 Following the retirement of John Gardner , Raymond Benson took over as Bond author in 1996 ; as the first American author of Bond it was a controversial choice . Benson had previously written the non @-@ fiction The James Bond Bedside Companion , first published in 1984 . Benson 's first work was a short story , " Blast From the Past " , published in 1997 . By the time he moved on to other projects in 2002 , Benson had written six Bond novels , three novelizations and three short stories . His final Bond work was The Man with the Red Tattoo , published in 2002 . 
