"The Name's Fleming, Ian Fleming."
What if Ian Fleming was James Bond?
A new novel, HONOR AMONG SPIES, offers readers the entertaining fictional premise that James Bond creator Ian Fleming was himself a British super-spy who enjoyed many Bondian exploits before he settled down and penned his now famous 007 adventures. Honor Among Spies was written by Quinn Fawcett (pseudonym for the writing team of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Bill Fawcett), author(s) of a number of mystery novels, including a series about Mycroft Holmes, older brother of the famous Sherlock (Embassy Row, The Flying Scotsman). This is Fawcett’s third book in his Ian Fleming spy series, all of which are set after WWII, but before Fleming wrote his first Bond novel.
In the first book, Death to Spies (2002), Ian Fleming travels from his home in Jamaica to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in order to probe leaks of atomic secrets by British scientists. In the second book, Siren Song (2003), Fleming investigates a powerful American businessman who may be a Communist passing U.S. secrets to Soviet Russia. Now, in Honor Among Spies, Fleming and a colleague journey to New Orleans to investigate a connection between a murdered bride and a religious cult.
The following book description comes from Amazon.com:
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was once an operative for British Naval Intelligence. Rumors hold that Fleming’s job occasionally required a bit of “wet work,” slang for assassination, but he never spoke of it, nor of the other secrets of his life during wartime. By the 1950s, Fleming had settled into a routine, spending part of the year in London and the rest on the island of Jamaica, at the estate he called Goldeneye . . .
Honor Among Spies
Fleming is recovering from witnessing the death of a woman he had come to love when he receives an urgent message from Prescott, a former colleague in the spy game. Prescott has set up as a private investigator in New Orleans, and his latest case, which began as a simple background check on a wealthy man’s new son-in-law, has turned deadly. The bride has been gruesomely murdered and one of her brothers has disappeared. Prescott himself been threatened, not physically, but with the revelation of his WWII activities, which could endanger not just Prescott, but England herself.
Investigating, Fleming and Prescott discover that the bride’s murder is connected to a new religious cult run by a mysterious woman from the former spies’ joint past. Before Fleming’s adventure is over, he will have seen the darkest parts of New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter, formed a temporary partnership with a pair of local pool sharks, witnessed perverse sex acts, and met a bewitching voodoo queen.
Layered with intrigue, packed with concealed truths and hidden identities, Honor Among Spies is another fast-paced adventure in the fictional life of Ian Fleming, in the days before James Bond.
Honor Among Spies, and the other books in Fawcett’s Ian Fleming series, can be ordered from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
First two books in Fawcette's Ian Fleming spy series.
Watch for CBn’s reviews of the Quinn Fawcett’s Ian Fleming spy novels in the future.