THE SPY WHO LOVED PREQUELS
AUTHOR CHARLIE HIGSON HAS BEEN GIVEN THE ASSIGNMENT TO WRITE THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF NOVELS ABOUT FICTION'S MOST FAMOUS SECRET AGENT ... AS A TEENAGER.
BY ANDREW B. COHEN
The Duke of Wellington reputedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of
The estate of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was looking to extend the half-century reign of fiction's most celebrated spy by publishing a series of new novels about Agent 007--this time aimed at readers age 9 to 12. In "SilverFin" (Miramax Books), the first in the projected five-book "Young Bond" series, we encounter 007 as a harried 13-year-old orphan newly arrived at
The Fleming estate, hoping to crack the world of kids' lit, tapped Charlie Higson, 46, the author of several horror novels for adults to write the prequel. Though best known as a star of BBC comedy programs, Higson has made a splash with young Bond. His book is already a success in the
NEWSWEEK: I understand that The Fleming estate approached you first about doing the series. How did that come about?
Charlie Higson: They had a woman working for them at the time called Kate Jones, who had been my original editor when I was writing adult thrillers ... She knew that I wrote in a fairly kind of direct, hard-boiled style that they felt would be suitable for kids. And she knew that I was a Bond fan and that I had kids.
What ground rules did the Fleming estate impose?
The main ground rule was that it had to get as close as possible with everything Ian Fleming wrote and any facts that he gave in the books, so the time scale had to fit with him ... We came up with 1920 as a birth date, but also because the early 1930s were an interesting time to write about.
In writing a book for kids, you couldn't resort to the sex and violence that are so much a part of the 007 identity. How did you deal with that?
On that front, I had no ground rules from the Flemings, because they are as new to kids' fiction as I am. And I just thought, and Kate said, write how you want to write it, and we'll see what the publisher thinks ... I had to tone down a couple bits of explicit gore. We've tried to push it a bit, because kids these days expect a bit more from fiction. I've had to cut some more bits for the American version than the English--the American publishers were smartly more squeamish.
Can you give me an example of what we're missing out in the
There's one bit where a body is fished out of a lake. In the English version an eel comes out of his mouth, and in the American version the eel comes out of his shirt collar. It's little tiny things like that ... Apparently, one of the reasons the Flemings were interested in me was because my adult books are quite extreme, they're quite violent, and very dark, and they quite wanted these books to have a bit of an edge to them, a dark edge. The Fleming books are obviously quite dark in places, and they wanted these books to not be a jolly, old-fashioned Enid Blyton-style romp ... He is James Bond, so we do expect a lot of action and death and mayhem. But you do want to be careful with kids books.
How influenced were you, or the estate, by the success of the Harry Potter books? Did you feel a need to emulate them, or else go out of your way to not resemble them?
Obviously, the success of the Harry Potter books is one of the things that made the Flemings realize that perhaps they could do some serious books for kids ... Once they decided to do Bond at that age, there's no getting away from the fact that he went to a boarding school--that's what Ian Fleming said. These are not school-based stories like the Harry Potter stories.
In
I don't like reading comic novels, but I love reading thrillers. So I've always just written, for books, the type of books that I like to read. The books I wrote before were adult thrillers ... and I'd been tinkering with the idea of doing some sort of thriller for kids. I've got three boys of my own, and I wanted to write something they could read, so when the Flemings approached me, I thought, great, what a fantastic opportunity, but we didn't want it to be a sort of jokey, Roger Moore type of Bond.
I ask because I've always thought the Fleming novels were quite unintentionally funny.
Fleming, with his own voice coming through, can be outrageously funny at times ... I wanted this to be a good, tough, straight-down-the-line action thriller. I find TV is a great outlet for any funny ideas I might have. There are moments of humor in the book, but I absolutely didn't want to write a comic novel for kids.
In the book, the Bond character is more of an Everyman, or Everykid, as opposed to the Bond in the movies, who is more like a superhero. You didn't give him any extraordinary abilities.
The adult James Bond] is a superhero without superpowers. And in the movies, he's much more impervious than he is in Ian Fleming's books. [In] the books, he's more of a real man. If someone hits him, he gets hurt. He gets angry a lot. He gets depressed a lot ... But because he has no background [in the adult books] and no domestic life, he is the sort of character that you can project yourself into slightly. And I think it's important for kids' books that they can relate to the character. So I wanted to start the books with a fairly ordinary boy and show him growing toward becoming the man that he is--growing a sort of hard shell about him ... But I didn't want to write this little shrunk-down kid in a tuxedo who is constantly coming out with double entendres and beating up guys 10 times his size.
In this first book, the villain is American--what's up with that?
[Laughs.] Well, I wanted to get away from the cliche of the villain being deformed or disfigured in some way, because I know disabled groups get quite upset, and you can't keep equating being disfigured with being evil. So I wanted to go the other way and do a [villain] who was so handsome and so good looking that he was kind of scarily perfect, so I needed a villain who was tall and broad-shouldered and [with a] perfect tan and white teeth, and I thought [laughs] it's going to have to be an American. And I also wanted to get away from it being a greasy foreigner, and Americans aren't considered foreign in
That makes me feel better. Has there been any interest in a film version?
There's been a lot of interest in the film rights. I mean, obviously, it's James Bond, and it's for kids--look how well Harry Potter has done--but we want to get the books established in their own right, and get as many of them out as we can and hopefully [they'll be] popular and successful and make it a very distinctive new brand for Bond, distinct [from] the adult movies, so that there's no confusion between the adult ones and the kids' ones, but that means getting the books established first.
This article originally appeared on Newsweek.com on May 13, 2005
