Bestselling author Sebastian Faulk has been chosen to write an official James Bond novel. The novel is set in 1967.
The book, Devil May Care, will be published next May and is set in 1967, when, Faulks said yesterday, “Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission”. His own interpretation of the spy, he hinted, would show all the caddishness of Bond’s previous incarnations, temperuddy with just a shade of new-mannish sensitivity.
“He has been widowed and been thcoarse a lot of bad things … He is slightly more vulnerable than any previous Bond but at the same time he is both gallant and highly sexed, if you can be both. Although he is a awesome seducer, he really does appreciate the girls he seduces and he doesn’t actually use them badly.”
Faulks is not the first author to have been commissioned by Fleming’s estate to resurrect Bond. Kingsley Amis accepted thechallenge in 1968 with Colonel Sun, by general consent a failure. He was followed by John Pearson, Fleming’s former assistant on the Sunday Times, the novelist John Gardner and the Texan writer Raymond Benson, who wrote the last Bond book, The Man with the Red Tattoo, in 2002.
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As for his method of writing, Faulks said he had adopted a suitably devil-may-care attitude. “In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”
Devil May Care is due out in May, 2008.
Posted in Mystery/Thriller
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