It is the 4th of May, two days before the Coronation of King Charles III and the world’s favourite spy has his work cut out for him. Bond is sent at the last minute to thwart an attempt to disrupt the Coronation by the wealthy, eccentric and self-styled Athelstan of Wessex, who is on a deadly mission of his own to teach the United Kingdom a lesson. Can Bond dismantle his shady plans and defeat his privately hired team of mercenaries?
ian fleming publications
The most striking and perhaps less familiar quality of Charlie Higson’s On His Majesty’s Secret Service is how prescient, current, and right now the book is.
Pitching an aptly framed caper of a heraldic wise villain trying to disrupt the United Kingdom via King Charles’ coronation could almost veer into The Naked Gun territory. Yet, Charlie Higson is wise to Bond, wise to Fleming and wise to pulling the baronial rug from under the reader’s feet.
He was a fist, clenched and ready to strike.’
on his majesty’s secret service
Agent Higson’s greatest sleight of hand is not his once 1930s Young Bond Bond now projected into a spring 2023 world of Ukraine, Travelodge quips, ‘friends with benefits’, Instagram narcissism, Tommy Robinson racists screaming at refugee boats on the Kent coast, Google searches, blogs, Extinction Rebellion, Putin and new fifty pence coins.
Art / Mark O’Connell
‘No tiredness. Like a modern sports car, he always started first time, even on a cold morning like today.’
on his majesty’s secret service
It is not the remembrances, lines and minutiae to the now sixty year old 1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service novel by Ian Fleming – the nods to heraldry, the loss of love and having all the time in the world.
It is not even the sheer fun the author has had fulfilling an eleventh hour brief with a knowing world of snobbery, crass chest-beating and Bond society parties that wilfuly play like bad, lackluster Bond cosplay office parties inspired by Bond films.
It is six chapters of time-jumping grace fully aware of the Bond and royal context of couples who cannot be together finally doing just that, how paper thin nationalism and jingoistic TV stations and commentators can fan the flames of Capitol Hill insurrections, how entitled politicians self-cut from Victorian cloths are just nasty sheep in nationalistic wolf garb and how dog-whistling bigots and bully boys with social media accounts are now the ones jeopardizing nations like a nuclear missile from a Connery movie.
‘There was no room for finesse, for careful plotting, for negotiation. He was a bullet and he’d already been fired from the gun. Nothing could stop him.’
on his majesty’s secret service
To encounter a Bond novel replete with nods to French pension strikes, references to a monarch’s recent use of a pen, the vagaries of Trump and his vile and dangerous global wannabees, dog whistling frauds and anti-diverse panic, the hysteria of ‘anti woke’ banshees knocking trans rights as they shriek ‘free speech’ yet talk with nothing of the sort is collectively nothing short of a big, contemporary leap in the seventy year old literary Bond project.
Art by Mark O’Connell
And yet it is also stitched together by an author wise to Ian Fleming, wise to Bond, wise to that comma of hair, wise to Patty Hearst freedom fighters, and wise to the far-right sheep bleating from the hills as being as disruptive as a bomb or virus.
As the book honors its author’s lighter touch and comedic pace, Higson then brilliantly deadens and darkens a beat with Fleming’s blunt, sometimes impatient handbrake turns and granite wise Bond mots. This is still a Fleming world of simple car pursuits, scrambled eggs, Bentleys and lone bike riders.
Good work, Agent H! On His Majesty’s Secret Service is a worthy, nuanced, deceptively detailed, wise and fun new adventure for Commander Bond. It is a crowning finale to Bond’s seventieth anniversary and a literary toss of that fifty pence coin that landed king’s head up.
‘I wanted it to be about what is actually going on in the world.’
As the new Bond novel is published to commemorate both the seventieth anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and the Coronation of King Charles III, I speak to Charlie Higson about how the new 007 adventure began, the fast confines of its creation, the real politics behind his story world, the dangers of real-life nationalism, and his thoughts on Bond’s future on the page and on-screen.
On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson is available now from Ian Fleming Publications. All proceeds from the new work will go to the National Literacy Trust.
The UK paperback edition is published in June 20024 and available to pre-order now.
“I’ve been thinking about writing an adult Bond adventure ever since working on the Young Bond books, and he came bursting out of me with both fists flying. It was all I could do to keep up with him and get his story down on paper. Fleming famously wrote fast, and I channelled that energy. And now it’s so exciting for me to finally enter the world of grown-up Bond. Everything you want from a Bond story is in there – sex, violence, cars, a colourful villain with a nasty henchman, and of course, Bond himself. So well-known and yet so unknowable.”
