Art and Music: Q & A with Raymond Benson

Raymond Benson

Raymond Benson has been an award-winning and best-selling author, composer, computer game designer, stage director, film historian, and film genres instructor for over thirty years. He is also the fourth official author of the James Bond 007 novels.

Q:  Raymond, occasionally Clown Town interviews a subject that defies our commitment to a brief, concise slice of an artist and his/her talents. We couldn’t possibly cover the list (and I would add guest speaking) of your artistic endeavors, so we’ll focus on Raymond Benson, author/composer-musician. Let’s start with “official author of the adult James Bond novels . . .” How did that title evolve, and where did it lead?

Raymond:           I was the official Bond author between 1996 and 2002. I suppose you can say it started with my non-fiction book, The James Bond Bedside Companion, first published in 1984. It was my first published book. During the three-year process of researching and writing it, I traveled to England and met members of Ian Fleming’s family, his business people, his friends, and most importantly, the man who was his literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith. Janson-Smith was chairman of what was called at the time Glidrose Publications (it is now called Ian Fleming Publications Ltd). We got along and he liked the . . . Bedside Companion, so we stayed in touch over the years while John Gardner was writing the Bond books. I did little odd jobs for Glidrose (no pun intended), including being commissioned to write a James Bond stage play based on Casino Royale, which never went anywhere. In the meantime, I still did theatre, music, writing, and got into the computer gaming industry as a writer/designer. But in late 1995, I received a call from Janson-Smith; he told me John Gardner wanted to retire from the Bond gig and would I be interested in giving it a shot? OMG. In a way I had to audition. I had to supply an outline of the story first, to be approved not only by Glidrose, but by the American and UK publishers. Once that outline was approved, I had to write the first four chapters, with the same approval process. By then, it was March 1996, and it was announced I was the new writer, the third continuation author and first American. Wrote six original Bond novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories.

Q:  Some of your latest Amazon titles include Europa Universalis: IV: What If? and Ice Cold. Do these works sway from the James Bond format? Tell us about them.

Raymond:            Just about everything I’ve done since my Bond tenure ended in 2002 is different from the Bond format. All of my original novels since then are Hitchcockian-style thrillers in which an everyday, normal person gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Most of them feature female protagonists! I must have used up all my testosterone doing Bond, and now I rely on the estrogen in my body. 🙂   Europa Universalis is a collection of alternate history short stories—I contributed one story about what our world would be like if we hadn’t had Shakespeare. Ice Cold was the 2014 annual Mystery Writers of America anthology, which I co-edited with Jeffery Deaver (the second American author to write Bond!) and to which I contributed a story. Most recently, my magnum opus is The Black Stiletto 5-book serial, which Library Journal succinctly described as a “mashup of the work of Gloria Steinem, Ian Fleming, and Mario Puzo, all under the editorship of Stan Lee.” It features one of my best female protagonists, and it’s currently in development for a television series. I also do a lot of “media tie-in” work—novelizations of videogames or whatever… I suppose sometimes that’s in the “Bond format,” but not always. They can be of various genres.

 Q: Let’s switch to your composer-musician hat. A published bio states that early in life you took an interest in piano that led to composing music. Share that transformation with us. What about your compositions?

Raymond:      I’ve been playing piano since before I can remember, took a couple of years of lessons when I was in elementary school, and from then on developed my own style and method of playing. I started composing in high school and got serious about it in college, where I majored in Drama. I often worked with playwrights who needed music to their lyrics. One of my musicals, “The Resurrection of Jackie Cramer,” text by Frank Gagliano and music by me, took me out of school for a semester for productions in New York and elsewhere. After graduating and spending a year as an apprentice at the Alley Theatre in Houston, I moved to New York to do theatre (my degree emphasis was directing). I directed many shows and composed/performed more music in the theatre. This went on for a decade before I became heavily involved in designing/writing computer games, and even then I composed music for some of the games. Today I do less composing but I constantly perform. I’ve done solo concerts, I play a regular gig at different Mariano’s locations, and play at my synagogue. I’m a rock ‘n’ roller, mostly; I love classic and progressive rock, but I also specialize in movie music.

 Q: How has music carried on in your family?

Raymond:      My son Max Benson is a bass player who got a degree in jazz studies at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. He now lives in Los Angeles and is always gigging. Recently he spent six months in China playing in a nightclub in Xaimen. Apparently he made more money in a month in China than he did in a year in L.A.!

 Q: What can we look forward to with regards to your writing and composing? If our readers would like to know more about you and your work, what might they do?

Raymond:      The Black Stiletto is still fresh and gaining a following. I have a new novel out on submission. I’m developing a new science fiction thriller. I play music wherever I am asked to play. I also teach Film History at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Folks in the NW suburbs can see me every month at Dann & Raymond’s Movie Club, which features myself and Chicago film critic Dann Gire. We do a sort-of Siskel & Ebert style live show in front of an audience, in which we take a cinema topic, show clips, and relate history, anecdotes, and jokes. We are entering our 9th season in September. Readers can get a quick-and-dirty bird’s eye view of my career on the Wikipedia page about me, which is surprisingly accurate: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Benson. My website is probably the best stop: www.raymondbenson.com. For more information about the Black Stiletto, go to: www.theblackstiletto.net. I’m on Facebook (both a personal and an author page, and I invite readers friend/like both, and Twitter @RaymondBenson.