Death to Spies: A Novel of the Espionage Adventures of Ian Fleming - Softcover

Fawcett, Quinn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812575253 ISBN 13: 9780812575255

Publisher: Tor Books, 2003

Synopsis

Was Ian Fleming a master spy?

After years of serving in the intelligence community, Ian Fleming retiredā€”and soon thereafter created James Bond, that debonair, dashing hero of countless novels and films.

But what if Fleming never really retired from spying? What if his position as an international journalist was really a cover for Cold War cat-and-mouse games?

In Death to Spies, Ian Fleming, master operative, steps out from the shadow of his creation to take his rightful place in the pantheon of fictional spies.

Flemingā€™s idyll on the island of Jamaica is disrupted when a ranking member of British Intelligence shows up with a wild story of purloined nuclear secrets and moles within British Intelligence, then mysteriously disappears, apparently the victim of foul play.

Investigating, Fleming faces hostility in Los Alamos--where anyone not American is automatically suspect--meets a glamorous, sexy woman with few scruples, and narrowly survives several attempts on his life.

About this title

About the Author:

Quinn Fawcett is the author of a number of mystery novels, including a series about Mycroft Holmes, older brother of the famous Sherlock (Embassy Row, The Flying Scotsman, and more) and a series detailing the espionage adventures of Ian Fleming (including Death to Spies and Siren Song). Retired from a respectable position with the Courts, Fawcett moved from London to the Caribbean a number of years ago.

From Publishers Weekly:

Fawcett has had some success injecting series life into the fictional character of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's smarter brother (The Flying Scotsman, etc.). But Fawcett's taxidermy skills fail him here, as he tries to turn writer Ian Fleming into a believable fictional character. James Bond's creator, who was a mid-level agent for British naval intelligence during WWII, did retire to Jamaica and work there as a local journalist before turning some of his own and his colleagues' adventures into his famous 007 series-which kept him living in fine style until his early death. But Fawcett's fiction asks us to believe that Fleming let himself be talked back into the espionage game in the early 1950s, traveling from Jamaica to Los Alamos in order to probe leaks of atomic secrets by British scientists. Brand names familiar to Bond fans dot every page-enough Players cigarettes get smoked to qualify as a paid endorsement-but all the details don't add up to a complete or even an interesting portrait of a fictional Fleming. Nor can the stiff, silly dialogue ("Oh, Ian," says a Jamaican madam, "so proper and cool, and with the fires of hell seething inside you") or the inside jokes (the British spymaster who visits Fleming offers an "authorization to kill" if he takes the job) make readers believe they're in Bond country.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0812575253
• ISBN 13: 9780812575255
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400