James Bond: The Horowitz Novels

About the James Bond: The Horowitz Novels series

Commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications with access to unpublished Fleming material, Anthony Horowitz wrote three James Bond continuation novels between 2015 and 2022, each slotting into a different point in Bond's original 1950s-60s timeline rather than updating him to the present day. Trigger Mortis (2015) picks up literally days after Goldfinger, sending Bond from a Nurburgring race track into a Cold War plot to sabotage the American space program, and incorporates an unused Fleming short-story fragment as its opening set piece.

Forever and a Day (2018) goes further back, serving as a prequel that imagines Bond's very first mission as a newly-promoted 00 agent, immediately following (in Fleming's internal chronology) the death of the original 007 whose number Bond inherits -- a deliberate hole in Fleming's own back-story that Horowitz fills in. With a Mind to Kill (2022), the third and Horowitz's self-described final Bond novel, closes the loop by picking up exactly where Fleming's own final book, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), left off, with Bond brainwashed by the Soviets and sent to assassinate M.

All three novels are period-accurate historical thrillers written in close homage to Fleming's own prose style and plotting, distinct from the many other continuation authors (Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and others) who have written Bond novels across the decades -- this entry tracks Horowitz's contributions only, not the wider multi-author Bond continuation-novel tradition.

How to read this series

Horowitz's three Bond novels can be read in any order -- each is set at a different, self-contained point in Bond's original Fleming-era timeline (Forever and a Day is a prequel to Fleming's Casino Royale; Trigger Mortis follows Fleming's Goldfinger; With a Mind to Kill follows Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun) and none depends on the others. Publication order (used here) is Trigger Mortis (2015), Forever and a Day (2018), With a Mind to Kill (2022); reading in the internal Bond chronology instead means Forever and a Day, then Trigger Mortis, then With a Mind to Kill.

This entry covers only Anthony Horowitz's three contributions to the much larger, multi-author James Bond continuation-novel tradition (which also includes books by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and others, not tracked here) -- not Ian Fleming's original 1953-1966 Bond novels either.