For Special Services
First edition cover
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| Author | John Gardner |
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| Cover artist | Bill Botten (Jonathan Cape ed.) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | James Bond |
| Genre | Spy fiction |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
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Publication date
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September 1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 8852827 |
For Special Services, first published in 1982, was the second novel by John Gardner featuring Ian Fleming's secret agent, James Bond. Carrying the Glidrose Publications copyright, it was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape and in the United States by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
In June 1941 General William Donovan was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the position of Coordinator of Information (COI), a position that later transformed into the chairmanship of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Upon request by Donovan, Ian Fleming was contacted to write a lengthy memorandum describing the structure and functions of a secret service organisation. Parts of this memorandum were later used in the official charter for the OSS, which was later dissolved after World War II in 1945. For appreciation of Fleming's work Donovan presented Fleming with a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver with the inscription, "For Special Services."
In 1944, Donovan proposed to President Roosevelt the creation of a new agency, "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." The OSS was disbanded in 1945; accordingly, the Central Intelligence Agency; formed in 1947 is a direct descendant of the OSS.
Bond teams up with CIA agent Cedar Leiter, daughter of his old friend, Felix Leiter, to investigate one Markus Bismaquer, who is suspected of reviving the criminal organisation SPECTRE, which was believed to have been disbanded years earlier following the death of its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, at the hands of Bond (in You Only Live Twice).
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