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Gardner's connection with James Bond began in 1980:

We were living in Ireland, and the mail arrived one morning. There was a letter from a great friend of mine, a crime writer, very well known - he said he'd been approached by Glidrose, who wanted to see if they could produce at least one more James Bond book. They had a short list of five people, and I was at the head of the list. He wanted me to get back to him immediately if I was interested. I have to be honest - at first I was not interested. My own work was not doing badly, and I thought this was probably not the thing to do. I slept on it. And I thought, well, I've been doing a serious book and then a rather light-hearted book, a kind of kiss-kiss-bang-bang type of book, and alternating between the two styles. So why not explore it? I told my agent at the time about it I said, "I've had an interesting offer, but I don't think I'm going to take it." When I told him what it was, he said, "Oh yes you are!" At that time, Glidrose were only thinking in terms of one book, which seemed to us a little short-sighted. So he went and had lunch with the Glidrose people and asked for a three book contract. And I wanted cut-out clauses; because we could all fall flat on our faces. They accepted that idea, and we had a mutual cut-out clause.

I then had to pass the test of actually going in and having lunch with the powers-that-be at Booker [Glidrose is a company within the Entertainment Division of Booker plc] answering… well, I was interrogated, actually. "What would you do with Bond?" they asked. And this is quite extraordinary — we all came to the table with the same idea on the approach: to put Bond on ice, so to speak, and resurrect him in 1980 completely intact with all the knowledge of the previous decade and a half, but at relatively the same age. We could have gone back to the sixties and continued where Mr Fleming left off. We could have gone back before the Fleming books, which is what Mr Pearson did. Kingsley Amis had done one, as you know.

Anyway, we felt it was the only way to do it, mainly because so much has happened in the world of espionage since the Sixties technologically speaking. Just the microchip itself has changed the espionage world so much. I wanted their permission to evolve my own style, which they refused, and I wanted to use real equipment - real hardware that exists, not the fantasy stuff, and they agreed to that. We got a fair offer, and then I had to submit an outline and the first six chapters. The outline became the all-serious thing for all the books, especially the early ones. I'm required by contract to produce this outline, and this is really the most difficult, painstaking part of the process. The actual writing of the book takes anywhere from five to eight weeks, and it's relatively easy.

The outline is anywhere from two to ten pages.
Even with the outline, I'm reluctant to write the ending.
I don't like to know how my books are going to end until
I'm writing them. I want the freedom to let them take me
where they want to go. I don't like being locked in to an ending.
I think Glidrose certainly now understand this. After the outline
and the first six chapters are accepted, I continue. I like them
[the publishers] to have the first chapter, especially, because it
sets the tone, and the outline sets up the situation and the MacGuffin.

I think I've only twice been told to change something major. Reluctantly, I've given away a secret or something so that the publisher will understand the plot better. Once I submitted the final manuscript, I found out I was being edited three ways - Glidrose were editing... Peter [Janson-Smith] and I would sit down at meetings and go through the notes, but we've fine-tuned this process down to a very manageable system, doing it by FAX. We call it “Professor Nitpick's Notes”, so we don't get on a personal level.

Then it goes through the American publisher [Putnam] and then the British publisher! [Hodder & Stoughton] And this is all a strange mixture of bed­fellows. I remember on the first book, the editor at Cape wanted me to change the locality of the climactic scene [at Perpignan]. I had to appeal to Glidrose to defend me. Finally, that was settled, and bingo, we did it. It wasn't until the first book was published that I realized what I'd let myself into. I had, through the years heard about James Bond this and James Bond that, but I had not fully realized what a household name he truly had become. And it hit me rather like a brick!

When I began the first book, I read all the Fleming books again quickly. I had to finish a book of my own before I started it, so I began this Jekyll and Hyde existence. I read the books, then I wrote LICENCE RENEWED. I was then exposed to the media upon publication. The first journalist to interview me was a very entertaining young lady from a very good British paper, and she said, “I have a quiz here”. She had prepared a list of twenty-two questions on the books, and I think I got about five of them right. I read them for the flavour, not the detail. Besides, Peter and Glidrose would have prevented me from making any big mistakes, any real howlers, so I wasn't that interested in the trivial details. I have other sources for weaponry and intelligence community information. Primary sources are books, secondary sources are people who are actually part of or happen to be part of the intelligence community. They're the most dubious connection, because they're not always forthright. But I built up, even before I started doing Bond, a good wealth of resources. Classified subjects are not discussed, of course.