Last Day To Hear "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" Radioplay Online

Following their very cool adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels Doctor No and Goldfinger, BBC Radio 4 has aired yet another Fleming-based radioplay.  This one's adapted (by Sherry Ashwell) from his classic children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Imogen Stubbs and Alex Jennings star. You can listen to it online with the BBC's iPlayer, but it's only available through this weekend, so listen quickly! In other Chitty news, The Book Bond recently reported that author Frank Cottrell Boyce will pen new adventures for Fleming's magical car... though she'll be transformed into a rather dubious minibus.

Lucifer Box Returns On the Radio

Mark Gatiss' dandy secret agent Lucifer Box is back!  Not in a new novel, unfortunately, but in a new BBC Radio recording of the author's second (and best) Box novel, The Devil in Amber.  (Read my review of the book here.) It's actually not really an adaptation, unfortunately, but Gatiss himself reading his own novel.  Still, with a performer as talented as Mark Gatiss (who played a litany of characters on The League of Gentlemen), that's the next best thing.  It's also notable because although an abridged, Gatiss-read audio version of his first Lucifer Box book, The Vesuvius Club, was issued on CD, no audio version of The Devil in Amber ever came out. So now's your chance to hear it, in six half-hour segments. The first one can be heard here on the BBC's iPlayer right now... but only for a few more hours, I'm afraid. The second episode begins tomorrow and will be available for a week.

New Spy DVDs Media Out This Week

I don't think there are any new spy DVDs out this week, and there's only one new spy Blu-ray–one that's already been available on DVD for a while.  But whatever format you watch it on, it's an undeniable classic! The Criterion release of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 wartime spy classic Army of Shadows, drawn from the director's own real-life experiences in the French resistance, gets the Blu-ray treatment this week with all the same excellent special features as the DVD edition, including an engrossing commentary with film historian Ginette Vincendeau, new interviews withe the editor and cinematographer, and behind-the-scenes material culled from French TV at the time of the film's production. Retail is a steep $39.99, but of course you can find it for cheaper than that. The new Blu-ray is actually cheaper on Amazon right now than the DVD, at just $27.99.

Also out today from AudioGO Ltd., is a cool-looking box set collection of all of BBC Radio 4's Smiley radio dramas first broadcast in 2009, The Collected George Smiley Radio Dramas: Eight BBC Full-Cast Productions Starring Simon Russell Beale.  The well-received radioplays star Simon Russell Beale (who's supposedly up for a role in the next Bond movie) as John Le Carré's most famous literary creation, unassuming spymaster George Smiley.  The box set includes adaptations of every single novel the character appears in–even when he's not the lead: "Call For the Dead," "A Murder of Quality," "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," "The Looking Glass War," the epic "Karla Trilogy" including "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (possibly my favorite spy novel of all time, of which I'm always keen to see/hear a new adaptation), "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People," and the epilogue to Smiley's career, "The Secret Pilgrim."  All that adds up to 2.8 pounds and over 20 hours of grim and gritty espionage and intrigue!  Sounds worth the $139.95 list price, though Amazon currently has it at a substantial discount for just $88.17.

More Saint News: Comics And Radio Show

With TCM airing a Saint movie marathon next week, it seems like a good time to check in on what's new in the world of Simon Templar.  After a relatively quiet summer for halo fans, The Saint website announced a couple of pieces of exciting news last month. 

First, a company called Radio Spirits has issued twenty remastered episodes of the Saint radio show on CD in a 10-disc set called The Saint is Heard.  The majority of these episodes, which come from the 1949 and 1950 seasons, feature the most famous voice of the radio Saint, Vincent Price, though a few feature Barry Sullivan filling in when Price was off shooting a movie.  Chances are most Saint fans have heard at least a few of these, but if you haven't, they're a lot of fun.  Leslie Charteris' immortal character seems to be slightly different in every medium he's adapted into, and radio is no exception.  These episodes sometimes sway a tad closer to the later-era Shadow radio programs than the RKO Saint films or Charteris' novels, but they are certainly a whole lot of fun and a great way to pass a long commute in your car.  Perhaps best of all, The Saint is Heard includes a Program Guide written by Ian Dickerson, author of The Saint On TV and noted Leslie Charteris expert, featuring photographs and a series history! The Saint is Heard, a 10-CD set, retails for $39.98–though of course it's considerably cheaper on Amazon.  Listeners can order directly from Radio Spirits' website (though they only ship domestically) or from Amazon. 

A more recent (1995) BBC radio version that hews much closer to Charteris (it certainly should; it's based on his novels Saint Overboard and The Saint Plays With Fire) starring Paul Rhys has been available on CD since last May. The Saint: Saint Overboard & The Saint Plays With Fire: Two BBC Radio Crimes Full Cast Dramatizations, a 2-disc set, retails for $24.95 but can be had for slightly cheaper on Amazon.

In even more exciting Saint news, the Saint website reports that Moonstone Comics (the same company that's developing a new Honey West series) has acquired the rights to the character and intends to publish brand new Saint comic books and graphic novels!  Unfortunately, there isn't much information available yet, but this is certainly something I'll be keeping an eye out for.  I believe (though I could be wrong, and I'm sure some of my more Saint-savvy readers will correct me if I am) that this will mark the first time The Saint has appeared in comics since the Sixties, when there was a Scandanavian series that featured Roger Moore's likeness.  Moonstone's website certainly doesn't provide any indication that this might be the case, but I sure hope that the company's license also allows them to reprint those and older Saint comics.  I'd love the chance to read them!

Anthony Horowitz Reveals Final Alex Rider Novel, Scropia Rising

I was surprised to hear Anthony Horowitz pop up on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" today, discussing the next and final Alex Rider novel, Scorpia Rising.  Things don't sound so good for poor, beleaguered teen spy Alex Rider! 

Horowitz noted that his books have gotten much darker and more challenging since Stormbreaker and Point Blanc, and he makes Scorpia Rising, which he declares definitively is "the very last one in the series," sound like the darkest of all. 

"I can tell you without any doubt at all," he says to host Michelle Norris, "that there is no way forward.  The book is without any question the end of a very long journey that I have been taking.  I have to tell you that I, that it makes me very sad to think that I wrote the last words, a few nights ago in fact, and, uh, sat there looking at it and thought, 'Goodness, have you really done this?'  That makes nine in the series and then that is it, and it makes me sad, but I really believe this: it's best to quit while you're ahead.  Don't go on writing formulaic books simply to make money for your publishers and yourself....  I like to think that each book in its own way has been as good as or better than the one before, and I'm happy to quit on a high note with a body of work which I will look on it and feel is about as perfect as it could have been, and not write that one book that sort of spoils it."

The whole tone of the conversation, and the definitiveness that he emphasizes so strongly, makes it seem like poor Alex might not survive the book.  But when pressed for more details about the denoument, Horowitz did offer that "it ends with hope.  A children's author has one duty in life, I believe, and that is always to write with hope.  If you're young and you have, you know, everything in front of you, it is not the job of somebody like me to come along and say, 'actually life is awful and, you know, get used to it.'  It is a dark book and is in many ways a sad book, but I think it ends with hope."  Listen to the whole conversation on NPR's website, where you can also read Horowitz's tribute to Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, which he picks as his favorite thriller.  (It struck me as an odd choice.  It's actually one of my least favorite Fleming novels.) 

The author revealed even more details about Scorpia Rising on his blog, including locations ranging from London to Paris to Gibralter to Egypt, a surprisingly real-world grounded villain named Kalid Aziz Al-Kazim who has worked for both Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and even the overall structure of the book.  (Alex doesn't make an entrance until Chapter 7, conjuring shades of Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love.)  He actually reveals a surprising amount of plot details (including that at least one major character dies), so fans should be sure to head to his site and read the full post.  (Oh, yes, and he's also hidden the entire first chapter somewhere on his site, in case you needed even more incentive!)

The final Alex Rider novel isn't actually due out until 2011.

Read my review of the most recent Rider book, Crocodile Tears, here.