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We sit down with the author to talk everything Bond, books and Benson!

What was your introduction to Bond?

I was a child of the 1960s, so I experienced ‘Bondmania’. When Goldfinger the movie opened I was nine years old. I lived next door to two girls and I was playing a game at their house when I heard this music coming from the living room, this fantastic brassy-sounding, dynamic, orchestrated music. I went in and the mom of the two girls was playing the Goldfinger soundtrack. And I kid you not, the woman’s name was M! So I ran home and I told my dad we had to go and see Goldfinger. I just went nuts. I thought it was fantastic. And then I realised there’s all these books. Everywhere you went in those days in 1964 you would see the paperback books by Ian Fleming, the Signet books with the uniformly designed covers. Did you know that that was the first time that an author had a uniformly designed series and paperbacks?

After this initial introduction, how did you become involved with 007?

By the 1970s although I would go to see each movie as it came out, I wasn’t the obsessed Bond fan. I got a degree in theatre as a director. And after I graduated from college, I moved to New York City, and I started directing plays and I also became a musician, composing music for theatrical productions. But then in 1981, the first John Gardner book came out, Licence Renewed. I enjoyed it. I thought, ‘Oh, this is kind of cool’. I got excited again. It was the same kind of excitement that I had in the 1960s. Around this time, some friends and I were sitting around a table when the question came up, if you had to write a book, what would you write? I thought about it, and said, “I’d like to write a big encyclopaedic coffee table book about the history of James Bond.” My friends all thought that was a great idea. One who had just published a book introduced me to his editor and I pitched my idea to her and that became the James Bond Bedside Companion.

In the 1990s I started writing and designing computer games, and that was where I really started honing my fiction. These games were story-based – complicated, elaborate stories where you solve puzzles and you talk to characters. So then in 1995, Peter [Janson-Smith] calls me out of the blue to say that John Gardner doesn’t want to write any more Bond books and would I like to give it a shot? Now, this was something I never campaigned for. Never thought about doing. It wasn’t in my wheelhouse. We talked at length about what my Bond books would be like, and Peter said, why don’t we keep it in sync with the new movies? I agreed but I also wanted to keep Fleming’s Bond. I want him to have all of his vices intact – to be a drinker and a smoker and a womaniser and be more of a brooding, serious guy. He might be a little anachronistic in the ‘90s , but as Judi Dench said in GoldenEye, he’s a ‘misogynistic dinosaur’.

What is your writing process like?

For that first book, I knew if it was published it would be in 1997. And what was the big event for Britain that year? It was the handover of Hong Kong. So I did a little research and once I had a good background on the history of Hong Kong, I wrote an outline for the story. I got the contract, and it was announced I was the next writer – unbelievable . I then travelled to Hong Kong with my wife to do the nitty gritty research. We went to China and Macau, as well as Hong Kong. I travelled in Bond’s footsteps and went to all the locations and met with the Royal Hong Kong Police to talk about Triads. That became the model of all my research trips. I would first look at a world map and pinpoint what hotspots Britain was concerned with and then do a little preliminary research. Then I’d come up with a plot and a story and write the outline, which is the most difficult part of the process. I would spend a month or two on this 20 page treatment broken out into block paragraphs. Each block paragraph represents a chapter – what’s going to happen in that chapter that moves the story forward. I don’t really get into character or dialogue or anything like that. It’s really the plot, the story. Once I work out all the twists and turns and the obstacles and the villains, I really hone it.

My method today is still to write a scene a day. By scene I mean, it has to begin and end. It could be a whole chapter, it could be part of a chapter. It could be two pages, it could be 20 pages. Like Ian Fleming, I would get the first draft completely done in one go, because I think that establishes a pace. Once that’s done, I go back and start reading, revising and deleting.

How did it feel to become a part of the world you had cared about for so long? Did you feel like you’d reverted to nine-year-old Raymond Benson?

Well, when Peter read Zero Minus Ten for the first time, he called me up. It still almost brings tears to my eyes. He just said, ‘Raymond, you’ve written a Bond book.’ Coming from Peter, that was just an incredible feeling. Looking back, who would have thought that nine-year-old Raymond Benson would one day be writing a Bond novel? That was just impossible to even think about. It’s turning a childhood obsession into a career. And those seven years were a roller coaster. I travelled the world. I met all kinds of great people. It was an amazing time.

What have you been doing since your last Bond book?

After Bond I started writing my own stuff. Bond kind of typecast me in the eyes of publishers. But I did not want to write spy novels. I didn’t want to write anything that was like James Bond. My other books are more like Hitchcock stories, you know, normal people in extraordinary circumstances. I also did a lot of what we call tie-in writing. Tom Clancy’s estate hired me to do a couple of books and Metal Gear, the video game. And I was also a sought-after ghostwriter. I’ve been a freelance writer up until now.

How are you feeling about the re-release of Zero Minus Ten? Have you read it back recently?

I’m really excited. I’m so happy about it. During the pandemic I read the books again. I mean, it’s 20/25 years later and they seem very fresh to me. I was reading the detailed things about Hong Kong and the Triads. I was going, wow, these are pretty good .

It’s well documented that From Russia With Love is your favourite Bond book. Do you have a favourite non-Fleming Bond book?

Oh wow. I would have to say one of mine and that would be High Time To Kill. I really think that’s the pinnacle of what I wrote. It’s what I call The Union Trilogy: High Time To Kill, Double Shot and Never Dream of Dying. I think that’s my strongest work. That’s what I liked the most. I would like to shout out to all the authors. It’s not an easy task. I think if you’ve managed to be in the club, to be a Bond author, then more power to you. I consider it a great honour to have these people as my siblings so to speak. I don’t take it for granted. I really appreciate that the Flemings trusted me, that Peter trusted me, and I still love it. I’m still very much a part of it. And I appreciate it.

We sit down with Mark Pearson to learn more about his father John’s work and 007’s impact on his own life. Mark has written an introduction in the latest edition of his father’s book, James Bond: The Authorised Biography.

Was Bond a big part of your upbringing?

I was exposed to the first of the Bond films by my father. He took a party of young children on my birthday to see Dr. No. Looking back on it, it was a slightly inappropriate thing to do for an eight-year-old child but there you go, it was fun. And all my friends thought it was really cool. Bond was quintessentially cool. And there were also the conversations around the dinner table when my father came to write James Bond: The Authorised Biography. They often centred on ‘Well, what would Bond have done in these circumstances?’ We’d be sitting around and talking about behaviours and people. My father was very open to the idea of getting ideas about Bond from us as children, which is slightly odd.

In your introduction, you write about some of the characters being based on people you knew growing up. What is this experience like, reading fictionalised versions of people from your real life?

One of the funniest for me is the depiction of my grandmother. In the book, James Bond has a cleaning lady who looks after his life and she’s much more than the cleaning lady. Sort of a female butler, if you like. And she sniffs in disapproval whenever Bond does something that she doesn’t like, and this is exactly what my grandmother used to do. We all knew that when my father wrote that, he was actually writing about his own mother, our grandmother, and we found that quite funny. Then there was the inclusion of our landlord as a porter at Blades, John Prizeman. And then the rather more surprising one, which was when we discover that James Bond’s mistress has been sponsored by a rich armament millionaire, who was named after Richard de Combray. He was a family friend who in fact was gay, so very unlikely to sponsor a female prostitute. Very unlikely to sponsor a prostitute full stop. Richard was a lovely, delightful man, who couldn’t have been less like an arms dealer.

The biography is so deeply researched. Do you recall anything about your father’s research, writing and creative processes?

My father was both a meticulous researcher and note-taker. When he was writing The Life of Ian Fleming he interviewed about 140 people. He kept every single one of the notes from that and so one of the things that the Queen Anne Press did before my father died was to publish the notes. The reality is that you could produce something similar for the Gettys or the Kray twins. You could do something similar for the Churchills because he kept meticulous notes of the conversations he had with people. But sometimes those notes were not exactly tactful. Coming back to our core subject here, which is Bond – Admiral Godfrey was clearly the model for M, and my father wasn’t taken by him when they met. What’s funny about that story, is that I think it was a two-way thing. I believe Admiral Godfrey was thinking ‘Is this whippersnapper, at 34, mature enough to write the book about my friend Ian?’ What we’re left with in the notes are comments about Admiral Godfrey’s appearance being fundamentally rundown, wearing rather tired looking brogues, but that you could still see a glint of the old M, or C, in his eyes, you could see the ruthlessness. I thought that was rather revealing and compelling.

How do you feel about the new edition of the James Bond: The Authorised Biography?

Well, I think let’s start with the really obvious thing – the cover of the new book is fun. Fun is actually central to this book, and it’s an opportunity to reengage with different populations. But the fun that goes with this is great: having a kit which any self-respecting spy can take into a mission. It feels very 60s. But I also think this edition celebrates the fact that this book is 50 years old. It’s actually 50 years young and in a curious way it’s still quite relevant. It’s still fresh. And I think people of my children’s and, dare I say, even my children’s children’s generation will enjoy this book.

Why do you think 007 and everything around 007 is so enduring?

I think it’s a mixture of things. There are massive overlays between a perception of what it meant to be British, coupled with the intelligence world and the lack of information about it, which is true to this day, although perhaps less so than it was at the time when Ian was writing. Coupled with this enormous sense of derring-do and a belief that one person could make a difference. That’s also very compelling, I think. Without question in the 50s and 60s we’d come out of a world war and people were desperate to have something which gave them a more positive view and a bit of fun. So I’ll come back to the theme of fun: the enduring theme of Bond, for me anyway, is fun.

What is your favourite James Bond book?

Diamonds Are Forever. An absolutely compelling page-turner. It is interesting, isn’t it? I was given the Bond books as a child. I remember being completely befuddled by Casino Royale, I didn’t understand it. Although my father did take me and my brother to Monte Carlo to look at a casino in action. My brother was eight and I was nine. And we were not allowed in. My father went in to do his research on gambling which took him a couple of hours. So we were parked, opposite, quite literally parked in a car. And he went off and did his research, and that was that really.

Hardback book cover for Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming, designed by Michael Gillette.

Had he given you Casino Royale before or after the casino visit?

Oh after that. But Ian gave my father a copy of Casino Royale, a first edition, which he inscribed. In fact I’d love to track down this copy because it means a lot. It’s inscribed to my father and it says ‘Thank you for supporting me through the writing of these books’. If anybody out there knows where it is, I’d love to see if we can find a way of borrowing it back!

Finally, what is your favourite John Pearson book?

Well, I really do love this book. So I think I’ll just stick with that.

Learn more about the life and work of John Pearson here.

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