Good at bad guys

Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of the Spy Novel in the Age of Osama bin Laden’.

The high tide of these get-togethers is the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place every July, over four days, in Harrogate. This year, the guest of honour was Jeffery Deaver, recognised across the pond as one of America’s pre-eminent thriller writers.

To much fanfare, Deaver was recently invited by Ian Fleming Publications to pen a James Bond novel, for publication next summer. Provisionally entitled Project X, the book will follow on the heels of Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks’s colossally successful homage to Bond which, to date, has sold around half a million copies worldwide.