1980s BOOKS - LICENCE RENEWED JAMES BOND

80s BOOK REVIEWS - Licence Renewed / James Bond

I love 80s music, 80s graphic design, 80s fashion, 80s architecture, 80s computers...all things 80s. Which is why I've been turning the pages of books published in the 80s. My latest read has been License Renewed by John Gardner (not Ian Fleming).

Check out the book cover:

James Bond Licence Renewed

You can tell right away this book is going to be a classic James Bond story, but modernized for the 80s! Judging by the jumble of images: you've got handgliding (new to the 80s!), you've got an excentric looking old guy who is obviously the villian, you've got some horse racing (80s gambling at its best), you've got a blond haired beauty wearing a nice conservative early 80s outfit, then you've got the car in the front. A SAAB! A car fit for any secret agent in the 80s. No more old 60s jaguar. All the classic ingredients for a good spy adventure story.

JAMES BOND MEME

The novel begins with a classic Bond story - a deranged ultra-rich man appears to be teaming up with terrorists to destroy the world. The theme is very current for the time, nuclear energy and nuclear explosives. The evil villian this time is a disgruntled nuclear scientist who also happens to be connected with a line of Scottish Royalty. He is on a mission to monopolize the world's nuclear power and he does it by scheming up a plan to take numerous nuclear power plants hostage and threaten the world with nuclear catastrophe that will destroy the world as we know it.
In a predictable fashion Bond gets tangled up in this potential world destroying scheme and is sent undercover to infiltrate and possibly stop this crazed madman. From that point on the story goes from suspensful scenes to tasteful romps in the bedroom, from villians revealing their secret plans to action filled shootouts...in few words - a BOND story.

James Bond - Villian's girl is my mistress #likeaboss

Even though this book was not written by the Bond creator, Ian Fleming, Gardner does a great job of putting together a page turning, action packed, suspenseful novel that is worthy of the Bond franchise. I did feel he overdid the stereotypical Bond descriptions in the beginning of the book - almost as if he felt he had to overcompensate his Bond knowledge and prove he was worthy of writing a Bond novel. But, apart from that I didn't want to put the book down. I love that it was both modern (for the 80s) with the nuclear theme and the updated cars/gadgets, but still stuck to the over-the-top undercover spy stories of the past. A great book.

FUNNY 80s MUSIC MEMES

MURDER SHE WROTE MEMES