In 1964 Gardner began his novelist career with
The Liquidator, in which he created the character
Boysie Oakes who inadvertently is mistaken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency. In fact, Oakes was a devout coward who was terrified of violence, suffered from airsickness and was afraid of heights and Gardner admitted of him that, "though I have denied it many times—he was of course a complete piss-take of J. Bond". The book appeared at the height of the fictional spy mania and, as a send-up of the whole business, was an immediate success. Reviewing the novel in
The New York Times,
Anthony Boucher wrote, "Mr. Gardner succeeds in having it both ways: He has written a clever parody which is also a genuinely satisfactory thriller." The book was made
into a film of the same name by
MGM and another seven light-hearted novels and four short stories about the cowardly Oakes appeared over the next eleven years. Following the success of his Oakes books, Gardner created new characters: Derek Torry—a Scotland Yard inspector of Italian descent—and Herbie Kruger, the latter of which appeared in a series of novels published simultaneously with his Bond works. In the mid-1970s Gardner also wrote the first of three novels using the character of
Professor Moriarty from the
Sherlock Holmes series, the last of which was published posthumously. The third of this series, titled simply
Moriarty, was delayed due to a dispute with the publisher, but was finally released shortly after his death.
Erik Lee Preminger bought the film rights to the first of the trilogy—
The Return of Moriarty—and wrote a script.
Edgar Bronfman Jr., for Sagittarius Entertainment and
Nat Cohen, for
EMI Productions were to produce.
Donald Sutherland was to portray Moriarty. Funding however fell through shortly before filming was to begin. In 1979
Glidrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications) approached Gardner and asked him to revive
Ian Fleming's
James Bond series of novels. Gardner stated that he wanted "to bring Mr Bond into the 1980s", although he retained the ages of the characters as they were when Fleming had left them. Even though Gardner kept the ages the same, he made Bond grey at the temples as a nod to the passing of the years. With the influence of the American publishers,
Putnam's, the Gardner novels showed an increase in the number of Americanisms used in the book, such as a waiter wearing "pants", rather than trousers, in
The Man from Barbarossa. James Harker, writing in
The Guardian, considered that the Gardner books were "dogged by silliness", bringing the author commercial success. Gardner had an ambivalent view on being the Bond author, once saying "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", His break from writing lasted for five years, following the death of his wife, Gardner also began a series of books with a new character, Suzie Mountford, a 1930s police detective. The
Crime Writers' Association short-listed
The Liquidator,
The Dancing Dodo,
The Nostradamus Traitor, and
The Garden of Weapons for their annual
Gold Dagger award. ==Personal life==