["For Special Services"] is a James Bond story—Mr. Gardner's second try at rattling those moldering bones—and, as the author's foreword suggests, it was inspired not by any of the nine Muses but rather by a consortium of 007's copyright holders and publishers, along with the Saab motor car company of Sweden, which now provides Bond with his transportation. At this point I will say that, after considering the extraliterary alliance associated with the venture,...

I was not pre-inclined to like John Gardner's second James Bond adventure For Special Services …, and I didn't. I missed Mr. Gardner's first conjuration of 007 but I believe it enjoyed considerable success, and I've little doubt that this one will too. Mr. Gardner is far too good a writer not to make a fair stab at the job. No mere arranger of other men's flowers, he is of course a thriller writer of the first water, author of many novels in many veins, and creator ...

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? daug...

[For Special Services is] John Gardner's second venture into Bond territory…. Gardner's Bond is to some significant extent reshaped, probably influenced by the extraordinarily successful series of films freely adapted from Fleming's work which has lightened the original Bond image, adding not only humour and tongue-in-cheek burlesque but also charm and even sympathy to the somewhat unpleasant, sadistic slant in the original characterization of this twentieth-century man of action...