By Ed Quinlan

James Bond is a character that everyone has heard of, making him one of the most profitable fictional figures since Casino Royale was first published in 1953.  But Bond’s ubiquity means that everyone has a rather different mental picture of him.  The various Bonds from the movie series each have their admirers.  Others associate Bond less with an actor than with a persona from the films: the globe-trotting detective, the campy playboy, the metrosexual, the grim assassin.

But The James Bond Omnibus 004 will thrill readers interested in the roots of the world’s most famous spy.  Consisting of nine serialized comic strips, the Omnibus is the fourth Titan Books collection of James Bond Comics that ran in the Daily Express, and later in other British newspapers, from 1958 to 1984.  The strips in this collection date from 1971 to 1975, long after Ian Fleming had died and his original novels and short stories had all been adapted for the comics.

The James Bond Omnibus 004 features nine original stories by the strip’s writer, Jim Lawrence. Yaroslav Horak provides the simple but effective artwork for 007’s adventures.  Despite being released during James Bond’s cinematic heyday, Lawrence and Horak’s comics hark back to an earlier Bond.  When Ian Fleming first gained acclaim, he was regarded as a successor of sorts to Raymond Chandler.  And he wrote at a time when hardboiled spies were common staples in pulpy paperbacks.  Literary savoir-faire elevated Fleming’s Bond above his competitors.  But for all Fleming’s sophistication, James Bond was a pulp hero.  A very Tory pulp hero, to be sure.

All I knew of Matt Helm could be summed up in two words: Dean Martin. He was a joke, a Bond spoof . I haven’t seen any of the films, mind you. Didn’t need to. What’s the good of a pre-conceived notion if you’re going to spoil it with facts?

Then Titan Books mailed me the first two titles in their ambitious endeavor to reissue several (all?) of the Helm titles in the next few years.

Why, you may ask, do we “need” Helm, as intimated in the headline? Well, This is the era of the reissue. The same democratizing factors that make it easier than ever to get new work into the hands of readers — ebooks, print-on-demand, et al — also have led to a boom in the reissue industry. we have Prologue Books, Hard Case Crime, Ramble House and others unearthing and rescuing titles of various ages and levels of obscurity. The University of Chicago Press brought back the Parker novels of Richard Stark as well.

By William Boyle

Stephen Romano’s debut thriller, Resurrection Express, tells the story of high-tech thief Elroy Coffin. Coffin, having survived a gunshot to the head, is serving out a sentence for armed robbery and attempted murder in a Texas prison when the novel starts. Jayne Jenison, mysterious and well-connected, shows up to let him know that his wife, Toni, who he believed to be dead, is still alive. Jayne wants his help in tracking down her daughter, who is being kept somewhere with Toni. But first he’ll need to hack into a complex security grid. If Coffin agrees, she’ll have him released. He agrees, of course, and the story kicks into high gear as he’s thrust into a conflict that he doesn’t quite understand. Riding shotgun with him is his former partner-in-crime, his father. What follows — resurrection, revenge, reversals, revelation — is all drenched in blood and guts.

 Tom Piccirilli writes that Resurrection Express “whipsaws along at 100 MPH.” Whipsaw: a perfect word for how this book moves. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I read, as I was whipsawed around from shoot-out to bloody shoot-out. The book’s pacing is masterful. Romano has a great handle on how to create and sustain tension. No more than two or three pages pass before something is paid off righteously. His background in screenwriting serves him well here, as the book has the heightened freneticism of a drill-quick action film. It’s long, over 400 pages, but the momentum keeps you always on edge.