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thedrifter
08-13-07, 02:10 PM
passings
British novelist John Gardner dies at 80
The ex-Royal Marine, magician and clergyman revived the James Bond character.
By Martin Weil
Washington Post

August 13, 2007

John Gardner, a British novelist who had been a magician, a clergyman and a Royal Marine before giving new literary life to one of fiction's most famous secret agents, the legendary James Bond, has died. He was 80.

The Daily Mail reported that he collapsed near his home and died Aug. 3 at a hospital in Basingstoke, England. A report on his website said he had been in ill health and had suffered a mild stroke last year.

Bond, celebrated as Agent 007, was created by Ian Fleming, who died in 1964. Sixteen years later, Gardner accepted the assignment of resurrecting the man, who, on the printed page and on the movie screen, had become a worldwide symbol of spying, sophistication and derring-do.

Gardner's efforts began with "Licence Renewed" (1981) and resulted in 14 titles, which exceeded Fleming's output and appeared to be among the most successful examples of one writer devising additional exploits for another's character.

Regarded as serious and thoughtful, Gardner was said to lack sympathy for Bond's obsession with high-end brand names and luxury products or for Bond's restrictive view of the role of women.

But Gardner said he viewed writing the new Bond series as a challenge, and "once I got the bit between my teeth, I wasn't going to let go."

He said he had hoped to add depth and dimension to the character, to make him grow and to bring him out of the world of fantasy into reality. Gardner's approach was reflected in matters such as giving Bond a concern for gas mileage and putting him behind the wheel of a sturdy and sensible Saab.

If not sacrilege, it was close, Gardner said, and "the die-hard fans wouldn't have any of it." Recognizing himself as an entertainer above all else, Gardner bowed to marketplace demands. Although critics sometimes looked askance, a number of his Bond books made bestseller lists.

John Edmund Gardner was born Nov. 20, 1926, in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, England.

His father was a priest in the Church of England, and Gardner was ordained in 1953. He soon recognized his error, telling an interviewer that during a sermon one Sunday, "I didn't believe a word I was saying."

He was released from clerical obligations in 1958 and said later that he had recovered his faith.

From boyhood, Gardner was interested in magic and became an adept performer, working with a Red Cross unit as a teenager in 1944. Later that year, he entered the Royal Navy and subsequently became an officer in the Royal Marines.

"I had been a small-arms expert and also knew a lot about explosives," he said, but he was "the worst commando in the world."

His educational credentials, which were acquired, he once said, "without my cooperation," included a degree from Cambridge University. He spent several years covering the arts for a British newspaper before embarking on fiction.

Cancer of the esophagus was diagnosed while Gardner was living in Charlottesville, Va., in the 1990s. His treatment and the death in 1997 of his wife, the former Margaret Mercer, kept him from working for several years.

Upon returning to England and in financial straits, he resumed writing. "What else would I do?" he said. In his 70s, he published a series of crime novels set in Britain during World War II about a female police detective.

Ellie

RIP