I described to the Glidrose Board how I wanted to put Bond to sleep where Fleming had left him in the sixties, waking him up now in the 80s having made sure he had not aged, but had accumulated modern thinking on the question of Intelligence and Security matters.

Most of all I wanted him to have operational know-how: the reality of correct tradecraft and modern gee-whiz technology.Updating the time frame to the 1980s, Gardner's series picks up the career of James Bond some years after the Fleming novels ended.

The car is Bond's personal vehicle, updated at his own expense by Communication Control Systems Ltd (CCS), a real-life company (now known as Security Intelligence Technology Group) that provided author John Gardner with ideas about feasible gadgets to be used.

With the release of Licence Renewed Saab Automobile took the opportunity to launch a Bond themed promotional campaign complete with an actual car outfitted like the one in the book (but using smoke instead of tear gas).

Other key elements from Renewed that appeared in future Bond films were Anton's cheating at horse racing, which Max Zorin did in A View to a Kill, and the obsession with weapons, not unlike Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Licence Renewed, all fourteen of John Gardner's James Bond books were republished by Orion in the UK starting in June 2011.

Poet Philip Larkin writing in The Times Literary Supplement, felt that the book had no life of its own and lacked Fleming's compelling readability.

"[10] Listener crime critic Marghanita Laski, a long-time admirer of Gardner's books, said Licence Renewed "is competent and has its funny moments.

But this fine thriller-writer can't perfectly adjust down to the simpler genre, and the world-destructive plot is a waste of Gardner, without ever really convincing as Bond.

"What John Gardner has failed to realise is that the charm of Bond is as strictly related to a sense of period as that of Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe.

"[13] Robin W. Winks said in the Library Journal that "Gardner lacks the sparkle of Fleming's truly original plotting and humor, and Lavender Peacock simply is not Pussy Galore.

"[14] The Globe and Mail crime fiction critic Derrick Murdoch complained that the villains were weak especially compared to Fleming's own, and that love interest Lavender Peacock is "a schoolgirl next to Pussy Galore."

There's one sub-plot about an international terrorist that seems derived indirectly from Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, and another about a stolen birthright that could come directly from Victorian melodrama.

In classic style, Gardner piles picaresque on bizarre: Neanderthal henchmen, a medieval castle equipped with radar, cars that repel attackers with clouds of tear gas.