best. This still doesn't compensate for the awkwardness of the whole project. The reader will do better to head for anything by Mr. Gardner that isn't imitation Fleming. As pure Gardner, he is quite a writer." Mystery novelist Reginald Hill, writing in Books and Bookmen, admitted "I was not pre-inclined to like John Gardner's second James Bond adventure For Special Services, and I didn't. Mr. Gardner is far too good a writer not to make a fair stab at the job. No mere arranger of other men's flowers, he is of course a thriller writer of the first water. All this is done with technical skill and some panache, but in the end Bond belongs so much to the 50s and early 60s that to translate him to the 80s without making him grow up is an almost impossible task. The result is very fair escapist stuff, but time and again I found myself asking the, I hope, not impertinent question, if this man wasn't called James Bond, how good a thriller would this be? And the answer, I'm afraid, is not half as good as what Mr Gardner is capable of giving us when he follows his own creative bent. Bring back Boysie Oakes!" People magazine complained that the novel "has the stripped-down feeling of a comic strip. Fleming had fun with James Bond, but he also seemed genuinely to admire 007's ridiculous, perfect-martini mannerisms. Gardner, while he's a better writer than Fleming, is a cynical pro. There is no joy in his Bond." A handful of critics liked the book despite some reservations. The Globe and Mail crime critic Derrick Murdoch praised Gardner's vast research "on the state-of-the-art technology affecting satellite chasers, hydraulics, automobile and monorail engineering design, weaponry, optics and pyrostatics." Murdoch also praised the novel's final scene set "in a mock-decrepit palace in the middle of the Louisiana swampland, is played out in maniacal fury, total illogic and superb idiocy to enchant the mind. In other words, John Gardner is having more fun with his rented character than he allowed himself to have in the earlier book." Kirkus Reviews said Gardner's second Bond novel "is smooth enough - but a good deal less fun than License Renewed. Comic-strippy as ever, but without the freshness and Bond-persona detail of the first resurrection." John Waite, writing in the Nursing Mirror, said Gardner managed to write in Fleming's style