Here's some good news for both James Bond and audiobook enthusiasts. John Gardner's Bond novels from the 1980's and early 1990's are finally available in new unabridged audio recordings at Audible.com. While Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond novel- Colonel Sun- shortly following the death of Ian Fleming, it wasn't until the 80's that another writer was permitted to continue Bond's adventures, and that was Gardner.
John Gardner went on to write more than a dozen Bond novels during his run, and they did very well. Myself, I enjoyed the five or six that I read, finding them to nicely combine the sexy, larger than life qualities of the movies with the attention to detail and occasional dark introspection of the Fleming novels. I eventually drifted away from the novels as other elements of pop culture caught my attention, but now I'm looking forward to rediscovering the early ones and discovering for the first time Gardner's later entries in his Bond series.
Unfortunately, the one fly in the ointment is that Gardner's first two Bond novels, License Renewed and For Special Services, don't seem to be available on audio as of yet. One hopes they're on the way. They are currently available to read on Kindle, at least, as are all Gardner's Bond titles (the Gardner Bonds became available some time ago as e-books).
Anyway, if your reading time is limited like mine is, you might enjoy diving into these fun, engaging adventures during your morning and afternoon commutes, via these new audios. I certainly plan to do so. In a perfect world, I'd have enough down time to read all the new novels always coming out and past series like this one, but as I don't, audio is very helpful. I always have one book going in print or Kindle form while enjoying another title via audio in my car at the same time. Of course, even if I did have a ton of time to read, I'd still do some books on audio, as audio is a lot of fun.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that these new audios are read by Simon Vance, a fine, crisp narrator who narrated the Fleming Bond titles, too.
Well there's your Bond tip of the day. Hope it's useful.
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