You Only Live About 23 Times: The Wall Street Journal Reviews New James Bond Continuation Novel, Carte Blanche

Michael C. Moynihan wrote a good review of Jeffery Deaver's new James Bond continuation novel for the Wall Street Journal.

In 1953, former naval-intelligence officer Ian Fleming introduced readers to the British secret agent James Bond with two wonderfully evocative sentences: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are naseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it." Fleming died in 1964, just when his Cold War creation was undergoing transformation into a hugely popular film franchise. He completed a dozen novels.

The runaway success of 007 demanded that Fleming's saturnalia of sex, genocidal villians and Cold War spycraft be continued by a capable literary ventriloquist.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303714704576383422025834058.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I reviewed the previous literary ventriloquist's James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. You can read my review via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DevilMayCarereview.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DevilMayCarereview2.jpg

Tattooed By Politics: Michael C. Moynihan On Radical Swedish Detective Fiction

I confess that I could not finish reading Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I gave up on the novel not because of Larsson's leftist, anti-capitalist views - Lord knows I've read a good many books by leftist novelists. I laid the novel down because I thought it dull.

Michael C. Moynihan in his Wall Street Journal review of Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, begins with noting that Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo offered "cartoonish tales of capitalists doing battle with righteous journalists and anarchrist hackers."

Moynihan goes on to write that Larsson, a former member of a Viet Cong support group, has a literary heir of sorts in Mankell, a Swedish crime writer, former Maoist agitator and author of the Kurt Wallander detective series. The Troubled Man is the latest novel in the series.

 "Like Larsson, Mr. Mankell is a writer of middling talent and radical political beliefs," Moynihan writes.

You can read Moynihan's interesting piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214481282836602.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5