James Bond is dead, and John Gardner's second effort to remove the nails from that coffin, though not so dreary nor so silly as the first, is nonetheless very thin gruel. For Special Services … is exceptionally bad when read, as I have just done, back-to-back with Ian Fleming's "From a View to a Kill," a story embedded in For Your Eyes Only…. The aging Bond is now teamed with Cedar Leiter, daughter of his old friend, and he goes up against a reincarnation (son? daughter? who knows?) of Blofeld in an appalling and sexist, though highly cinematic, confrontation with the usual mix of sadistic cheats in Amarillo and like romantic places. The book is full of one sentence paragraphs—did Fleming ever really write this way?—and obligatory "who'll sleep in the one bedroom, who on the couch" scenes once calculated to titillate fourteen-year-olds. The whole is marked by an appalling cynicism toward the reader; one wonders why Gardner, who has written some perfectly acceptable books of his own, largely modest parodies of the genre, did not study the formulas well enough to understand them. (pp. 38-9)
Robin W. Winks, in a review of "For Special Services," in The New Republic, Vol. 186, No. 25, June 23, 1982, pp. 38-9.
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