Gardner, John (Edmund) - Francis Hope

FRANCIS HOPE

[In John Gardner's The Liquidator], 'L', the secret service killer who never kills and is terrified by flying in aeroplanes, is a sort of Ferdinand the Bull of the spy world; but there is enough real ingenuity in the plot to save him from the cloying cosiness of protracted parody. A few jokes about brand-names, and Sapperish smirks … fail to come off, but the whole achieves the cheerful mixture of self-indulgence and self-parody that marks the Bond films.

Francis Hope, "Olden Times," in New Statesman, Vol. LXIV, No. 1745, August 21, 1964, p. 253.∗

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