John Gardner

John Edmund Gardner, writer: born Seaton Delaval, Northumberland 20 November 1926; married 1952 Margaret Mercer (died 1997; one son, one daughter) (one daughter with Susan Wright); died Basingstoke, Hampshire 3 August 2007.

John Gardner, author of more than 50 thrillers, including 14 James Bond books, was a workaholic and recovered alcoholic who even in his 81st year was still writing at all hours. He worked every day - even a little on Christmas Day. "I work because I am scared stiff of losing the ability to put words together," he said. "Touch wood, it's never happened, but I have nightmares that it might."

His fictional characters included the cowardly secret agent Boysie Oakes (introduced in The Liquidator in 1964, the first of a series of books Gardner described as "born in the hope of being an amusing counter-irritant to the excesses of the many imitators of 007") and Big Herbie Kruger (who first appeared in The Nostradamus Traitor in 1979). He also expanded and developed Arthur Conan Doyle's Moriarty in The Return of Moriarty, 1974; The Revenge of Moriarty, 1975; and a third volume, provisionally titled The Redemption of Moriarty, which he had just completed before his death.

Gardner took over the Bond books in 1981 after being approached by the literary copyright owners, Glidrose. (Kingsley Amis had written just one Bond book after Ian Fleming's death in 1964.) "What I wanted to do," he said, "was take the character and bring Fleming's Bond into the Eighties as the same man but with all he would have learned had he lived through the Sixties and Seventies." The first new Bond was Licence Renewed (1981) in which M reminds Bond that the 00 section has been abolished; however, M retains Bond as a troubleshooter, telling him " You'll always be 007 to me." Other titles included Nobody Lives Forever (1986), Win, Lose, or Die (1989) and, the one Gardner considered his best, The Man from Barbarossa (1991)

Gardner was ambivalent about Bond, regarding the character as "one- dimensional", and was at first reluctant to write about a character he had not devised himself. He said: "I'm used to putting a lot more flesh on my characters. And of course with Bond I can't. It wouldn't be in keeping with the way Fleming depicted him." However, he refused to "dumb down" Bond. "What the Americans wanted," he said, "was: 'Bond goes to see M, flirts with Moneypenny, goes off, Bond loses the baddy, baddy gets Bond' and then 'Bond triumphs'. And I thought, 'erm, no'". But he enjoyed the trappings, including a Bentley (his second) and a silver Saab 900 Turbo, which his version of Bond switched to later.

Born in 1926, John Edmund Gardner was the son of an Anglican priest. He lived his first years in the bleak mining village of Seaton Delaval near Newcastle upon Tyne. His father Cyril was a cockney who had been ordained in Wallsend in 1921. He married a local Geordie girl, Lena Henderson, in 1925 and John was born the following year. In 1933, the family moved south to Wantage where Cyril had taken up the post of Chaplain at St Mary's, Wantage. Aged eight, John announced to his father that he wanted to be a writer - "I remember falling to sleep while telling myself adventure stories - mainly, of course, with me as the hero."

He was educated at King Alfred's School, Wantage, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read theology. In an extraordinarily varied early career, Gardner started out as an Anglican priest, but after five years had a crisis over his faith, which contributed to serious drink problems and a brief career as a Marine commando. "I must have been the worst commando in the world," he reported. "I bent an aeroplane I was learning to fly. They say a Tiger Moth's undercarriage will stay intact no matter how hard it bounces, but I am the living proof that it doesn't."

Along the way he became a magician, too, and was admitted to the Magic Circle "at the highest level possible for someone not earning his living from magic" said his daughter, Alexis Walmsley. "It started when he was 13 years old, and when he met my mother [Margaret, whom he married in 1952] she would sometimes be his stage assistant."

A self-confessed alcoholic, Gardner's first - and only non-fiction - book, Spin the Bottle (1964), chronicled the agonies he went through with his habit of two bottles of gin a day. "If I were still a magician" he once said, "I'd be playing the northern clubs and I'd be down-at-heel, seedy and a chronic alcoholic." Instead he became a drama critic, covering the Royal Shakespeare Company for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, for which he worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He would often get a lift to work from Peter Hall, then director of the fledgling RSC. During his time at the Herald, Gardner reported from the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, did a lecture tour of the United States, and visited Moscow with the RSC with Peter Brook and Paul Scofield. His Every Night's a Bullfight (1971) borrowed heavily from the experiences of these years.

In Gardner's first attempt at writing a thriller, Boysie Oakes was not played for laughs. When he sent the first four chapters of the book to his agent, there was an immediate response: "I really need to see you." Gardner remembered his excitement: "I thought it must be very good to warrant a trip to London. However, when I was settled in his office he sighed and said, 'John, this book is truly dreadful . . . perhaps you could try comedy.'"

After becoming a full-time thriller-writer, Gardner moved with his family into a rambling, 18th-century house in Oxfordshire. Here he worked, surrounded by computers and electronic war games, in a vast library in his spacious attic, his desk carefully arranged so that he was not distracted by the delightful view of his rambling garden. He regarded himself as a " terribly private" person, but when he moved to Oxfordshire, he had made up his mind to become involved in village life. After two years, he had failed dismally. It was not, he said, because of "shy privacy" but "a privacy brought on by the demands of work".

Describing her father as "a true entertainer, and a weaver of spells, magic and dreams," Alexis said he "sometimes would find the line between fiction and reality hard to distinguish". He was, she said, "something of an enigma even to those of us closest to him". Gardner also had a son, Simon, with Margaret, and another daughter, Miranda, the result of a long love affair with Susan Wright (now Wood), former personal assistant to Peter Sellers.

Having lived for a while in Ireland, in 1989 Gardner moved to the United States, where he lived in opulent style near Charlottesville, Virginia, but then a series of medical crises left him "financially drained". He said later: "I spent a fortune on staying alive." Alexis described her father as "forever driven by his talent and the need to write, a need which latterly had a very serious purpose as, at an age when most people have long retired, he tried to work his way out of the financial difficulties in which he found himself after the virtually bankrupting oesophageal cancer surgery in the US."

On return to the UK in 1997, Gardner's wife, Margaret, unexpectedly died, leaving him living alone in reduced circumstances and faced with the prospect of re-establishing his career in Britain. "Short of funds and temporarily without a British publisher," he recalled, "I withdrew to a cottage in Basingstoke, administered by a charity, and went about re-igniting my career. At first nobody was really interested. I went from huge success to 'John who?' in zero seconds flat." But a publisher was finally found. Refusing to remain in the dumps, Gardner even chose an unplifting email address, JollyJG.

Apart from being fuelled by a chronic shortage of funds, Gardner's stubborn determination to keep writing was also partly inspired by a new character, Suzie Mountford, a Second World War detective sergeant who was the heroine of a five-novel saga, the fifth volume of which, The Human Enemy, is due to be published later this year.

During his Bond period, Gardner told friends: "Unhappily, I feel I'm probably going to be remembered as the 'guy who took over from Fleming'. I'm very grateful to have been selected to keep Bond alive. But I'd much rather be remembered for my own work than I would for Bond."

Arnie Wilson