Forever and a Death
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Bond That Never Was
Two decades ago, the producers of the James Bond movies hired legendary crime novelist Donald E. Westlake to come up with a story for the next Bond film. The plot Westlake dreamed up – about a Western businessman seeking revenge after being kicked out of Hong Kong when the island was returned to Chinese rule – had all the elements of a classic Bond adventure, but political concerns kept it from being made. Never one to let a good story go to waste, Westlake wrote an original novel based on the premise instead – a novel he never published while he was alive.
Now, nearly a decade after Westlake’s death, Hard Case Crime is proud to give that novel its first publication ever, together with a brand new afterword by one of the movie producers describing the project’s genesis, and to give fans their first taste of the Westlake-scripted Bond that might have been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This high-stakes standalone from MWA Grand Master Westlake (1933 2008) originated as a script treatment that was never used for a 1990s James Bond movie, as film producer Jeff Kleeman reveals in a fascinating afterword. Businessman Richard Curtis is out for revenge against the entire city of Hong Kong, having been driven out of the place, recently returned to China, by "mainland bastards." He and his mostly unwitting minions plot to steal the gold from Hong Kong's bank vaults, remove it through tunnels crisscrossing under the city, and then set off explosions in the tunnels. The explosions will create a soliton wave, causing the ground to liquefy and the buildings above to come crashing down, killing thousands but covering his tracks. George Manville, a brilliant engineer, and Kim Baldur, a volunteer with an ecological guardian group, inadvertently interfere and then fall in and out of danger as they try to figure out and thwart Curtis's plan. Credible characters and tangible suspense distinguish this highly readable thriller, which is longer and more complex than most of Westlake's work.
