Then he wakes up with a hangover in London’s Dorchester hotel after a gourmandising blow-out in celebration of his 45th birthday. Bond is asleep, dreaming of his experiences with an intelligence-gathering unit in the second world war the details are drawn from Fleming’s own wartime experiences. A versatile and experienced writer, he nonetheless faces a daunting task with Solo – to stay true to the spirit of Fleming’s original while remoulding Bond for a readership 60 years distant from the first 007 novel, 1953’s Casino Royale. His novels range widely over different countries and eras, including one ( Restless) about Cold War spying, and another ( Any Human Heart) in which Fleming plays a cameo role. Like Faulks, Boyd is a successful British novelist who straddles literary and popular fiction. So now the Ian Fleming Estate has returned to plan A. But Deaver’s Bond novel, Carte Blanche (2011), sold fewer copies than Faulks in the UK and achieved only middling success in the US. The British novelist Faulks was succeeded by Jeffery Deaver, an American thriller writer who attempted to update Bond for a mass market readership, especially in the US where Devil May Care sold less well. But the Fleming Estate appears to have wanted more from its revived super-spy. In the UK it notched up the best first week sales of any novel after the Harry Potter titles. Solo sends Bond on a mission to resolve a civil war in an oil-rich African country the scenario mirrors the Fleming Estate’s conflicting approaches about how to exploit 007’s literary legacy.īond was reactivated in 2008 by Sebastian Faulks in Devil May Care, a pitch-perfect Fleming pastiche. In contrast to the Bond films, which have lucratively bounced back from a 1990s slump, there has been confusion about how to position the character for today’s bestseller charts. Boyd’s recruitment by the Ian Fleming Estate isn’t quite the seamless succession portrayed by Solo’s slick PR operation.

2013 novel by william boyd