that John Gardner was underqualified to write Bond. "His book strikes me as deficient in many of the basic requirements. Mr. Gardner is all awkwardness. Every time I try to enter into his latest conspiracy we bump heads. It's one thing to accept an improbable plot and quite another to accept an improbable style. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief, but not my affection for the English language. I don't see why, when Mr. Gardner can learn all about the various weapons, machines and intelligence procedures he describes, he can't do a bit of basic research in ordinary narrative technique. A man who has no talent for describing women, for example, should let them alone." Broyard cited numerous examples of clichéd writing and dismissed the plot as "a muddle". T. J. Binyon, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, believed the book was "full of good action; his torture scenes are splendidly painful; his villain is adequately megalomaniac, though perhaps not sufficiently outre; his girls are pretty, sexy, and available, and the courting routines as embarrassingly obvious as anything in the original. But in the end Gardner's Bond doesn't really measure up to Fleming's. There isn't that maniacal snobbery about trivial and useless detail which the original so endearingly manifests. And, further, Gardner simply hasn't grasped Bond's most important trait: he only takes assignments where his creator would like to take a holiday. And who on earth would want to holiday in the 'desolate Arctic wastes of Lapland'? Certainly not the luxurious Bond." People Magazine'''s anonymous reviewer said that "the action in Icebreaker is fitful at best" and that the book was "not at all up to Gardner's (first) 007 outing, License Renewed. The Russian villain, however, is an original and sometimes interesting menace."The Globe and Mail crime critic Derrick Murdoch believed Icebreaker was Gardner's best Bond novel thus far. "In most technical respects (writing, plotting and minor-character sketching), he is more skilful and more painstaking than Fleming even attempted to be. On the other hand, nobody since the Grimm brothers could equal Fleming's gift for improvising such audaciously grotesque adversaries as Dr. No, Blofeld, Auric Goldfinger and his henchman, Oddjob. To make up for the lack of gnomes or behemoths, Gardner offers a plot of labyrinthine complexity, subtler than any of Fleming's. In short, he has taken more risks in Icebreaker to display his own talents, and it has paid