["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 don't believe any writer could have done better with this curious project than John Gardner, but it is simply a defeating project to start with. Ian Fleming was a dreadful writer, a creator of books for grown-up boys, a practitioner of tin-eared prose. As evidenced by his writings, he was also by nature a ferocious and humorless snob, a political primitive, a chauvinist in every possible area whose ideas about sexuality...