Jason meets Charlie Higson

Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series and The Enemy, concluded his whirlwind Australian tour with a small get together in the Melbourne offices of Penguin. There to meet him was a good cross-section of book-buying and selling public: booksellers, librarians and straight out fans of his work. There was even an ardent Fast Show fan in the bunch.

He spoke briefly about the Young Bond books.

“The Ian Fleming Estate called me up out of the blue. They wanted me to do a series of James Bond books for teenage boys. At the time there wasn’t much out there for boys besides Tony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books.”

“I wanted to write something that dads could read with their kids. It was simple because most dads are James Bond fans.”

Higson wrote five stories chronicling James Bond’s formative years at Eton. “I could have written more but I wanted to stop at five. I didn’t want to get stuck writing anything but Bond like Fleming. He wrote one Bond a year for thirteen years and by the end of it he wanted to kill off Bond and his health was suffering.”

Last year Higson published the first in a new series. The Enemy tells of a virus that strikes at anyone over the age of fourteen. Part post-apocalyptic zombie horror, part Lord of the Flies, it reads more like something from George A. Romero than a children’s novel.

“As I was writing it, I’d read some to my kids. And they kept saying it was good, it was all right. So I went back and put more horror in.”

The second book in the series, The Dead, is coming late September, 2010.

By Jason Danby
Collins ABC Werribee staff member and self confessed book fanatic

PS  Jason is a mad James Bond and Dr Who fan and has a knack for sourcing hard to find books!!  Drop by the store anytime to chat to him about your book obsessions.