Oct 30, 2016

The Double O Section Turns Ten: A Look Back at the Best Spy Movies of the Last Decade

It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a decade. There are very few things that I’ve stuck with regularly for that long! But it was ten years ago today that I published my first post on this blog, a list of seven names that were both then relevant to spy entertainment, and also indicative of the sorts of topics I planned to blog about. It’s weird that I can’t even remember now that it was Halloween time when I published my first post. I don’t remember what costume I wore or where I went that year to celebrate, or with who. But I do remember that the first Daniel Craig James Bond movie, Casino Royale, loomed large at the time. It played a huge part in why I decided to start blogging about my love of all things spy. It was the most exciting time to be a Bond fan since that first GoldenEye trailer showed up in theaters a week earlier than expected over a decade prior. And it still is! But this blog hasn't just chronicled the Daniel Craig era of James Bond. It's covered an interesting period in spy entertainment. So I thought I'd celebrate the tenth anniversary with some more lists, like that first post. The obvious list to start with is movies. Usually decade lists are made, well, for a given decade. 2006-2016 is admittedly an odd span to cover with such a list. But it's actually been a pretty remarkable period for our favorite genre, encompassing a lot of great movies all very different from each other.

Before I get to that list, however, I want to thank two people who were instrumental in the inception and longevity of this blog: Nora, who first put the idea in my head of starting a blog, and Josh, who's created a number of terrific graphics for me over the years, including these anniversary banners. Stay tuned for more interesting lists spanning the last ten years over the coming week, as well as news, reviews, and a contest or two!

Click on the titles for links to my full reviews, where applicable.

My Favorite Spy Movies 2006-2016

1. Casino Royale (2006)

That movie we were all looking forward to when I wrote that first post not only revitalized the 007 franchise, but proved to be one of its very best entries of all time. While I hadn't come to that conclusion at the time I posted my initial pre-release thoughts, or even by the time I wrote my full review after seeing it again, over the years it's risen to second place on my own list, following only On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

2. OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies (2007)

Michel Hazanavicius crafted a near-perfect send-up of Sixties spy movies (despite his film actually taking place in the late Fifties) while simultaneously reviving a classic Eurospy character in his two OSS 117 films starring the incomparable Jean Dujardin. He beautifully, lovingly recreated not only the hallmarks and cliches of the genre and the era, but also the filmmaking techniques. I remain ever hopeful he'll still make a third!

3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

John le Carré may be the undisputed master of the spy novel, but in 2011 his name hadn't been seen on screen for a decade. Director Tomas Alfredson kicked off the le Carré screen revival that led to this year's mega-successful miniseries The Night Manager with his stunning, gorgeous adaptation of the greatest spy novel ever written. I still marvel at the brilliance of Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan's remarkable script, a masterclass in adaptation that managed to perfectly preserve the spirit of the lengthy novel by brilliantly changing just about every scene. It's an incredibly economical script demanding the audience's full attention throughout. No bit of exposition is repeated. This is another movie desperately crying out for a sequel; I'm dying to see Alfredson tackle another Smiley novel.

4. The Lives of Others (2006)

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's masterful Cold War-era, East German-set film ably demonstrates the breadth of the spy genre. It's as far from James Bond as you can get, but a film that actually examines the act of spying itself, and what it can do to its practitioners when they start to identify with the people they're spying on.

5. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

It's hard to believe that Tom Cruise has now been playing Ethan Hunt for longer than any actor ever consecutively played James Bond. But the Mission: Impossible series was not healthy at the time Brad Bird was hired to direct its fourth installment. Cruise had been briefly banished from the Paramount lot, and the studio had even contemplated giving the series to its direct-to-DVD arm. Bird, unproven in live action, shot new life into the series by turning to the TV show for inspiration. In doing so, he not only made the first entry in that series that I unabashedly love, but also made one of my favorite spy movies of the decade. The setpiece in which Cruise dangles from the Burj Khalifa may be the most memorable, but nothing in the film excited this fan of the show as much as the line at the end when the voice of the IMF name-checks "The Syndicate!" Happily, Christopher McQuarrie continued with the tone set by Bird, making the Mission: Impossible series one I now look forward to nearly as much as James Bond.

6. Green Zone (2010)

There's no question that director Paul Greengrass changed action cinema when he imbued The Bourne Supremacy with his signature style of shaky camera movements and fast edits. He spawned a number of imitators, but hardly any of them have been able to successfully recreate his style, and the result has been a number of jolty action sequences so chopped up you can barely tell what's going on. But even Greengrass had not perfected that style with his first spy movie. The Bourne Supremacy was partially successful, but The Bourne Ultimatum was better. Green Zone, however, is the culmination of Greengrass's collaboration with Matt Damon. This movie demonstrates exactly what that style is meant to do: it puts the viewer right in the middle of the action, and it's utterly thrilling.

7. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

Modern movie reboots of classic Sixties spy series seldom prove creatively successful. The Avengers, The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, and countless others have come up severely short despite, in some cases, promising creative teams. But Guy Ritchie managed to make a thoroughly entertaining spy movie by valuing the spirit of the series above the letter. Some fans were disappointed that he didn't serve up a beat-for-beat recreation of the show. He did something better. He set the film in its original Cold War period, but with the benefit of hindsight was able to fully explore the dynamic of an American agent and a Soviet agent working together in ways the TV series simply couldn't at the time. And he did it with great style and a spectacular soundtrack. Like the OSS 117 movies, this was a thrilling love letter to Sixties spy movies.

8. Bethlehem (2013)

Here's a movie that deserves a much wider audience. Yuval Adler made one of the best realistic spy movies of the decade in his story of a young intelligence asset torn between his Israeli handlers and his Palestinian brethren. It delves deeply into the true nature of spying and the high cost paid by those caught up in it. This is the second-best le Carré movie of the last ten years, a feat all the more remarkable given that le Carré had nothing to do with it!

9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

If there's one genre that's characterized these last ten years more than any other at the box office, it's superhero movies. Hollywood studios finally discovered the riches to be mined by faithfully adapting classic comic book characters and story arcs instead of dumbing them down or camping them up. Some viewers complain of over-saturation, but if you ask me Marvel Studios has managed to avoid that by setting its films in distinctly different genres. And the second Captain America movie is undeniably a spy movie. It takes its cue from classic paranoid Seventies spy thrillers like 3 Days of the Condor and Marathon Man, and takes much of its storyline from the Iran-Contra-era comic book Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. (Though Fury himself is only a supporting player to Cap, this is very much a S.H.I.E.L.D. movie!) But what makes it a great spy movie isn't what it borrows from the past, but the direction it set for the future. This was the first major Snowden-era spy movie. It spoke to the paranoia Americans were beginning to feel about their espionage apparatus, as the dust settled on the post-9/11 era in which spies were once again portrayed as heroic. Sibling directors Anthony and Joe Russo took advantage of the fact that they were telling a story about a fictional spy agency, rather than MI6 or the CIA, and told a story that really cant' be told with real-life organizations. And their treatment of the evil organization Hydra and its infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. paved the ground for new versions of The Syndicate in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation and SPECTRE in the most recent Bond movie.

10. Skyfall (2012)

Casino Royale was no one-off. Daniel Craig has managed to make two classic Bond films so far during his tenure. Skyfall may divide fans, but director Sam Mendes managed to take 007 to new box office heights by combining the darker character exploration that made Casino Royale great with the fun, more over the top action that characterized the best moments in Roger Moore's tenure. It was great to see Q and Moneypenny return to the series, and to see some humor injected back into Bond while simultaneously delivering a mature story. It's not a perfect film. It's got flaws. But it's still fantastic!

Check back tomorrow and all week for more 10th Anniversary celebrations, including those contests!

Tradecraft: Catherine Keener Joins Sicario Sequel Soldado

Sicario proved to be one of the best spy movies in 2015, a year chock-full of genre entries. Earlier this year it was revealed that that film would spawn not only a sequel, Soldado, but potentially a trilogy or series. Now there's some more casting news on the next film. We already knew that Benecio del Toro's enigmatic assassin and Josh Brolin's unscrupulous CIA agent would be returning (though not Emily Blunt's FBI agent, despite being the main protagonist of the first movie). Now, Deadline reports that Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich) has joined the cast. Keener will play Brolin's CIA boss. The trade also reveals a bit about the plot of Soldado. While the first film dealt with drugs being smuggled into the U.S. through tunnels from Mexico, the second will deal with terrorists infiltrating the country though those same tunnels. Gomorra director Stefano Sollima takes over helming from Denis Villeneuve (who has moved on to the Blade Runner sequel), but Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan returns to pen the sequel.

Tradecraft: CBS Buys Mission: Impossible-like Spy Drama From James Patterson

CBS has bought a spy drama, Stingray (no relation to the Stephen J. Cannell series of the same name), written by David Marshall Grant (Code Black) based on a novella by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski. According to Deadline, "Stingray is described as a fun, adrenaline-fueled drama in the tradition of Mission: Impossible and Ocean’s Eleven. It centers on a group of ex-con artists who work for the FBI, using their amazing transformational skills and elaborate deceptions to take down the most elusive criminals." Hm, okay, maybe it is a little bit like that Cannell drama... though that was a loner who used his amazing transformational skills and elaborate deceptions to take down the most elusive criminals, not a group. No, no, it's not based on that, but it certainly sounds in the tradition of not only Mission: Impossible, but also other shows I've loved like The Saint, Burn Notice, Hustle and Leverage. It's a good formula, and I hope this one works as well as those others.

Oct 29, 2016

Tradecraft: CBS Developing Spy Drama from Scorpion Producers

Deadline reports that CBS has bought Sentinels, as spy drama, from three producers on its hit show Scorpion--supervising producer Rob Pearlstein and executive producers Nick Santora and Nicholas Wootton. According to the trade, Pearlstein's script "shares the sensibility of Scorpion as a light, action procedural. It centers on the world’s worst news team who’s actually a cover for a secret government program that has highly trained spies masquerading as hapless reporters. They use their unfettered access all over the globe to take on harrowing missions and preserve world peace."

Oct 27, 2016

New 24: Legacy Trailer; Carlos Bernard Returns as Tony Almeida

Fox has released a new trailer for the upcoming spinoff/sequel 24: Legacy. I'm kind of surprised how much it looks to be retreading the plot of 24's first season (or was it the second? the one with Dennis Hopper), but it still looks great, and I can't wait! As 24: Live Another Day proved, twelve episodes suits this format so much better than twenty-four. While Jack Bauer won't be around for this installment, Deadline reported earlier this month that another beloved 24 alumnus would be back. Carlos Bernard will reprise his role as former CTU badass and sometime bad guy Tony Almeida. You can be forgiven if you were under the impression that Tony was either bad, dead or in jail, because he's been all of those things at the end of various seasons. But there was a special feature on the DVDs of 24: Live Another Day in which Tony is seen escaping from prison. He's not in this trailer, though, so no doubt his reappearance will come at a surprising moment during the new season.

[Video removed]

Oct 26, 2016

Trailer: Come and Find Me



Rubicon writer Zack Whedon's Come and Find Me, starring Aaron Paul (Eye in the Sky, Central Intelligence) and Fleming standout Annabelle Wallis, looks more noir than spy, but it definitely looks awesome!

Tradecraft: Paramount Plans Alex Hawke Spy Series Based on Ted Bell Books

Deadline reports that Paramount has acquired the rights to Ted Bell's series of novels about MI6 agent Lord Alex Hawke with hopes to launch a new spy franchise. (They already have Mission: Impossible and Jack Ryan, but the latter is moving to television after the last unsuccessful attempt at a theatrical reboot.) The studio has set veteran espionage specialist Kurt Wimmer (Salt, The Recruit) to pen the adaptation, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura (RED, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) will produce. Di Bonaventura has a few other spy movies percolating right now, including Michael Apted's Unlocked and Lionsgate's American Assassin (another potential franchise starter, based on Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp series). The trade doesn't reveal which of Bell's books the first movie will be based on, if any. I have to admit, I haven't read any of Bell's books, but it sounds like I probably should.

Oct 24, 2016

The Ian Fleming Episode of Timeless Airs Tonight on NBC

The Ian Fleming appearance on NBC’s Timeless that EW first reported over the summer will air tonight at 10/9c. Sean Maguire, who played Robin Hood on Once Upon A Time and, it should be noted, bears no resemblance to Fleming, will play the James Bond author in a story set during his wartime service for British Naval Intelligence. Based on the trailers and clips, however, I don’t think we should expect a historically accurate Fleming on the time travel adventure show. Instead, it looks like we’ll get the James Bond surrogate the author is usually used as on television. Which isn’t automatically a bad thing; it could still be a lot of fun. Based on the clips, it looks like we’ll be seeing Maguire playing Jason Connery’s Ian Fleming from the 1990 TV movie Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming. This Fleming is undercover behind German lines, something the real, deskbound Fleming may have dreamed of doing, but couldn’t risk owing to the secrets that he knew. Yet the notion of Fleming on a commando raid disguised in Nazi drag persists in popular culture (seen most recently in the BBC miniseries Fleming). Indeed, it has its barest roots in reality, as written in John Pearson's still excellent biography. Screenwriters are wont to spin some of Fleming's more creative notional operations that he dreamed up for the 30 Assault Unit commandos into the very sorts of adventures the future author probably imagined himself going on... and frequently combine that with an actual intelligence gathering trip he undertook, after the fighting had been done, to recover the German Naval Archive. Indeed, Timeless Executive Producer Eric Kripke admits that Fleming was more or less filling a void in their script. He told EW, "We needed a spy in Germany to help our heroes and bring them into this world… and we turned to our historian, and he said, ‘Let me work on it,’ and then he comes running in the room an hour later and says, ‘Ian Fleming was there!'" So it doesn't sound like a history lesson, but then it hardly needs to be. It does sound like it could be pretty fun, so I'll certainly be watching tonight. (And Timeless is a fun show already.) Unfortunately, one of the main rules of the series is that the characters can't return to points in time they've already visited, so it seems highly unlikely that Fleming could become a recurring character.

Oct 23, 2016

BMW, Ford Release Short Spy-like Films Starring Clive Owen, Mads Mikkelsen

The eagerly awaited return of BMW Films' The Driver (Clive Owen), announced last month, premiered today. The Escape, the new short film (or long commercial, depending on how you look at it) stars Owen, reprising his role from the early 2000s, as the enigmatic, ultra-professional getaway driver, this time transporting a human clone (Dakota Fanning) for the unscrupulous chief of security for a biotech company (Jon Bernthal). Neil Blomkemp (District 9) directs The Escape, the highlight of which is a Bond-worth setpiece featuring a car vs. helicopter tug of war. Watch on the BMW Films website or embedded below, via YouTube.


Meanwhile, Ford actually scooped BMW by a few days by copying their idea, and released a short film of their own starring Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) and the great Barbara Steele (Black Sunday). Like BMW, they trade on classic spy movie imagery in their short, Le Fantôme. Jake Scott (Plunkett & Macleane), son of Ridley Scott and nephew of Tony Scott, who produced the second series of original BMW short films, directs this one, which finds Mikkelsen playing a debonair international assassin (the titular Fantôme) hunting his latest quarry in an exotic European location. Steele plays a rival assassin, and the targets drive a shiny new Ford. (So you can probably guess their fate.) It's also worth watching:

Oct 22, 2016

Kino Lorber Brings Dimension 5 to Blu-ray and DVD

Wow! I honestly never thought we would see Franklin Adreon's ultra-low budget 1966 spy movie Dimension 5 get a legit DVD release, let alone a brand new high-def master on Blu-ray. But that's exactly what's happening, thanks to Kino-Lorber, according to a post on their Facebook page! In my review of the film, I called it "an American Eurospy film," and I stand by that geographically shaky claim today. It's got next to no budget, but makes up for that with beautiful babes, recycled James Bond gimmicks, and the requisite loathsome hero played by original Star Trek captain Jeffrey Hunter. Best of all, it's got a genuine Bond baddie in the person of Oddjob himself, Harold Sakata, as the villainous "Big Buddha!" Read my full review to get an idea of whether or not this is a movie you would appreciate. It's appeal is certainly limited to a certain type of cinephile, but anyone who enjoys Eurospy movies, Sixties spy TV, or Bond knock-offs in general is likely to find something to enjoy. Dimension 5 is so obscure it's never been released on any home format before, and now we're getting a Blu-ray! What a world!

Tradecraft: Nineties Surveillance Movies Become Modern TV Shows

Two fun and fairly beloved Nineties caper movies about surveillance experts are being rebooted as rival TV series. Deadline reports that NBC is developing a hacker drama inspired, no doubt, by the timely post-Wikileaks success of USA's Mr. Robot, but ostensibly based on Phil Alden Robinson's classic 1992 movie Sneakers. The film starred Robert Redford as master hacker Martin Bishop (though I can't recall if it actually used the word "hacker"), who leads a Mission: Impossible-style team of surveillance experts as they conduct fake heists to test companies' security. They become embroiled in spyjinks when they're blackmailed into recovering that favorite espionage MacGuffin, a "black box" for the NSA. Bishop's arch enemy turns out to have a personal connection to his past, a set-up that lends itself well to a network series. The movie's producers Walter Parkes (who also co-wrote it) and Laurie MacDonald will executive produce the series along with Mentalist executive producer Tom Szentgyorgyi.

Meanwhile, according to Variety, ABC is taking a crack at Tony Scott's 1998 action movie Enemy of the State. The film's producer Jerry Bruckheimer is on board to produce the show, which will be written by Morgan Foehl, who mined similar territory in the 2015 movie Blackhat. The trade reports that the series is conceived not as a remake, but a sequel to the film. "Based off the movie, the show is set two decades after the original film. When an elusive NSA spy is charged with leaking classified intelligence, an idealistic female attorney must partner with a hawkish FBI agent to stop a global conspiracy that threatens to expose dark secrets and personal mysteries connecting all three of their lives." Other than a thematic similarity, it's difficult to see from that description how exactly the series relates to the movie, which starred Will Smith as a labor lawyer who becomes embroiled in a spy conspiracy involving the NSA, an assassination, and a reclusive surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman. Just as the fun of the Bruckheimer-produced The Rock was seeing Sean Connery unofficially reprising his James Bond role, the main attraction in Enemy of the State was seeing Hackman unofficially reprise his role from Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic The Conversation.

In addition to capitalizing on the success of Mr. Robot, shows about hacking and domestic surveillance are also obviously quite topical in the current climate. It will be interesting to see if one or both of these reboots ends up making it to series!

Oct 10, 2016

Clive Owen Returns as The Driver for BMW Films

He's not quite a spy, but Clive Owen's enigmatic character The Driver from the series of BMW Films in the early 2000s is certainly spy-adjacent. And he (somewhat circuitously) inspired an even more spy-adjacent character, The Transporter. The Driver first appeared in a series of eight short films produced in 2001 and 2002 known collectively as The Hire. It was an innovative idea. BMW approached top international directors including John Frankenheimer, Wong Kar-wai, Guy Ritchie and Alejandro González Iñárritu, to helm short films (or long, plot-driven commercials) featuring Owen driving various BMWs in various action/adventure scenarios ranging from comedic (Ritchie's) to downright surreal (Tony Scott's, which featured Gary Oldman as the devil). The shorts were collected on a now out of print DVD, and beloved by many fans. In 2005, Dark Horse published a less successful comic book version, which also tried the strategy of recruiting industry superstars like Kurt Busiek and Matt Wagner (and, oddly, Bruce Campbell, who is a superstar... but not as a comic book writer!), but kind of missed the mark by using concept cars instead of actual BMWs on the market. That was the last we had heard from The Driver. Until now.

Now, fifteen years later, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Owen is back in the role! Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) directs a new 11-minute short entitled The Escape, and intended, according to the trade, as "an homage to the original series." Does that mean it's not an actual sequel? Unclear, for the moment, but it certainly looks like a new entry in the franchise we're familiar with. Also unclear is whether this is simply a one-off, or if this is the first of a new series of Hire shorts. I'm certainly hoping for the latter! In addition to Owen, original series creative director Bruce Bildsten, executive producer Brian DiLorenzo, producer Steve Golin, and creative consultant David Carter all return. The latter co-wrote the new short with Blomkamp. Jon Bernthal (The Accountant), Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring) and Dakota Fanning (Man on Fire) co-star.

The Escape will premiere October 23 on the BMW Films official website.

Here's a teaser:



...and a short behind-the-scenes video:

Trailer: Incorporated

Here is the trailer for Syfy's upcoming futuristic industrial espionage series Incorporated, from producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The series, which we first heard about two years ago, takes place in 2074 when governments have fallen and corporations have taken control. A deep cover operative penetrates one such corporation to bring down the system from the inside. Incorporated premieres November 30.

Oct 4, 2016

Lost First Season Avengers Episode Discovered!

Wow, there is a lot of truly exciting spy news breaking today! In addition to the announcement of a new James Bond novel from Anthony Horowitz comes some fantastic news for Avengers fans.My wishful thinking 2010 April Fool's post has come partially true. (Reading that all these years later, I'm kind of astonished at the amount of time I must have spent on that constructing a narrative of so many trivial details!) Not the whole season, sadly, but one more episode of the mostly lost first season of The Avengers has been discovered! Most of the first season has been considered lost for decades thanks to the unfortunate UK practice of "wiping" tapes. Videotaped series, seen at the time (so long before DVD or streaming media) as ephemeral, were simply recorded over to make room. Other notorious victims of wiping include (sadly) many of the monochrome episodes of Callan, most of the second season of Adam Adamant Lives! and, most famously, many early Doctor Who serials featuring the first two Doctors.

Avengers scholar extraordinaire Alan Hayes, co-author of the definitive book on the show's first season, Two Against the Underworld (a must-buy for any curious fan!), provides most of the background in a post on his wonderful Avengers Declassified website, but it was Spyvibe's article on the subject that first caught my attention. A 16mm film print of the 20th episode, "Tunnel of Fear," was discovered by Kaleidoscope's Chris Perry. "Tunnel of Fear," set at a seaside funfair, was one of the highlights of the most recent volume of Big Finish's excellent audio recreations of the lost episodes, so I very much look forward to seeing how close they got it! The episode features both Patrick Macnee's John Steed and Ian Hendry's Dr. Keel, and Steed goes undercover in a harem, which sounds wonderfully appropriate.

For those lucky enough to live near Birmingham City University, "Tunnel of Fear" will be shown in November at this year's annual Missing Believed Wiped festival. As for the rest of us, apparently rights holders StudioCanal have been contacted, so hopefully they will find a way to get it onto DVD for the masses before too long. And hopefully more believed lost first season episodes will continue to turn up as dedicated TV scholars continue to tirelessly search for them!

Anthony Horowitz Returns for Another James Bond Novel

Ian Fleming Publications announced today that Alex Rider and Foyle's War creator Anthony Horowitz, who penned the well-received 2015 James Bond continuation novel Trigger Mortis, will write another 007 novel for publication in Spring of 2018. The project will also mark the return of Bond to the publisher most associated with the series, Jonathan Cape. Cape published all of Ian Fleming's original 007 novels, and more recently William Boyd's 2013 one-off continuation Bond novel Solo.

Like Trigger Mortis, Horowitz's next, still untitled Bond novel will again be a period piece set during the timeline of Fleming's original novels, and will once again, according to The Bookseller, "feature previously unpublished material by Fleming." (Trigger Mortis incorporated a racing sequence based on an unused Fleming outline for an episode of a never-made James Bond television series.) Horowitz will be the first continuation author to pen more than one novel since Raymond Benson ended his tenure as Bond's official chronicler in 2002. While Benson and John Gardner before him each wrote many entries in the series, Since 2008, the Fleming Estate has instead (until now) opted to hire big name authors on a single book basis for the main series of adult James Bond novels. (Spin-offs, however, like Young Bond and the wrongfully forgotten Moneypenny Diaries--both excellent series--saw the same authors pen multiple titles.) If you ask me, Horowitz is an excellent choice to take of the mantle of Bond's official chronicler! Trigger Mortis was excellent, as was his series of Bond-inspired teen spy novels featuring Alex Rider. And Foyle's War (starring Brosnan-era Bill Tanner Michael Kitchen) was simply one of the best TV dramas ever. I look forward to reading Horowitz's next James Bond novel, and hope it's only the next of many more to come!