It's almost D(MC)-Day!

Tuesday marks the release of the latest James Bond novel, Devil May Care. I’m really excited about this as it’s the first adult Bond novel since 2002’s The Man With the Red Tattoo. Back then, the books were written by Raymond Benson and carried the Ian Fleming Publications copyright which meant these books were “official” cannon for the James Bond franchise. Since then, other writers have taken a stab at writing for the Bond cannon, but, this year, to celebrate what would have been Ian Flemings 100th birthday, a writer has been selected to carry out Ian Fleming’s vision for Bond.

Enter Sebastian Faulks.

Devil May Care picks up in 1967 two years after Fleming’s last Bond novel, The Man With the Golden Gun ends. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time now. I was especially excited to find out that Faulks would be writing this book in the style of Ian Fleming. To me, that meant a return to much colder, darker spy stories and staying away from cheesy fantasy stories and hokey dialogue that was made popular thanks to the movie adaptations of the original books.

I’m afraid I may have been wrong…

In an excerpt from Devil May Care published in Saturday’s London Times I was disappointed to read what I consider to be some sub-par passages from the book. There is an exchange between Bond and his housekeeper May, a flirtatious moment between Bond and Moneypenny, and a run-of-the-mill briefing between Bond and M. None of it feels fresh and none of it feels Fleming. I worry that Faulks is basing his novelization of Fleming’s characters on how they are often portrayed in the movies and not how Iam Fleming himself would have written them.

In an interview with the Times, Faulks explains that he wrote the book in Fleming’s style - more like a newspaper man. Both Fleming and Faulks worked in newspaper so it likely wasn’t a stretch. Faulks wrote this tale in Fleming’s style with “no semicolons, few adverbs, few adjectives, short sentences, a lot of verbs, a lot of concrete nouns.” Great. So it should read like a Fleming book but the themes and plot are going to fall short? I’m nervous. I had/have such high hopes for this book…I can only hope the excerpt the Times ran was meant to entice fans of the movie franchise to buy the book - and doesn’t stand as a true indicator of how the majority of the book will read.

I’ll let you know next week after I’ve read it.