No Deals, Mr. Bond

An interesting and different direction for James Bond in this Gardner continuation novel. I think this is one of the better ones and certainly is quite well pasted. The locations perhaps let it down somewhere and there is a lack of glass which reminds me more of the Daniel Craig era of Bond films simply because it doesn’t have the casino and major of villains before. Interestingly, though it is a piece of Cold War action. Certainly worth a look.

For more reviews and bookish posts visit: https://www.ManOfLaBook.com

No Deals, Mr. Bond by John Gardner follows agent 007 as he attempts to save agents whom he’d extracted after an operation years earlier. This is the sixth James Bond novel written by Mr. Gardner.

On a cold night, James Bond and a team from the Special Forces Boat Group extracted four young women who were used as honeytraps for high-ranking KGB agents. Operation Cream Cake went well but one of the Boats was killed.

Years later, two of the young women are brutally murdered, with their tongues cut out sending a clear message to MI6. Bond is sent by MI6 to find the other women, who have changed their names, but must navigate danger after danger to get them to safety.

One of show more the things I noticed when reading the John Gardner’s Bond series is how much M hates James Bond. While it’s not out of character for Ian Fleming’s M, in this incarnation the head of MI6 is actively trying to get him killed.

The women in this book are both prostitutes and secret agents, and to make matters worse are not interesting or well written. When Bond talks to them he comes off pompous, he’s not undercover, that’s who he is in this book.

But no one read the Bond books for a dose of reality. Despite these I enjoyed reading No Deals, Mr. Bond by James Gardner. The action is well written, the fight scenes work, and the story is full of double crossing and peculiar violence.

This is a satisfying adventure, and I think it actually reads better in 2025 than it did when originally published in 1987. The casual racism is still there, and someone’s ideal of what “manliness” is, but it reads much more tongue in cheek than it was probably meant to be.

In fact, there are so many occurrences of silliness in this book that it’s hard for me to imaging Mr. Gardner didn’t do it on purpose. It’s a cohesive adventure, despite much of the inanity and absurd code names. show less

Merely OK espionage adventure. Bond is assigned to protect former agents of a British operation. Gardner gives us a decent secret agent thriller, but the character merely shares a name with Fleming's creation. Gardner's Bond has none of the characterization associated with the more famous version, whether in Fleming's books or the film series. Good book if you're looking for a thriller, but not if you're the mood for classic Bond.

Pretty decent.