Ranking James Bond Authors

Tenure – 2014-2017, Novels – 4, Short Stories – 0

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that the Young Bond subseries continued after its initial conclusion, with Steve Cole was then chosen to further the stories of Bond’s teenage years in the 1930s. A prolific children’s author, Cole had begun his writing career with Doctor Who novels, branching out into a number of original series before entering the world of Bond.

Ostensibly designed to bridge the gap between Bond’s expulsion from Eton and his eventual recruitment into MI6, Cole’s four novels are little more than formulaic filler, taking James to interesting locations like Los Angeles during the early days of Hollywood and Cuba several decades before the revolution but failing to inspire or excite.

Coming on the back of three authors who’d contributed just a single novel each to the series, Cole was fairly prolific, delivering four books in four years. Despite their comparative recency, however, they’re already fairly obscure, with Strike Lightning and Red Nemesis having the distinction of being the only books in the series not to even get their own Wikipedia articles.

Teen fiction will always be a lucrative market, but the appetite for an adolescent 007 seems to have faded over time.