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About John Gardner

John Edmund Gardner (20 November 1926 – 3 August 2007) was an English writer of spy and thriller novels. He is best known for his James Bond continuation novels, but also wrote a series of Boysie Oakes books and three novels containing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional villain, Professor Moriarty.

During the Second World War, Gardner joined the Home Guard at the age of 13, served in the Fleet Air Arm and subsequently joined the Royal Marines: he later described himself as "the worst commando in the world". After demobilisation, he followed his father into the Church of England, studying theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and being ordained as a priest in 1953. After losing his faith, he left the church in 1958 and took a job as a drama critic at the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald.

Gardner's literary career began in 1964 with the autobiographical Spin the Bottle, which detailed his experience of alcoholism. In the same year, he published The Liquidator, a parody of James Bond in which the cowardly Boysie Oakes is mistakenly recruited as a British spy. The book was made into a film, and followed by seven further Oakes novels and four short stories over the next eleven years. He subsequently wrote further novels centred on the characters of Derek Torry and Herbie Kruger, a Scotland Yard inspector and an intelligence agent respectively. From the mid 1970s onwards, he published three novels using the character of Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes series.

John Gardner writes about Fiction, Fiction, thrillers, espionage, Great britain, fiction, Bond, james (fictitious character), fiction, Fiction, espionage, and James Bond (Fictitious character). Their best-known work is License Renewed.

On FindMyTBR we track 38 books by John Gardner, 32 of them confirmed as audiobooks on Spotify or Apple Books — including Brokenclaw: James Bond (Original Series), Book 10 (Unabridged), Cold Fall, and Cold: James Bond (Original Series), Book 16 (Unabridged). Full availability across Spotify, Apple Books, Audible, and Amazon is below.