My Weekly Book

Having just spent a stress-free couple of hours watching Casino Royale on DVD the other day (and admiring Daniel Craig’s rather fetching swimming trunks) this piece from Guardian Books caught my eye…

There is one clear rule if you are looking for an heir to Ian Fleming: don’t bother too much about Caribbean locations and Martinis shaken not stirred. Instead, go straight for a good writer who has proved he or she can bring off bouts of genteel sex at bestseller level.

This, at least, was the line followed by the Fleming estate, which revealed yesterday that Sebastian Faulks has written the most coveted commission in publishing - an official new James Bond story to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.

The book, Devil May Care, will be published next May and is set in 1967, when, Faulks said yesterday, “Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission”. His own interpretation of the spy, he hinted, would show all the caddishness of Bond’s previous incarnations, tempered with just a shade of new-mannish sensitivity. Read on here…

But this is definitely my favourite quote:

As for his method of writing, Faulks said he had adopted a suitably devil-may-care attitude. “In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”

Yes, me too, Seb old chap, me too…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:48 am and is filed under 2007 news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.