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The Humor of Organizational Dysfunction
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet follows an 84-year-old former super spy who has been officially declared dead but who refuses to walk quietly into a life of retirement. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One inspiration was simply wondering what happens to an iconic screen hero when in an advanced age? The original thought was an affectionate nickname of 0070 but age 84 seemed more appropriate. The more I thought about it, the more I also wanted to explore consequences from all the casual relationships. In addition, my father was a kind of inspiration in that I experienced him having a stroke and losing some faculties, and becoming even more inappropriate, and I still laugh at the things he and other immigrants say very casually that have become officially offensive. There was just a lot of material to mine. He even used the word exploit in its original sense, talking about mines, but it sounded so funny in recent years to discuss relatives that moved to Chile and decided to exploit the mines. He is no longer with us but I picture him having encouraged me to keep going with this project many times.
Were there particular spy novels or films that influenced the book?
Sure, mostly films: various James Bond films, Johnny English, Get Smart, and Austin Powers on the cinema side, and I grew up watching Get Smart, The Saint, and Mission Impossible, and made parodies of the latter 2 in high school. I also appreciate Spy Kids and others I’m not recalling just now. For novels I would have to say various manuals from Human Resources at various places I’ve worked. They were quite inspiring to take on the humor of organizational dysfunction and inhumanity, and caving to lawyers over common sense.
The novel embraces absurdity with remarkable confidence. How did you decide just how far to push the humor?
I appreciate that reception of the humor. I didn’t have any kind of meter other than my own experience in various organizations and in my work as a therapist. I have seen a great deal of silent suffering and it’s usually over the myriad of little absurdities we are asked to tolerate. Comedy is a way of relieving some pain. I hope readers will get a lot of relief from seeing their own experiences reflected in these characters and interactions.
What does the novel suggest about the difference between being cared for and being sidelined?
In my experience you can have two realities side by side, having to do with perception and where one stands. In retiring Herbert, no one is trying to hurt him, they gave him many chances to continue contributing. But at some point a person needs to bow out gracefully and focus on other things. It only seems uncaring because he refuses to accept his limitations as significant. I also often dwell on the theme of well-intentioned people still causing damage, and this applies to Herbert as well as to the agency he formerly worked for. In my experience as a therapist and human being, some people want an inordinate amount of empathy and sympathy and can be quite mistaken that people have not cared. Yet hopefully people take time to reflect and enjoy the positive things they still have access to rather than dwell excessively on what they have lost.
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What happens when one of the world’s greatest superspies struggles with retirement? Officially, he’s dead, of course, but for 84-year-old Herbert Bigglesby, a quiet fadeout at Sunset View Senior Living Community is not going well. He feels like a prisoner, no one believes his stories, and his once-honored sixth sense for danger is now ridiculed as paranoid delusion.
But he’s not wrong. His enemies are not all resting in peace or dementia. Soon he finds himself thrust back into his old world of high-speed chases, unusual alliances, and late-night adventures with gorgeous women, though staying up past 8:00 is hard to do!
With his past, present, and future all at stake, he flips the script and PT tables on what aging is all about. And he won’t suffer scammers lightly as he gathers his remaining wits about him and heads to the high seas for what is hardly a final slowdown.
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet, by James P. Rochester Jr. III, is a satirical spy comedy about Herbert Bigglesby, an 84-year-old former superspy who has been officially declared dead, tucked away in a senior living facility, and expected to fade quietly into the background. Herbert, naturally, has other plans. What begins as a comic portrait of a retired agent refusing to accept retirement turns into a wild genre-bending romp involving old enemies, senior scams, family complications, cruise-ship chaos, and one last chance for Herbert to prove he is still useful, even if his body, his colleagues, and common sense keep suggesting otherwise.
What struck me first was how committed the book is to its own absurdity. Rochester writes with a restless comic energy, piling jokes on top of references, misunderstandings, wordplay, and physical mishaps until the story feels almost like a spy movie being performed in a nursing home after someone misplaced the script. Sometimes that works beautifully. The opening scenes at Sunset View are sharp, funny, and oddly vivid, with all the fluorescent lighting, bad smells, institutional blandness, and bruised pride of old age turned into the setting for espionage. I liked that the humor is not gentle. It pokes. It elbows. It’s often ridiculous, but it also has a clear target: the way society files people away once they are no longer convenient.
The author’s biggest choice is also the book’s biggest risk. Herbert is not always easy to like. He’s vain, inappropriate, stubborn, and trapped in an old version of himself that the world has mostly outgrown. Still, I found myself curious about him because the book does not treat aging as a soft-focus lesson in wisdom. It treats it as a collision. Herbert’s mind is full of old missions, old habits, old desires, and old wounds, while the present keeps interrupting him with pills, liability forms, family demands, and people who do not remember why he mattered. That tension gives the comedy more weight than I expected. Beneath the jokes about spycraft and senior living, there is a real question here: what happens to a person when the role that gave them meaning is taken away?
As a work of comic spy satire, Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet will appeal most to readers who enjoy humor, parody, and stories that move fast even when their hero doesn’t. Readers who enjoy messy, loud, self-aware comedy with a surprising amount of heart should have a good time. I would recommend it to fans of spy spoofs, aging antiheroes, and books that are willing to be silly while still asking what dignity, purpose, and usefulness look like near the end of life.
Pages: 310 | ASIN : B0GSPKG78M
