![]() Amis had impeccable credentials for the job. ![]() No one asked me.īut ask others the Fleming estate did and the first non-Fleming Bond to appear was Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun (1968). ![]() I’ve read a biography of Fleming and I set the questions on Bond and Fleming for the television program Mastermind. I read all the Bond books with enjoyment, a few more than once, and owned them in paperback. I think I could almost have done it myself. Throw in the crucial phrases: ‘Bond, James Bond’ ‘Smoke if you wish, 007′ ‘Shaken not stirred’, and come up with a plot. Then sprinkle with product placement – Moreland cigarettes, Bollinger (or Veuve Cliquot), the Beretta, the Aston Martin. Then it would be a matter of lining up the characters – in the case of Bond, M, Q, Miss Moneypenny, May, Felix Lieter, Blofeld or another appropriate villain, and so on. Not so hard with Conan Doyle or Ian Fleming because their bodies of work on Holmes and Bond were not large. The way to do this would be to immerse yourself in the original books. The first requirement would be to get the tone of the author right, the voice. I imagine that writing a Sherlock Holmes or James Bond pastiche is something like ghost writing or co-authoring an ‘autobiography’. ![]() Moneypenny, M, danger, sex and cigarettes the self-indulgent, worldly tone: William Boyd’s James Bond gets it right. Tags: Arthur Conan Doyle/ Ian Fleming/ James Bond/ John Gardner/ Kingsley Amis/ Sebastian Faulks/ Solo/ spy fiction/ William Boyd ![]()
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