Fast Show legend Charlie Higson, left, has written his first full-length Bond novel, King Zero (Image: Pengin / Getty)
First we need to clear something up about King Zero. Despite its title and plot involving an anti-technology conspiracy, Charlie Higson’s blockbuster new James Bond novel is not, he insists, a fiendish satire on the UK’s sustainable energy programme. “No, no,” chuckles the bestselling author and comedian. “It’s certainly not Bond goes to war with Ed Miliband!” An amusing thought perhaps, but the climate change minister turned Foreign Secretary will no doubt be relieved to hear he’s not in 007’s crosshairs. “Net Zero isn’t about switching everything off, anyway,” Higson continues with a sparkle in his eye. “It’s just finding new ways to power it.” A bit like 007 himself, then?
After all, 73 years after publication of Casino Royale, the first of Ian Fleming’s 14 Bond books, MI6’s most famous secret agent is still making a killing despite umpteen iterations on the page and, more famously, in the 25 official movies. And King Zero, Higson’s first full-length Bond novel after a well-received novella, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, written to tie in with Charles III’s 2023 Coronation, and his Young Bond series, should help propel 007 into the future. While the next movie, indeed the next big screen 007, has been shrouded in speculation since 2021 when Amazon paid £8billion for MGM Studios, including Bond filmmakers Eon, he’s in safe literary hands with the former Fast Show co-creator and star.
Roger Moore with Maud Adams and Britt Ekland in The Man With The Golden Gun (Image: Corbis via Getty)
King Zero starts with a bang – a robot surgeon is hacked, killing a former double-oh agent on the operating table by turning his brain to mush before he can spill a secret – and ends with the sort of cinematic set piece that wouldn’t be out of place on a movie set. Bond’s only lead on the gruesome assasination is a playboy film producer and his tattooed ex-cage fighter bodyguard. Which sends the jet-setting secret agent with the licence to kill hunting for a traitor in Saudi Arabia, and onto a showdown in the Congo via the Maldives.
There’s action, excitement and a suitably improbably named ‘Bond Girl’ in Navy Riordan. But the book’s very much set in a present day of scarce resources and ever more powerful technology that many will recognise and shudder at. Without risking spoilers, one sequence involving a driverless car feels especially timely while Bond’s ingenious, if time-consuming, method of communicating securely with Moneypenny back in London involves a Spotify playlist and Adele!
“Most of the other continuation authors – Sebastian Faulks, Anthony Horowitz and William Boyd to name a few – set their stories within the Fleming time of the 1960s,” explains Higson, a youthful 68, over lunch in a pub near his north London home. “They didn’t necessarily want to acknowledge the films at all. They’re good books, and they’ve done well, but I wanted to write a thriller that will sit happily on the airport shelves next to Lee Child or Mick Herron and other contemporary writers. That’s what I’m hoping this does, it’s not a niche fandom thing.”
His baddie is Martin Koenig, an 80-something mining magnate losing his mind, who’s created an archetypal fifties English village, Kingsdown, in the heart of Africa. Higson was inspired by Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s real-life plantation town in the Brazilian rainforest. “I liked the idea of this all-powerful, typical Bond villain type who has dementia and is losing his powers – slightly farming it out to AI – alongside fake nostalgia for a wonderful golden past which probably never really existed.
“People living in the fifties had the same nostalgia for the twenties; people in the twenties would have had nostalgia for the pre-war. Everybody’s convinced they’re living in a s****y age and things were better in the past, which is probably not true.
Daniel Craig played a harder, more ruthless James Bond, says Charlie (Image: PA)
“But I wanted an action sequence on the streets of a little English village, which you can’t do in Bond because he’s MI6, not MI5, so he’s always abroad. So I set it in Africa, and it became a slightly surreal sequence instead.”
It’s a clever twist and just one of the ways Higson’s Bond manages to pay homage to his roots while remaining highly contemporary. “There are lots of different Bonds out there, and they’re all in slightly different worlds – it’s like the sort of Bond multiverse,” he says.
“My 007 is an amalgam of all the Bonds from Fleming through to Daniel Craig, although there’s not much of Roger Moore in him. His Bond was an anomaly, it worked well at the time with no pretence of realism. They’re still good light entertainment but, after Moore, they brought in Timothy Dalton, and a much harder edge, more serious, darker. So King Zero has something of all the cinematic Bonds and Fleming’s… but in my mind, he’s just James Bond.”
An avowed fan of the franchise and something of an expert, Higson has a theory that on-screen Bonds swing between lighter and darker characterisations. Which might suggest that after Daniel Craig’s cynical, glowering secret agent was controversially killed in 2021’s No Time To Die, we might be in for something a bit more fun?
“I don’t have any insights,” he sighs, having presumably been asked this by absolutely everyone. “But I do think Amazon has set out their stall – they’ve hired one of the most respected and best directors around [in Oscar-nominated filmmaker Denis Villeneuve] who’s very good at action sequences. And they’ve got a British writer [Peaky Blinders creator] Steven Knight.
“They’re good indicators it’s going to be a big, prestigious film. I just hope there’s more of a sense of fun and adventure than there was towards the end of Craig, particularly in the last film, which was a bit kind of glum and cold and dark. I saw it with my eldest son, who’s quite savvy, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people embarrassed to be making a Bond film’.”
Sean Connery as James Bond in 1964, he felt like a ‘small cog’, says Charlie (Image: Getty)
That might be the crux of the problem when it comes to Fleming’s super-spy in the 21st century. Does anyone really still believe in Britain as a global power with the courage and, perhaps more importantly, conviction of the fictional take?
“That side of Bond was always quite tongue-in-cheek, even in the books, the idea Britain still could play a part on the world stage – it was a sort of pillow fantasy,” insists Higson. “Sometimes people worry too much. The Mission: Impossible films show that you can make a straightforwardly escapist action adventure film and people are happy. The hero does some amazing stunts, wins the day. Bond can be the same.”
Bond is a lifelong love for Higson, having exploded into his life during a trip to see Thunderball in 1965. But even Fleming, who died aged 56 in August 1964, became trapped by his creation. “Whenever he tried to do something else, his publishers always steered him back to Bond,” says Higson.
“It’s a tricky balancing act. You have to concentrate on the fun aspects – ‘F*** me, I’ve been given the job of writing James Bond!’ – but it’s a great responsibility, though you can’t keep thinking about that because it would paralyze you. I know I can’t please everyone, but if I can come up with a good, exciting story that people are gripped by, with interesting, strong characters that stick in the mind, and a few decent set-pieces, then my work is done.”
He continues: “Most Bond stories, particularly the Fleming ones, start with M saying, ‘This is the villain, this is his plot, go and sort it out’. I decided to make it more of a mystery – Bond becomes more and more aware that something terrible is planned.
“He’s working his way through the organisation – a sort of Jack-Queen-King structure. And Bond is the Ace – which could be high or could be low, he doesn’t know ‘till the end.”
It certainly keeps the tension mounting. Higson’s currently working on his royal history podcast, Willy Willy Harry Stee. He’s also playing M in a new full-cast audio version of SilverFin – his debut Young Bond book – the first time anyone has been allowed to dramatise Bond outside of the official films.
Front right with fellow Fast Show cast members (Image: PA Archive/PA)
Higson launches his new Bond book, King Zero, in London (Image: Getty)
As for his thoughts on the next on-screen 007, Higson says Bond can happily be black, but insists he must be a man because the franchise is all about masculinity. He had doubts when Tom Hiddleston was rumoured to be in the running because he wasn’t “a convincing hand-to-hand fighter. With Daniel Craig you can believe him kicking the s*** out of someone”.
“To play Bond, you’ve got to do more than just look good in a tuxedo,” he continues. “You have got to be sexy and you’ve got to be physically confident and convincing in a fight scene. To be able to do both is harder than it looks.”
As for Daniel Craig’s oft repeated remark towards the end of his tenure that he’s “rather slash his wrists” than play Bond again, Higson puts it down to the pressures of publicising the films. “He probably spent more time promoting them than he did filming them. It was the same with Sean Connery who felt like a tiny cog in a big machine. Whereas, Roger Moore loved it. He didn’t have aspirations to be an Oscar-winning actor, he didn’t want to play King Lear at Stratford.”
King Zero by Charlie Higson is out now (Image: Penguin)
Higson’s tip for the next Bond then – someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously and doesn’t mind handing over their life to Amazon for the next few years. That doesn’t narrow it down much, but he likes the look of Slow Horses star Jack Lowden – like Bond, a Scot – and Callum Turner, AKA Mr Dua Lipa.
How about Bond girls? There’s certainly one former actress newly-arrived back in the UK who’d love the work, I jokingly suggest – Meghan Markle.
“I have to confess I’ve never actually seen any of her acting,” he smiles. “I presume she’s okay or she wouldn’t have been cast in Suits before she was famous. Whether she’d make a Bond girl, I don’t know, she doesn’t exactly present an action girl image – it’s more putting popcorn in bags and scent by your guest’s bedside.”
Who knows, could be explosive popcorn?
King Zero by Charlie Higson (Penguin, £22) is out now
