007 Lives!

By Philip Herrera

JAMES BOND, THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

by JOHN PEARSON 317 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

Old 007 is back again, courtesy of the late Ian Fleming's official biographer, John Pearson--but with a twist.

It is this book's pretense that there actually was (and is) a James Bond, whose real life corresponds startlingly with Fleming's "fiction." Run to earth in Bermuda and interviewed by Pearson, the real Bond is slightly older than he was at his last appearance in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). He still has his gun-metal cigarette case, however, and that laconic, infallible way with svelte women and gross villains. Those vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred) are still going down the hatch.

Bond, it seems, was born in Wattenscheid, Germany, on Nov. 11, 1920, second son of a one-armed Scottish engineer. Brought up mainly on the Continent, his only stint in England (at Eton, of course) was brief and unhappy. At age 18, James joined a British espionage unit, exposing first a sweaty Rumanian card cheat at the baccarat tables of Monte Carlo. After that, the jobs got more difficult. In 1940, for example, he killed a Japanese code breaker in New York by shooting him through a hole made earlier hi a thick window by his part ner's bullet.

Pearson tries hard to humanize the Secret Service Superman. But as the ad ventures come thick and fast, 007 remains precisely what Fleming made him: a suave robot programmed to exploit the romantic idea that physical pleasure becomes more intense as death becomes more imminent. After 1 5 min utes, readers looking for truth will see the put-on. But true Bondsmen will rejoice at any flimsy excuse to see their man in action again. Bond is last seen heading for Australia on the trackdown of an old antagonist, Irma Bunt, the late Ernst Stavro Blofeld's baleful dumpling from On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

She seems to have bred a kind of giant carnivorous rat that will eat all the live stock Down Under, unless 007 can foil her. Will he succeed? If Pearson's first reincarnation does, the answer will surely come in good time.

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