When Ian Fleming died and there was talk of finding someone else to continue the James Bond series, it didn't seem to me that this would be very hard to do. The Bond books were amusing and reasonably inventive, but not inimitable. They had good details, a flashy threat, a pretty girl or two, a villain with delusions of grandeur and Bond himself, a smooth practitioner of elementary irony.

When Kingsley Amis, surely a competent novelist, wrote a rather boring Bond book, I was surprised. I could only suppose that he was overqualified for the job. Now, with ''Icebreaker,'' his third James Bond book, John Gardner is the established heir apparent. His second effort, ''License Renewed,'' made the best-seller list and he may be irrevocably launched.

But if Mr. Amis was overqualified, Mr. Gardner seems to me to be at the other end of the spectrum. Though he is described on the dust jacket of ''Icebreaker'' as ''one of Britain's most esteemed and successful thriller writers,'' his book strikes me as deficient in many of the basic requirements. I see now why Mr. Fleming is so hard to imitate: though his books were not brilliantly written, they were, like Bond himself, very smooth. What made them so easy to read was an almost complete absence of awkwardness. The illusion of unseriousness was seriously maintained.

Mr. Gardner, however, is all awkwardness. Every time I try to enter into his latest conspiracy we bump heads. It's one thing to accept an improbable plot and quite another to accept an improbable style. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief, but not my affection for the English language. I don't see why, when Mr. Gardner can learn all about the various weapons, machines and intelligence procedures he describes, he can't do a bit of basic research in ordinary narrative technique.

A man who has no talent for describing women, for example, should let them alone. Otherwise, he's guilty of unnecessarily tarnishing their image, which is a grave incivility. Mr. Gardner refers to a woman who possesses ''dark eyes in which a spirit of humor seemed to dance almost seductively.'' ''She was,'' Mr. Gardner says later on, ''at close proximity, a very lovely young woman.'' In an intimate scene, she ''returned from the bathroom looking like several million dollars.''

In conversation, Bond ''gives'' or ''signifies an affirmative,'' instead of saying yes. In a tense moment, he ''dripped acid from each word.'' People, including Bond's chief, the magisterially impassive M, ''snarl'' and ''snap.'' M even coughs, ''playing for time,'' while talking to Bond. Since he has sent for Bond in order to brief him, it's not clear why he should be playing for time, unless Mr. Gardner feels that everybody in a suspense novel has to engage, under all circumstances, in strategic delay. M is slipping in other ways: He asks the same question three times.

The figures of speech in ''Icebreaker'' remind me of the intelligent suggestion some critic made that all figures of speech be removed from language, on the ground that they inevitably debase it. For example: ''Set against Rivke and recent events, Paula appeared suddenly to have feet of melting wax.'' Also: ''Brad Tirpitz's eyes turned to broken glass.''

Even Bond is deteriorating. In his hotel, he is forever ''sweeping'' the room for listening devices, even though he knows that the switchboard too is tapped. Again, Mr. Gardner shows an indiscriminating use of a standard thriller device: Always sweep your room. At the moment of truth, Bond's pistol becomes stuck in the waistband of his trousers. The plot of ''Icebreaker'' is a muddle about a neo-Nazi party. Mr. Gardner has taken too seriously the stories about the duplicity of secret agents, and as a consequence people in the book keep changing sides. It's his favorite, almost his only plot device.

In one of the volumes of his autobiography, Peter Quennell tells an anecdote about Ian Fleming. While visiting him at his country house, Mr. Quennell was asked by Mrs. Fleming whether he was an early riser. When he said that he was, she asked him, if he should be inclined to go outside, not to disturb the dew on the spiderwebs on the lawn. Ian, she said, liked to look at them first thing when he awoke. He was a fastidious man, apparently, and Mr. Gardner ought to study him further.

James Bond in Finland and Russia--for more of the same, just colder. This time Gardner's neo-Bond (who's less vividly characterized with every book) is sent by M to join three other agents--a CIA man, a KGB man, and beauteous Rivke of Israel's Mossad--in an action against the NSAA, a neo-Nazi group that has been responsible for heaps of recent terrorism. The plan? To catch the NSAA in the act of getting arms supplies . . . which are coming from Russia, of all places, near the Finno-Russian/Arctic-Circle border. But Bond suspects that the operation is not quite what it seems to be. First off, Rivke (not her real name) turns out to be the daughter of the old Finnish Nazi who's rumored to be the NSAA mastermind! Moreover, the KGB guy is clearly up to no good. And what about Bond's Helsinki girlfriend Paula: is she a neo-Nazi too? So it goes, with the requisite bursts of techno-violence (lethal snow-plows, snow-scooters, etc.), kidnaps, grenades, mild smirks of sex, double-crosses, triple-crosses (can Bond even trust M himself), and a final dollop of missile warfare. And though the formula is tired beyond belief, the scenery's nice, the pacing is competent--and the readership has proven to be uncommonly loyal.

In Icebreaker, as indestructible as ever, Bond is back in another mission—a deadly assignment undertaken in cohort with Bond’s opposite numbers from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel in the desolate Arctic wastes of Lapland. Yet if resurgent fascism is the common enemy, who is really to be feared? Is it the breezy American or the voluptuous Israeli who is acting as a double agent? Are the Finns merely using Bond to break the KGB's stranglehold on their tenuous national autonomy? Never has Bond encountered such an unnervingly deceitful bunch of collaborators or been subjected to such a bewildering series of potentially lethal shocks.