Junk Bonds

Writing a James Bond novel? What could possibly be simpler? Surely all one needs is an arch, semi-meaningless title — something like ‘Never Kiss Death Goodbye’ — then a villain with a camply sinister name, a heroine with an even camper double-entendre for a name, a seasoning of sadism and you are away.

But it’s not that easy at all. If it is, then why have the writers who picked up Ian Fleming’s mantle got it so wrong? Even the class acts who have come closest to nailing the authentic 007 style — Kingsley Amis, John Pearson and Sebastian Faulks — have missed something small but crucial, as I shall explain.

It’s an odd thing, 007’s literary afterlife. No one would dream of taking P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster and writing new novels around them. Fleming’s original novels — from Casino Royale to The Man with the Golden Gun — with all their bizarre jeopardy, exotic heroines and unheimlich villains, are fantastically distinctive and, yes, classic works of imaginative popular fiction. So why, nearly 50 years after Ian Fleming’s death, is literary Bond constantly hauled out for further embossed-cover missions of ever-increasing naffness?

There have been more than 20 novels since Fleming died in 1964. The latest is Carte Blanche, by the American thriller veteran Jeffery Deaver, who is due to write more. He clearly means well, but really. Here we have a necrophiliac villain, a girl called Ophelia Maidenstone, some novelty 21st-century new-mannish sensitivity — involving Bond avoiding sex — and an unusually unpleasant weapon of mass destruction. But there are other distractions for the reader: mainly in the form of politely over-researched yet misplaced English tics that would have made Fleming yelp.