I Read Books: Blood Fever
I’d heard about the Young James Bond books but never tracked them down. While in a holiday cottage I spotted this on a bookshelf so took the opportunity to read it.
It’s the 30s and James Bond is a schoolboy at Eton, and weird things are happening. Lots of the rich boys families are getting robbed and one of Bond’s friends has his father and sister go missing when their yacht is taken by pirates in the Mediterranean. While sneaking around the roofs as part of the “danger society” Bond accidently stumbles on some Latin-speaking criminals and then finds them again on one of Eton’s (real) weirdo school events.
But Bond is just a schoolboy so no one cares, and he joins an expedition to Sardinia for the summer holiday where things get stranger.
This is riffing more off the books than the films (hence the 30s setting, allowing Bond to be the right age to join Naval Intelligence in WW2 and the Secret Service for the 50s). Bond is probably no more ineffectual and hapless than in the books, despite being a schoolboy. Meanwhile there are full scale Bond villains in the world, with continent spanning plots, weirdo constructions and more than a touch of sadism. I like that take, that the world has always been full of deranged megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur and criminal organisations full of larger than life characters.
Read This: Ian Fleming isn’t writing them any more and this is Bond from a new angle
Don’t Read This: If a silly thriller is not your thing
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