Biography

Educated at King Alfred's School, Wantage and at Cambridge University. After several years as a minister of the church, he bcame an agnostic, moving into a varied career in the theatre and journalism. He began writing popular fiction in the mid 1960s.
- IMDb mini biography by: <dferstat@iinet.net.au>

Followed Ian Fleming and Kingsley Amis as the third writer of original James Bond novels in 1981.

In his Bond novels, he made 007 a little less flamboyant, and changed his Aston Martin to a Saab. The women characters were given more depth.

The author of 16 James Bond novels between 1981 and 1996.

During WWII, he served as a Royal Marine commando in the Middle East and Far East. By his own admission, he was "the worst commando in the world". While learning to fly, he bent an airplane (not an easy thing to do).

Gardner's favorite James Bond novel he wrote was The Man from Barbarossa.

Unhappily, I feel I'm probably going to be remembered as "the guy who took over from Fleming" [Ian Fleming]. I'm very grateful to have been selected to keep [James] Bond alive. But I'd much rather be remembered for my own work than I would for Bond.

[on coming up with ideas for his works] I have no idea where plots and characters come from. If you are a professional novelist, a writer of the kind of books that I write, that's the job--inventing characters and plots.

It started when I was eight. I announced that I wanted to be a writer so my father gave me a notebook and some pencils that he'd probably liberated from the school where he was chaplain. I took them up to bed. The story goes that he came up an hour later and found me fast asleep while the notebook was still virgin white except for the first page on which I had written, "The Complete Works of John Gardner".