Bestselling British thriller writer John Gardner has died at the age of 80.
John Gardner, a prolific British thriller writer who wrote more novels about Bond - James Bond - than Ian Fleming did, died on Aug. 3 after collapsing near his home in Basingstoke, England. He was 80.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Alexis Walmsley.
A former Anglican priest, Mr. Gardner wrote four dozen books in a career of more than 40 years. He was best known for the 14 Bond novels he wrote in the 1980s and '90s, which officially continued the work of Bond's creator, Fleming. (For his part, Fleming wrote only 12.)
In Mr. Gardner's hands, Bond is every inch a late-20th-century man. He smokes low-tar cigarettes (where is the Turkish blend of yesteryear?) and, in an authorial choice that anguished 007 purists, drives a fuel-efficient Saab instead of his Bentley Mark II Continental.
Though the reaction of critics was mixed, the novels were embraced by all but the most orthodox Bondians and appeared regularly on the New York Times best-seller list. Among Mr. Gardner's Bond titles are License Renewed (G. K. Hall, 1981); Win, Lose or Die (Putnam, 1989); Brokenclaw (Putnam, 1990); and, most recently, Cold Fall (Putnam, 1996).
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Mr. Gardners recent books include Bottled Spider (Severn House, 2002), the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford, a policewoman in wartime London.
Gardner still has two novels that will be published posthumously: Moriarty from Harcourt and No Human Enemy from St. Martin's Press.
