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In addition to Die Another Day, this little novella was also inspired by the James Bond short story "Blast from the Past" by Raymond Benson, published in the January 1997 issue of Playboy. It brought back Bond's baby he didn't know he fathered with Kissy Suzuki in the novel version of You Only Live Twice as James Suzuki, now a 25-year-old banker in New York City. Kissy died of cancer when James Jr was a teenager, and as an adult he has a distant relationship with his dad. Bond himself is retired, and the story revealed that he found out he had a kid pretty early on, but kept him at arms' length (even beyond the demands of his job) due to the trauma of losing Tracy. He visited the boy sporadically and put him through college, but his role as a father ended there. The story opens with Bond getting a telegram (it is 1997) supposedly from James Jr asking him to come to New York, saying it's urgent. Bond gets to his son's apartment, finds him dead, and a trap had been set to kill Bond himself. With the help of SIS agent Cheryl Haven, Bond finds out the killer is a vengeful Irma Bunt, and she had sent the telegram. Yes, the same woman who killed his wife decades earlier had also killed his son. Bond succeeds in killing her, but the victory is hollow because his son is no less dead. The story ends with Bond in the hospital recovering from the big fight, still on an emotional high from the victory while knowing the grief of losing James will hit him sooner rather than later. In the meantime, in walks Ms. Haven for sexy times.
I hated that story. At the time, James Bond as a father was an entirely new facet of the character that hadn't been explored before, and Benson could've done so much more with Bond's estranged son than killing him as a plot device for a revenge story. We never even see their present-day relationship because the poor boy is dead from the start. It was just gratuitously cruel and the worst case of "fridging" I'd ever seen, since James Suzuki goes straight from the womb to the grave without ever being a character in his own right. We also never see Bond in any state of mourning, not when he finds James' body, and not in the end because he's too busy getting laid, because that's totally an appropriate ending for a story about the death of his child. This is also chronologically the last entry in Bond's literary timeline. Unless another writer comes along with a story about Bond in his 60's and his role as a parent and contradicts this one, it will always end here, and I find that deeply unsatisfying.
Thus, I spent some time dreaming up a few "00Dad" story ideas before settling on this one. A "What If?" where Bond takes in his son as a single father after Kissy's death, but it was too sappy. I also considered a continuation of "Blast from the Past" where Bond does process his grief, but it's the straw that breaks him after a lifetime of loss and trauma and he goes clinically insane after a suicide attempt, institutionalized with only Felix left to visit him, but that was way too depressing. The 1962-2002 film continuity left more room for an upbeat ending than the much-grittier novels, and the film version of YOLT had a completely different plot than the book with no secret pregnancy, so any surviving Bond Girl in the series could've been knocked up. But using Jinx as the babymama meant Bond could be present from the start rather than finding out years later, while also letting me address the issues I had with DAD and Brosnan's tenure. Also, as a fellow Clevelander I'm partial to Halle Berry, so I made Jinx a Clevelander as well and was pleased to find a reason to bring James Bond into the city. And since the original film series never had a definitive conclusion, this has become my headcanon of how he rides off into the sunset.