On a recent trip to London I visited the Waterstones book store in Trafalgar Square where I picked up a copy of the new James Bond book, Forever and a day written by Anthony Horowitz. That sounds far grander than it was, we were on a city break on one of our allotted annual leave breaks so we chose our capitol city to do some sight seeing. What follows, isn’t a review of said book per se but more of a telling of what happened next.

The book was the second James Bond book written by Horowitz, the first being Trigger Mortis and both of them were set in the original timeline Fleming wrote his series in, late fifties, early sixties. Forever recounts the story of how Bond earned his Double O status and the subsequent mission after his promotion.

I have to say I really like Horowitz’s style of writing, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy his first outing with Bond when I read that it would be set sometime after Casino Royale. I was looking forward to a more modern adventure with the super spy but once I started reading it the fact that there were no mobile phones, no modern computers or GPS tracking or any of the other standard stuff in espionage stories didn’t hamper being fully immersed in what the writer had to say. Remembering that fact I jumped right into Forever and was totally lost within reading the opening sentence.

The era the book is set has a much more relaxed pace to it which at times gives you the illusion that nothing much has happened and yet you have to continue reading. As I worked through the book it reminded me of early books by Fleming and what interested me as a young man in the thriller genre. I dare say books like these encouraged me to write at a later date, maybe not right away but when I did start to write my own books the experiences gained from reading these books helped formulate what I wrote at the beginning. Since returning from London I find that the influence has reached deeper. The style of writing back when Fleming was in his hey day and copied remarkably close by Horowitz with his two Bond adventures was a much more stylised way of painting pictures with words. The writer would set a scene with a flourish of prose that lit up the imagination of the reader. Modern thriller writers tend to stick to short sentences mainly for pacing I suspect and it was a style I adopted after a particularly scathing review of my first book which told of endless run on sentences. Clearly this reviewer had never read anything older than himself but at the time I thought that was what the modern reader wanted to I adapted. After reading Forever I now know I was correct the first time and will continue to paint pictures with words.

I am a writer forever and a day.