The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel by Anthony Horowitz

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel by Anthony Horowitz Internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s third James Bond novel, after Forever and a Day. It is M's funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger and who is now in custody, accused of M's murder - James Bond. Behind the Iron Curtain, a group of former Smersh agents want to use the British spy in an operation that will change the balance of world power. Bond is smuggled into the lion's den - but whose orders is he following, and will he obey them when the moment of truth arrives? In a mission where treachery is all around and one false move means death, Bond must grapple with the darkest questions about himself. But not even he knows what has happened to the man he used to be.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. Be sure to subscribe to the show. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives. Put your arm around them. Hold their hand and just say, look deeply in their eyes and say, have you subscribed to the Chris Voss Show podcast and gotten involved in everything that's going on over there?

Also, go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there as well. Also, go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. LinkedIn newsletter is killing it. If you haven't subscribed to that thing over there, it just grows massively every day. We put that baby out in the 122,000-member group over there on LinkedIn. Today we have an amazing author on the show. He's very prolific.

He's written a lot of different books. His new book that's coming out is called With a Mind to Kill. This is an official James Bond novel. Anthony Horowitz is on the show with us today. He is a New York Times bestselling author as well. He's one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK and is unique for working across many media. Anthony is a born polymath, juggling writing books tv series films plays and journalism he's written over 40 books including the best-selling teen spy series alex rider which he adapted into a movie it was released worldwide in 2006 uh the alex rider series is estimated to

sold 19 million copies worldwide and his highly anticipated novel Oblivion, the epic conclusion to the Power of Five series, was published in October 2012. He's also an acclaimed writer for adults and was commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate and Orion Books to publish two new Sherlock Holmes novels. The House of Silk was published in November 2011, was internationally lauded as the top title this autumn. And we'll get right to the point here. Welcome to the show, Anthony. How are you? I'm very well, Chris. What a great pleasure to be talking to you. Thank you much. Thank you much. We certainly appreciate it. We'll have the book in the middle

of the final production of the show, but I'll go ahead and hold it up here on screen. So give us your plugs, your.com, so people can find you on the interweb well I have my own website which is anthonyhorowitz.com and that's probably the best place to find me but I'm also on Twitter as Anthony Horowitz and I always reply to anybody who gets in touch with me there and you know all the various publishers have their own different websites

actually it's quite hard to avoid me on the internet I think to be all over it well there you go, that's a good place to be on the internet, hard to avoid by the way his book will be coming out May 24th I think we all over it. Well, there you go. That's a good place to be on the Internet. Hard to avoid. By the way, his book will be coming out May 24th, 2022. And I believe you'll hear be hearing our podcast on that date about this. So how many James Bond novels have you written so far? Well, I actually ended up doing three, which is really quite extraordinary because the Ian Fleming estate, when they decided to sort of, you know, redo Bond for the modern age, had the idea that they would hire one writer to do one book

and they would keep changing it. So Sebastian Fuchs had the first one. I think that was back in about 2000 or 15 or so. I can't remember now, but that was Devil May Care. And then there was another one by Jeffrey Deaver, an American writer, very, very good American writer, who wrote a wonderful book called Carte Blanche. Love that title, incidentally.

That was then followed by William Boyd who did Solo. And then they came to me a while ago and my first one was Trigger Mortis and they came back for seconds and then for thirds. So I'm a three-time Bond writer. There you go. Well, that's

pretty good. Maybe you'll have a good 40-year run like the series. I don't know how long it's been. I don't think so. This one is my last. I think I'm done. One, two, three, and I'm out. Well, there you go. So tell us, give us an overarching view of this book and what's inside, or tease out what you can.

Okay, well, I mean, this is set in 1963, so anybody who's read Bond will know that he's getting on a little bit by then. I mean, it's towards the end of his career. It takes place, in fact, just a few days after his mission in Jamaica finishes. And that was written by Ian Fleming under the title of The Man with the Golden Gun when he was sent to assassinate Scaramanga. And what happened to him was that he returns to Britain and is persuaded by M to infiltrate Russia, to go into Cold War Russia behind the Iron Curtain to try and discover what a mysterious new organization,

a successor to Spectre, is planning. And the way to do that is quite complicated. He has to pretend he's been brainwashed. He has to pretend that he is a Russian agent. If you've read Man with the Golden Gun, you will know that in that book, he was in fact brainwashed by the Russians. Now he has to pretend that that brainwashing has still worked. He has to go into Russia. He has to pretend to be a traitor. He has to find out what is going on, what is being planned by this organization, and he has to stop it. Ah, there you go. There you go. Russia, the old style of Russia. As it turned out, having the Russians as the sort of bad guy to this book was, I'm afraid, Ah, there you go. There you goain falls and the Berlin Wall comes down. And then, of course, you get this sort of this return, if you like, to sort of Russian imperialism, Russian supremacy, which is what we're now seeing.

So the book does fit historically very closely into what I think is and has happened in Russia and in the world. Yeah. I mean, you know, those Russians are always up to something. Well, I try not to think badly of a whole country or a whole race of people. I mean, it is sort of a, but what you say, I'm afraid, is true. That, you know, what we're seeing now is sort of worse than anything

you could possibly read about in, you know, in any work of fiction. It's just so terrible. But that said, you know, when the book, when we realized that we had this sort of, you know, this war happening at the same time as this book, I had to remind myself and my publishers and my readers that the world of Bond and Ian Fleming is not the real world.

We are in a sort of a fantasy world, a world of adventure and excitement. And this book is not a political tract. It is just an adventure. Sure. Yeah. James Bond. Bond. With the Bond books, I suppose you have to disconnect yourself from the Hollywood characters in the Bond books. Is there a Bond character that's in movies that people should

reference? First of all, Chris, I would have to tell you that the Bond hasn't been played, as far as I know, by many Hollywood characters, as you say. I mean, Sean Connery certainly wasn't at the beginning of his career. He was very British. And so, of course, was Roger Moore. Of course, they went on to become Hollywood superstars because that's the power of Bond.

But, you know, when I write Bond, of course, I'm thinking of the movies. How can you not? I mean, you know, the heart of the world has seen a James Bond film. It's an extraordinary thought that. And I always sort of think that I'm sort of, I see Daniel Craig when I'm writing Bond and I hear Sean Connery. And that's the character who appears in the books. He's got a bit of both of them, but also, you know,

there's never been a bad Bond and every single Bond has brought something to the screen that I've, that I have sort of in my own way, sort of borrowed and added to my character. That's pretty good. You get a compilation maybe of all of them. I didn't think I'd like Daniel Craig as a character when they named him. But, yeah, wow. I don't know. I might have a hard time thinking he's the best Bond ever.

And I was a huge Sean Connery fan, still am. I think he played the role really well. I think both him and Craig are my two strongest people that I like the most for their role. But yeah, the voice of Sean Connery, oh my God. It's just a powerful voice. Yeah, with that voice I hear. I'm also a big fan of Pierce Brosnan and Tim Doolittle. They did a great job too.

For that matter, I always liked George Lesson. I thought he was great. And Roger Moore, I grew up with. That's, you know, I think you can tell. Your favourite Bond always tells you something about your age. Because, you know, I'm of the age that it had to be Sean Connery. Because I still remember being a little kid and seeing Doctor No at the movies when I was about 10 or 11 years old. And being absolutely blown away, both by, well, obviously by Sean Connery, but even more so by Ursula Andress.

You know, this was everything that wasn't in my life glamour good weather great food beautiful women and excitement i mean it was it was like it was like landing on another planet so sean connery has always had a very very sort of close place in my heart when it comes to bond but they've as i say they've all been good and casino royale with daniel craig is is one of my very very favorite movies in the whole franchise. Yeah. I think I loved him. I think I loved him.

That sounded weird. I think I loved him the most. Maybe I'm saying that because seeing the last movie was really painful at the end, the way that turned out. I guess I won't give spoilers to anybody who hasn't seen the movie. But, yeah, it's kind of a weird place of what they did at the end of Bond, and now you have, you know, Daniel Craig, and then you have a book and he's alive again. That's right.

I mean, well, I mean, the books, you know, it's a funny thing. These are parallel worlds. The world of Bond movies, and don't forget, there have been many, many more movies than there have been books. There are only 14 books. Now we're on six movies. So, you know, they are very, very different. And what happens,

the first three Bond novels, Doctor No from Russia with Love, and which is the third one I'm thinking of, well, anyway, the first three films, Goldfinger, were very, very close to the books. But after that, they began to move away ever further. So Moonraker, for example, sends James Bond into outer space, which never happens in any of the books.

And I belong very much to my book, With a Mind to Kill. It's very much part of the book world. That's where it fits in. Even when you were asking me to describe the plot of it, I have to remember that my plot bounces off A Man with a Golden Gun, the book, not the movie with Roger Moore and Christopher Lear's Scaramanga.

They are different worlds, and they don't really come too close. I imagine there's a whole bunch of people that... Are there people that really like the books more than the movie? They're like, ah, the movies ruin the books. Is there people that really like the

book version better? There is definitely all over the world a huge base of core, diehard James Bond novel fans who understand that these novels, if you ever go back to them, and I mean, you know, not many people do really go back to the great novels from Russia with Love, Live and Let Die, You Only Live Twice, all of them, they are the language and the excitement and the adventure, the pace. Fleming's extraordinary view of the world that makes them very, very special. You have to ask yourself, why have the books lasted so long when other spies have disappeared?

And that's because Fleming created something so original. And his writing is terrific. These are wonderful thrillers. But I have to be honest and say that the real, you know, the real power of Bond now is in the movies. I mean, you know, everybody, everybody goes and sees them. Everybody talks about them. As soon as one Bond retires, everyone is asking who's going to be the next one.

Can you think of any movie franchise where the newspapers actually, you know, put a front page splash on the, who's singing the theme tune for the movie? You know, that's what happens with Bond. It's sort of, It's an extraordinary phenomenon. Yeah, and I hope the franchise continues to smack it out of the park. I guess now we all

have to sit and wonder, who's the next Bond? The last movie puts a big question mark over how they're going to continue with the franchise. Again, not wanting to give anything away, but it's sort of, you know, it ended on a pretty sort of major exclamation mark. It definitely did. So, is there

a major evil dude in this book that Bond, you know, finds he's up against at the end? Yeah, he's a very, very nasty piece of work. I mean, I've written three villains now, and I think of the three, he is the most sinister and the most unpleasant. His name actually is not a name I

chose myself. He's called Colonel Boris. He's a Russian psychoanalyst dealing in brainwashing. And what's interesting is, is that in The Man with the Golden Gun, written by Fleming, the book, a character called Colonel Boris is mentioned as having brainwashed Bond. And that same character has a fleeting appearance

in a much earlier novel from Russia with Love. And as a sort of an avid James Bond book reader, I began to puzzle about who is this guy, Colonel Burris? What's he like? What does he look like? What does he do? Does he have a cap that sits on his lap when he jokes, when he's doing his evil deeds? What would it be like to meet him? So I thought, well, let's try.

So I used that name and that character and created more or less my own man. But he is a villain who captures Bond and does some pretty horrible things to him. So what kind of imagination do you have to come up with some of these horrible things? You don't have to be a horrible person. Who hurt you, Anthony? I write a lot of crime fiction, and I meet a lot of crime writers. And they are the nicest people in the world. It's a funny thing.

It always strikes me as weird that people who write these really quite violent and horrible things in terms of death and brutality are often the gentlest, kindest, sweetest people you can hope to meet, and you can't believe that they come up with that sort of stuff. I think to write a good Bond novel, you've got to just love Ian Fleming, which is where I begin. I mean, I try and channel Ian Fleming's vision of the world. And, you know, I'm not sure that there was any writer before him

who created such extraordinary monsters. You know, the Goldfingers, Hugo Drax, Scaramanga. They are such wonderful characters. And what's great about them is they're not generally vile. They're not disgusting. There's something always semi-attractive about them. They're interesting. I think we enjoy being with them you know my favorite scene in a james bond book and in a movie for that matter is when the bad guy has captured bond has tied him up and then gives

him dinner with nice wine and great food and tells him he will plan and says and now it's time to kill you this is how i'm going to do it and these guys never learn do they never learn but actually a single bullet to the head right there and there would be the fastest and easiest way of getting rid of Bond. No, no, no. They have to try all sorts of clever stuff to get rid of them, like throwing them into a tank of sharks or whatever, or tying them down with a laser beam going up between their legs, whatever it may be. And, of course, they always end up sort of, you know, dead at the end of the movie. They never learn.

I would just make Bond get married to someone, and know dead at the end of the movie they never long i would just make bond get married to someone and that would be the end of it um he did he did get married on that movie and um and that marriage lasted approximately one hour before it all ended horribly and with blood and with death oh man What are the sort of things that we want to tease out about your book? Well, I think you, I mean, you know, it is, it is a, it's set in three different places.

It starts in London, it moves into Moscow, and then from there to Berlin. Moscow and Berlin, of course, being behind the Iron Curtain. It is, it's got plenty of action in it. Lots of sort of big sequences. There's a great fight that takes place on London Bridge in the

middle of London. I mean, there's another one that takes place on, which I particularly liked. The chapter heading is really very very, a sort of chapter heading that Ian Fleming would have been proud of. Death under the chandelier. And on the Russian underground, you may not know this, but the Russian metro system or subway

has the most extraordinarily beautiful stations, often with very, very ornate tiles and chandeliers. And Bond has an assignation, a meeting underneath the streets of Moscow in one of those subway stations. And there's a really terrific fight, which I enjoyed writing, with I think the best twist in the book. It comes at the end of that fight. I'm not giving any more away.

Nice. Beautiful. It's set in the 1960s? 1963, that's right. Just at the end of Khrushchev being the leader of the Russians. I always get confused between Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but I think it's

Khrushchev. Yeah, they all have the F, whatever. Be careful what we say yeah um and it's an interesting time because it's when russia is sort of failing i mean there have been so many different issues that have gone wrong for example the cuban missile crisis which many people in russia see as a weakness a sign of backing down and uh and khrushchev gets a lot of blame for that uh but there are other things do their relationship with China is sort of in difficulties. And there is a sense that things aren't holding together. Too much liberalism, too much, you know, too much giving away to Western values. This is a time when, you know, the Beatles can be heard in Russian streets. And, you know, the Politburo, the leaders aren't happy about this. So the plot is really about people trying to return to the old style, the hard core communist Russia,

to make sure that Iron Curtain stays firmly down. There you go. There you go. One aspect, I guess I won't be giving something away in the book because this is in the publication. It opens with, well, I'm not sure if it opens the book. I'm just reading the inside cover. It's M's funeral. One man is missing from the gravesite

but I did mention that Bond has been brainwashed and sent by the Russians to kill M and what happens is that he does kill M or so it appears that is what they have to tell to the Russians the fact that Bond has killed his boss instead I have to tell you that when I watch those movies, my favourite scenes

are always the ones where Bond meets M, I have to tell you that when I watch those movies, my favourite scenes are always the ones where Bond meets M. I don't know what it is about it. Those scenes are so Bernard Lee, the great actor who played him in the early films, and then of course wonderful Dame Judi Dench who took over for the later ones. Those scenes always had a special magic for me, especially as a kid.

That idea of, you know, the sort of Judi Dench was almost like a mother figure to him. She was sort of a, you know, and yet she was also his boss and she, you know, that wonderful speech she had in one of the movies about him being such a dinosaur and him being, you know, get your act together, Bond. I used to

love all that stuff. So the idea of Bond killing M is a real subversion of what the book's stories were all about. I love the sequence in the book in the book man with the golden gun where bond brings out a special gun he's been given by the russians it's made of wood and it fires acid or cyanide or something yeah cyanide so that it so that it can evade any metal detector and it can't be seen and wow there's m it's amazing scene wow well there you go that

just sets it up for fun because, yeah, there's always been tension between their relationships and between the different movies and stuff like that. That's right. Yeah, and of course now Ray Fiend's taking over for the future. He was in the last one, but who knows who'll do it next time. There you go.

There you go. Anything more you want to tease out on the book, Anthony, before we go? Only to say that if you've read Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day, this is the end of my trilogy. I've done Bond as a young agent, Bond at the beginning of its career, then with Trigger Mortis I did Bond in the middle of his career. That was set at the time of Goldfinger. This is an older, wiser, more introspective, a little sadder Bond,

a Bond who has been through so much in his life and is wondering what comes next. It's a psychological story as much as an adventure story. Those who have read it so far, and there aren't many of them yet, but the ones who really count, like my wife and my publisher and my agent in that order, have said it's the best

of the three. So I hope I've gone out with a bang. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. Well, that's great. We'll be excited to read it. Give me your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, please. As I say, AnthonyHorowitz.com is my own website. Or just look up Anthony Horowitz on Twitter.

If you read the book, let me know what you think. I will write back to you, especially if you're nice to me. There you go. May 24th, 2022. You want to take an order of that baby up. Thanks for coming on the show, Anthony. We really appreciate it. Chris, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me. There you go.

Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com Fortress Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com Fortress Chris Voss and all the groups on all the different social media platforms. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.