James Bond's Changing Incarnations

Jeffery Deaver is the latest in a surprisingly long list of authors who have written official 007 sequels.

From an article in the Guardian...

1967. Kingsley Amis was 45, divorced, and languishing in literary purgatory (a lecturing job in Nashville, Tennessee to be precise). His great first novel, Lucky Jim, was 13 years behind him. His latest, The Anti-Death League, was struggling to sell out its first printing. Amis needed glory. Amis needed money.

Along came Gildrose Productions, literary executors of the Ian Fleming estate. This was four years after Fleming's death. Gildrose offered Amis £10,000 to pen a Bond sequel. Amis agreed. Colonel Sun - published under the pseudonym Robert Markham – was out within the year.

Colonel Sun is not a literary novel – it is, however, stylish. Gone is Fleming's grandiloquence (nipples were "the pointed stigma of desire" in Live and Let Die; eyes became "mouths which licked their lips" in Dr No). Amis writes straight, with a relish for sadistic detail. One chapter includes a three-page sermon on torture methods (disembowelment, genital cutting, and so on). Later, Bond gets a kitchen skewer through his right eardrum. Amis also develops the rather startling suggestion, set out by the female narrator of Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me, that "All women love semi-rape". His heroine, Ariadne, spends three chapters with gang-banging Greek heavies and still concludes with the line, "I don't mind anything now you're here James."

Sales soared. But Amis's reputation dipped. His biographer, Neil Powell, describes the novel as "completely worthless". Ian Fleming's widow, Ann, was disgusted for other reasons: "Amis will slip Lucky Jim into Bond's clothing," she wrote in a Sunday Telegraph review. "We shall have a petit bourgeois red-brick Bond [who will] end up selling his country."

She needn't have worried. Amis declined to write a follow-up.

For 13 years, literary Bond went quiet. Then, in 1981, Ann Fleming died. Within months a new Bond sequel was ready. Its title: Licence Renewed. Its author: John Gardner, a former Anglican priest.

And talking of Bond, read an exchange between Ian Fleming and a firearms expert, here.