox Home Entertainment, and Fox is also treating spy fans to their "Classic Spy Collection" that same day, including Quiller and Flint and some great cover art!

Speaking of cover art, 007 didn’t fare so well. Companies like Fox and Warner have learned the value of releasing their classics with original poster art, and have produced some fine, eye-catching DVDs.

MGM, unfortunately, is still working on their lackluster Photoshop skills for some reason. They have at their disposal some of the very best poster art ever created
and instead they used poorly done photo montages. What the hell???

At least the discs are housed in slimcases, which greatly cuts down on the shelf space from the last Bond release. The slimcases are inside a kind of neat "magazine holder" style inner case, which slides into a sturdy, glossy cardboard outer slipcase.

The cases for the first two volumes, one gold and one silver, are attractive at first glance, but exhibit some weird choices as to photos used. For example, Goldie (that 90s trip hop artist who played a very minor baddie in The World Is Not Enough in a bit of stunt casting no one really cared about?) ends up the most prominently pictured actor on Set 1, moreso than any Bond actor or any of the beautiful women. Huh? The discs are also randomly assembled, so that Set 1 contains an odd assortment of Connery, Moore, Brosnan and Dalton, but not the first movie, Dr. No. Or even the second. So it will prove confusing each time you go for a specific Bond movie, and have to figure out which set that particular one is in.
But enough with the negative. The new discs themselves are amazing! The picture quality is the best it’s ever been on Bond, and they retain all the special features of the last batch (including the wonderful documentaries on each film) plus great new ones. And, of course, the Roger Moore commentaries.

Sir Roger is one of the great DVD commentators. His tracks on episodes of his two best TV series, The Saint and the fantastic, underrated The Persuaders! are first rate. He and his producing partners Johnny Goodman and Robert S. Baker provide commentaries that are both informative and entertaining. Ol’ Rog is very funny, usually in a self-deprecating manner. And he has an amazing memory! He knows every actor’s name, even in the smallest of parts, and what happened to them and where they are now. Therefore you’re never faced with those lengthy discussions you sometimes get where older commentators try in vain to recollect someone’s name, or endlessly debate whether or not the person is still alive. He finds tactful ways to give us a bit of gossip on them (usually to do with drinking problems, it seems) and never takes himself or the material too seriously. So, based on those other tracks, Moore’s commentaries were probably the number one reason I’ve been anticipating these new DVDs.

I haven’t had the chance to listen to much of them yet, but based on a few minutes of The Spy Who Loved Me, he doesn’t disappoint. I think it was a mistake to let him go it alone, because the give and take with Baker and Goodman was part of the success of the Persuaders! tracks. If they’d gotten Michael G. Wilson or Barbara Broccoli or even a moderator to join him, it might have turned out a little better and filled the occasional gaps. Or perhaps they could have gotten production designer extraordinaire Ken Adam to record with him. Adam provides entertaining commentaries over his home movie footage elsewhere on the discs, and Moore mentions having a great relationship with him on his track. Had the two old buddies gotten together to remember, I think it would have been a good time for them and for us. And it’s definitely a missed opportunity not to have the incomparable, always entertaining Christopher Lee accompany Moore on The Man With the Golden Gun. Oh well. Like, I say, Moore doesn’t disappoint anyway. He’s still as droll as ever and offers up the same kind of anecdotes about bit players he did on his other commentaries. I can’t wait to listen to them all at length.

Moore’s also on my brain right now because I’ve been watching a lot of Saint episodes lately, some of the black and white ones I hadn’t seen before. Australia’s Umbrella Entertainment has put out top quality DVD sets of The Saint and just about every other Sixties ITC show. I was able to pick up the first set at a ridiculously cheap price, and have been enjoying all the extra features (like the aforementioned commentaries) that it offers that the bare-bones A&E sets here in the States don’t. (Of course, now there are two massive sets out from Network in England that include all the Australian bonus features plus brand new, full-length documentaries! If only I could afford them...) I enjoy The Saint a lot, and contrary to most fans I think I prefer the color episodes just a bit. But for me, Roger’s TV masterpiece is his early Seventies team-up with Tony Curtis, The Persuaders! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.) If you’ve never seen this show and you’re a fan of spy/adventure shows, you owe it to yourself to check it out. A&E have released it in two good volumes here in the USA, including some of those exemplary Moore commentary tracks. Network seems to have just put out the definitive version in the UK with loads more features, but importing it is naturally expensive, so I haven’t seen it.

The Persuaders! is silly, it’s generally mindless, and it’s bogged down in truly hideous Seventies fashions (actually, that’s part of the fun) but it is a pure joy to watch. Relentlessly entertaining! The whole thing depends on the pitch-perfect chemistry between Moore and Curtis, which is so undeniable on screen that I find it really hard to believe that it supposedly... wasn’t... off! Other key factors in the series’ success are the gorgeous European locations (none of that Saint grainy stock footage establishing shot followed by obvious studio backlot business here!) and a parade of recognizable guest stars like Terry-Thomas, Ingrid Pitt, Ian Hendry and Susan George, to name a few. Definitely start with the pilot episode. It really establishes the characters’ relationship for future episodes to build on, and it’s got a great split-screen race through the winding roads of Monaco between Moore’s Aston Martin DBS and Curtis’s Ferrari Dino! (Echoed, probably unintentionally, by the Aston/Ferrari race in the same location in Goldeneye decades later!)

Watch The Persuaders! opening credits (accompanied by John Barry's wonderful theme) on YouTube!


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

1. Daniel Craig
James Bond is the granddaddy of them all. It was Bond that made me as spy fan, and without 007 there probably wouldn’t be half the other spy stuff there is out there.

James Bond is everywhere right now, mainly because Eon’s new movie of Ian Fleming’s first Bond book, Casino Royale, is due out in just over a month. There’s even more buzz than there usually is over a new Bond movie because, as anyone who hasn’t been under a rock for the past year knows, there’s also a new Bond. Daniel Craig is going to show us what he’s got up his sleeve as Fleming’s quintessential superagent.

And he’s the elephant in the room of anything calling itself a spy blog, so I guess I better say how I feel about Mr. Craig. I say, wait until November 17. That’s when we’ll know.

I loved Brosnan, even though his last two Bond movies were sadly among the worst in the series. Despite the material, he got better and better with each movie. I think he’s a really gifted actor who did a great job in the part and does an even better job in his sleazier, non-Bond roles. Last year he got a Golden Globe nomination and probably should have gotten an Oscar nomination for his perfect comic performance in The Matador. He played a similarly amoral riff on his Bond persona in my favorite Pierce Brosnan movie, The Tailor of Panama (based on the John LeCarre novel). He’s a great actor who keeps getting better, and is at the height of his game. I think, like Sean Connery, he’ll end up playing some of his greatest parts in his more mature, post-007 years. He still looks great and I think he had another Bond movie yet in him. (He’s still younger than Roger Moore was when he shot his last Bond movie, and in better shape.) But the producers decided to go a different direction, so it’s no use crying over spilt milk. (The saddest part is that, if media reports are anything to go by, ol’ Pierce seems to have been rather unceremoniously dumped, which is too bad.)

So now we’ve got Daniel Craig. Let’s not judge him in advance. I think that whole "Craig not Bond" stuff the media made such a big deal of a few months ago is bullshit. We haven’t seen him as Bond yet! How can you say he’s not Bond? Yes, it’s true that he’s not traditionally handsome, but then again it could be argued that Brosnan was too much of a pretty boy. I can see why they want to go in a different direction, especially if their angle is to make Bond "grittier," as it seems to be.

Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale is a pretty dark, somewhat gritty novel, so that makes sense. Why couldn’t they have gone that direction with Brosnan? The shot in the trailer that seals it for me is the one where Craig jumps out the window going after the baddie. Just look at the way he goes through that window! Can you see Brosnan doing that? That’s not the way he moves. It takes a younger man to be so physical, and it makes for a cool shot.

So I say give Craig a chance. I’m optimistic about him. The posters look great, the trailer looks AMAZING (the best Bond trailer since that glorious original Goldeneye teaser more than a decade ago!), and the buzz in the movie’s pretty good.


7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig

List

For the first entry, to let potential readers know where I’m coming from, I’ll do a Top (double-oh) Seven list of people in the world of fictional spies to keep an eye on. People who are relevant right now. Such lists are by nature entirely arbitrary, and, for me, constantly changing. I’ll probably forget a bunch of people today that tomorrow or any other day might easily make such a list. But the point of this one is to let you know what kind of spy fan I am, what my tastes are. And to cram in a bit of news and some early reviews as well.

7. Elke Sommer
6. Mark Gatiss
5. Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz
4. Nick Fury
3. Greg Rucka
2. Roger Moore
1. Daniel Craig