From The Sunday Times, May 25, 2008
Peter Kemp
Rows of empty, shiny black dust jackets line a corridor in Penguin’s smartly renovated offices on the Strand. Each cover is flamingly emblazoned with what, at first, looks like a poppy, but is actually the silhouette of a svelte nude girl with a flamboyant head of scarlet hair. They are waiting to be wrapped around the season’s most excitedly anticipated novel. Devil May Care by “Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming” will be published worldwide on Wednesday, the centenary of the birth of the creator of James Bond. Until then, Penguin is guarding it with a ferocity Rosa Klebb would envy, and under conditions that make Dr No’s security arrangements for his Caribbean lair look slapdash.
So it is with a feeling of having accomplished a mission that would have taxed the resources of 007 himself that I settle down to talk about the book with Faulks. Outside the room where we meetin Penguin’s HQ is the spectacular view down the Thames to Westminster that Monet painted from his suite in the adjacent Savoy hotel. Facing out from the shelves around us are books representing highlights of Penguin’s publishing history, to which Devil May Care is designed to be a handsome addition. Appearing under the company’s new James Bond imprint, Penguin 007, it’s a continuation of the secret agent’s adventures, written by Faulks at the invitation of the Fleming estate.
The request at first left him “pretty amazed”. True, he has twice already tried his hand at Bond pastiche. His first novel, A Trick of the Light (1984), juxtaposed the glamorous escapades of a Bond-like figure battling fiendish foreigners in far-flung locales with the ugly actualities of IRA terrorism. For Radio 4’s literary quiz game, The Write Stuff, he envisaged the spy dropping into Sainsbury’s for a spot of shopping. (“Bond lowered himself through a ventilation grille in the ceiling above the savoury-dips aisle... Ignoring the selection of instant mashed potato – Cadbury’s Smersh, he thought ruefully – he eliminated the three people ahead of him in the queue by triggering a lethal dart from the adapted handle of his twin-exhaust wire trolley.”) It’s unlikely, however, that any of this loomed large in the thinking of Ian Fleming Publications, the management company that looks after the author’s estate and reputation, when it approached Faulks. What recommended him, no doubt, was his acclaimed and bestselling expertise at portraying combat, in wartime novels such as Birdsong (1993) and Charlotte Gray (1998), along with his fictional foray into cold-war espionage in On Green Dolphin Street (2001)... [article continues]
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