7. The Man With The Red Tattoo
The final original novel from Raymond Benson, and released in 2002, The Man With The Red Tattoo might be difficult to bring to screens now thanks to the presence of one famous girl and her own fire-breathing tattoo, but that doesn't mean the story is any less engaging. It is essentially a reworking of You Only Live Twice, in which 007 first visits a booming Japan, and though the story has attracted criticism for its limiting timelessness (and specifically it fails to follow on from Fleming's vision of Japan as progressive from YOLT). In terms of the plot, Red Tattoo is pure Bond - which is perhaps why it was almost chosen as the source for Bond 21, before the studio turned to Casino Royale - he investigates the assassination of the head of the world's biggest genetic research company and his family by a mutated version of the West Nile virus. The assassinations were carried out by the yakuza-boss head of a world terrorist organisation hell-bent on using the company to spread the mutated virus around the world causing mass destruction. Only the surviving daughter of the slain family can save the company, and the day, so Bond is forced to track her down in the red light district of Sapporo. It is a very cinematic story, with the kind of set-pieces that movie audiences would lap up, and the story is certainly strong enough to warrant consideration for adaptation. In the wake of the release of Sebastian Faulk's Devil May Care, Benson's work has been cruelly side-lined by the Fleming Estate, who decided to proclaim DMC the first Bond novel since Fleming's death, but his novels are no less worthy of note for that back-tracking.