His name's still Bond, but it's 007 with a brand new twist

Published on Tuesday 27 May 2008 22:41

BOND is Back. That is the hope, and the advertising slogan, for the publishers Penguin and the Fleming family trust, on today's centenary of the 007 creator's birth. They are betting the much-hyped release of a new Bond novel by a celebrated modern author will revive a flagging book brand.

Since Ian Fleming's death 44 years ago, his descendants have commissioned 22 new books about the super-suave British spy. But the most recent, The Man With the Red Tattoo, was almost ignored by British book buyers.

The first 007 copies of The Devil May Care by the British novelist Sebastian Faulks, a writer both respected and hugely popular, were shipped down the Thames yesterday. The Royal Navy, James Bond's former employers, provided a Lynx helicopter escort.

Tuuli Shipster, the model featured on the seductively designed front cover, helped take the first seven copies to Waterstone's branch in Piccadilly, in a cavalcade of Bentleys.

With a UK print run of 100,000, and another 250,000 copies planned for the US, Penguin employed JK Rowling's marketing firm, Colman Getty, and took a leaf out of her book. While taster extracts have appeared in selected newspapers, copies went to bookshops and newspaper reviewers under tight security for release across the country this morning.

The new Bond villain is said to be Dr Julius Gorner, with one hand deformed like a monkey's paw. The plot puts Bond back in the Cold War days of 1967 but throws him into the heroin trade, with Dr Gorner attempting to smuggle vast quantities of opium west, to undermine America and Britain.

A female character named "Poppy" features prominently, as the action moves from Paris and London to the Far East.

Beyond the hype it is the figure of Faulks, who has driven up expectations for the new book. His 1993 historical novel Birdsong has sold three million copies, and his Charlotte Gray (about a secret service agent in the Second World War) was another big success.

He is well qualified to put Bond in the past, but had to change his style: "It was quite a challenge because people say these are simple, straightforward thrillers, but this is not the kind of book that I normally write.

"I normally write about people's inner lives and thoughts and emotions, and so on, often set in a historical context. Here I am trying to write about a man with, as far as we know, almost no internal life, a story which is just driven by incident and excitement the whole way through.

"I suppose in a way it is like asking someone who normally writes complex symphonic music if they would like to write a three-minute pop song."

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