He subsequently wrote further novels centred on the characters of Derek Torry and Herbie Kruger, a Scotland Yard inspector and an intelligence agent respectively.

[2] He ended his work on Bond following a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer in the 1990s, and took a break from writing altogether in 1997, following the unexpected death of his wife, Margaret Mercer.

His parents were Cyril Gardner, a London-born Anglican priest who had been ordained in Wallsend in 1921, and Lena Henderson, a local girl; the couple were married in 1925.

[5] Gardner considered himself "the worst commando in the world"[1] and, despite being "a small-arms expert ... [who] also knew a lot about explosives",[1] he admitted that "I bent an aeroplane I was learning to fly".

"[7] In 1964 Gardner began his novelist career with The Liquidator, in which he created the character Boysie Oakes who inadvertently is mistaken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency.

[8] In fact, Oakes was a devout coward who was terrified of violence, suffered from airsickness and was afraid of heights[9] and Gardner admitted of him that, "though I have denied it many times—he was of course a complete piss-take of J.

[11] Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Anthony Boucher wrote, "Mr. Gardner succeeds in having it both ways: He has written a clever parody which is also a genuinely satisfactory thriller.

"[12] The book was made into a film of the same name by MGM and another seven light-hearted novels and four short stories about the cowardly Oakes appeared over the next eleven years.

[13] Following the success of his Oakes books, Gardner created new characters: Derek Torry—a Scotland Yard inspector of Italian descent[14]—and Herbie Kruger,[15] the latter of which appeared in a series of novels published simultaneously with his Bond works.

[2] James Harker, writing in The Guardian, considered that the Gardner books were "dogged by silliness",[2] giving examples of Scorpius, where much of the action is set in Chippenham, and Win, Lose or Die, where "Bond gets chummy with an unconvincing Maggie Thatcher".

[2] Whilst Gardner's Bond novels received a mixed reaction from the critics, they were popular and a number appeared in The New York Times Best Seller list,[26] bringing the author commercial success.

[4] The Globe and Mail crime critic Derrick Murdoch said, "John Gardner is technically a highly competent thriller novelist who never seems to be quite at ease unless he is writing in the same vein as another writer.

)"[30] The Crime Writers' Association short-listed The Liquidator, The Dancing Dodo, The Nostradamus Traitor, and The Garden of Weapons for their annual Gold Dagger award.