A Leiter Shade of Bond

Amid worrisome reports that corporate giant Amazon has taken over the James Bond film franchise comes this cheerier news:

Ian Fleming Publications [IFP] is pleased to announce a new novel coming soon from 007 continuation author Raymond Benson. The Hook and the Eye focuses on Felix Leiter, James Bond’s trusted American friend and ally. This full-length novel will be released digitally in ten instalments, beginning on May 27th, recalling the serialisation of classic pulp fiction in the early twentieth century. This will be followed by the paperback publication of the full story on October 2nd.

You will remember that Benson was the third author—and the first American—commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to pen fresh novels starring renowned British superspy James Bond. He produced half a dozen of them from 1997 to 2002, beginning with Zero Minus Ten and concluding with The Man with the Red Tattoo. In addition, he novelized three of the films featuring Agent 007, wrote Bond short stories, and assembled an encyclopedic celebration of Fleming’s creation, The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984).

CIA operative Felix Leiter was introduced in the first Bond book, Casino Royale (1953). He would go on to appear in five more of Fleming’s novels, and then be portrayed on the big screen by actors such as Jack Lord, David Hedison, and Jeffrey Wright. A synopsis of The Hook and the Eye makes clear he’s at the center of the action this time:

It is 1952. Felix has lost his job at the CIA and finds himself working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. What starts as a simple surveillance job turns into anything but when Felix stumbles upon a murder and a cabal of spies embedded in Manhattan. Hired to transport the impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive Dora from New York to Texas, Felix is thrust into a non-stop adventure, where danger and deceit lie in wait around every bend in the road.

In an IFP press release, Benson adds: “Having worked on this project in secrecy since May 2024, I am now pleased and proud to finally present the first ever Felix Leiter novel, appropriately set in Ian Fleming's timeline of the 1950s between the character’s appearances in Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever. As a native Texan myself, I’ve always had an affinity for 007’s close American friend.”

There’s no word yet on whether The Hook and the Eye will be the initial book in a new series, but The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig explains that it “fits in with IFP’s recent strategy of diversifying beyond the Bond character. Kim Sherwood has written novels featuring other 00-section agents. This fall, IFP is bringing out Quantum of Menace, the first of a series of novels by Vaseem Khan featuring Major Boothroyd, aka Q. Q is out of MI6 and off solving mysteries.”