Ian Fleming Publications said today it will bring out another James Bond spinoff book series, this one featuring Major Boothroyd, aka Q.
The Q Mysteries series will lead off with Quantum of Menace, with a scheduled publishing date of fall 2025, IFP said in its announcement.
The project continues a trend of an "extended Bond universe."
In the 2000s, there was a series of novels and short stories by Samantha Weinberg under the brand name The Moneypenny Diaries.
In the 2020s, the spinoff trend has accelerated. Kim Sherwood has published two novels of a trilogy featuring 00-agents other than James Bond. One of her agents is Johanna Harwood, named after a screenwriter who worked on the first two films of the Eon Productions series.
Now it's Boothroyd/Q's turn. Here's the synopsis of the story written by Vaseem Khan:
After Q (aka Major Boothroyd) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6's OO agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water. His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem disinterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier's ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces . . . Can Q decode the truth behind Napier's death, even as danger closes in?
Meanwhile, the literary James Bond has been somewhat scarce of late.
Between 2015 and 2022, Anthony Horowitz penned three Bond continuation novels, taking place at different points in Ian Fleming's original Bond novel timeline. In 2013, Charlie Higson (author of a series of "Young Bond" novels) wrote a novella titled On His Majesty's Secret Service.
With the new series, the star will be Boothroyd, who first appeared in the novel Dr. No. The character had a new gun for Bond. Fleming named him after a reader who critiqued the author's choice of firearms for 007.
In the Dr. No movie adaptation, the scene is adapted very closely with actor Peter Burton as Boothroyd. Desmond Llewelyn took over the role in From Russia With Love and was listed as Boothroyd in the end titles. Starting with Goldfinger, Llewelyn was listed as "Q." After Llewlyn died in 1999, John Cleese and Ben Whishaw played different Qs. It was specified Cleese was the understudy of Llewelyn's Q.
As a result of the films, Major Boothroyd is primarily known as Q. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Soviet agent XXX (Barbara Bach) does address Llewelyn's Q as "Major Boothroyd."
IFP said the new book series is a "collaboration with Zaffre, the flagship commercial fiction imprint of Bonnier Books UK."
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