CHICAGO — James Bond is alive and well and living on a street in a pleasant northwestern suburb with wide lawns and many white houses and at least one prolific novelist.
Bond lives mostly in the head of a writer named Raymond Benson, as he has for decades. But Bond is just one part of the Benson bookshelf. He has written more than 40 books and counting, the latest being a fine and inventive novel titled “The Mad, Mad Murders of Marigold Way” (Beaufort Books).
Set in May 2020 with the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic ever-present but never intrusive, it is, as the book’s charmingly playful and thoughtful narrator says in the novel’s first line, “Friends, this is a little tale about some murders.”
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