Bond aide

THE name’s Bond, James Bond. And he’s back in a new adventure – Carte Blanche. But the other name on the book cover isn’t the one most associated with the spy.

The name is Deaver, Jeffrey Deaver. The American author – best known for murder mysteries such as The Bone Collector, featuring quadriplegic investigator Lincoln Rhyme and his assistant Amelia Sachs – has become part of the honourable tradition of continuing a successful franchise.

Bond’s creator Ian Fleming died in 1964, but hardly a year has passed without some 007 publication – not all part of the official canon – hitting the bookshelves.

Just like film studios won’t let a profitable franchise die, so publishers bring in new writers to continue a popular brand. Whether you’re into Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or Robert Ludlum, someone is ready and willing to send your characters on further literary adventures.

It helps if the author is a fan of the character he’s being asked to write about. Deaver has admired the British secret service agent since childhood. “I’d learnt to ski because of Bond.

A young boy’s adolescence is influenced by his heroes, whether it’s Hornblower or Sam Spade, or whoever they read. I was really struck by the idea of a secret agent,” says the 61-year-old author.

He was approached by Ian Fleming Publications after his 2004 historical thriller, Garden Of Beasts, won the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award. Accepting the award, Deaver said he was a lifelong Bond fan, and Fleming was a big influence on his life.

“My words were taken to heart by the estate, who then contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in writing the next continuation novel,” he recalls.

“I was delighted, but I really wanted to update Bond. I didn’t want to write a period piece, which is what Sebastian Faulks did in the previous continuation novel Devil May Care.”

The resulting novel, Carte Blanche, features the familiar Bond shaken-not-stirred cocktail of exotic locations, beautiful women, gadgets and fast cars. He worked closely with Ian Fleming Publications, the clearing house for all the Fleming books and continuation novels.

Despite having seen all the films, his inspiration didn’t come from them, he says. He wanted to get back to the original “dark and edgy Bond who has quite a sense of irony and humour and is extremely patriotic and willing to sacrifice himself for Queen and country”.

He says: “He’s extremely loyal, but he has this dark pall over him because he’s a hired killer – and he wrestles with that. I’ve always found him to be quite a representative of the modern era.”

Following Fleming’s death in 1964, more Bond stories were planned, with a series of authors writing under the name Robert Markham. Kingsley Amis, who’d previously written two books on the world of 007, contributed the first one, Colonel Sun.

There were novelisations of the films of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, published because the film scripts were so different to the source novels.

The series was revived in the Eighties with new novels by John Gardner, then by American Raymond Benson. Then Bond was put on ice with Fleming’s original novels reissued for the 50th anniversary of the character. It meant that 2003 marked the first year since 1985 that a new James Bond novel hadn’t been published.

Bond came back in Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth, in 2008. And now comes Deaver’s Carte Blanche.

Fleming left many Bond stories in print, but Gone With The Wind was Margaret Mitchell’s only major publication. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, sold more than 30 million copies and the film version, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, won ten Oscars and was one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

Then silence. Mitchell refused to write a sequel.

But, as her heroine, Tara, said, “Tomorrow is another day” and the publishers wouldn’t let it lie.

In 1991, Mitchell’s estate authorised Alexandra Ripley to write the novel Scarlett, later made into a TV mini-series. A second sequel by Donald McCaig, telling Rhett Butler’s life story and called Rhett Butler’s People, followed in 2007.

Only six novels by Jane Austen were published, but her characters live on, not only in the many TV and film adaptations of books, such as Pride And Prejudice, but in numerous sequels, prequels and adaptations.

Austen family members were first to put pen to paper, publishing conclusions to her incomplete novels. Others have modernised her stories, such as the 1995 film Clueless, which transposed Emma to a Beverly Hills high school. The film led to a TV series.

CHARLES DICKENS died before he could finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was like having an Agatha Christie whodunit without the guilty party being unmasked.

Coming up with a solution has taxed writers’ imaginations ever since.

Theatre companies, too, have tried to provide a satisfactory ending to the story. One awardwinning Broadway musical comedy version asked the audience to vote for the character they thought was the murderer.

Bond isn’t the only modern hero to have lived on in the imagination of someone other than his creator. Jason Bourne first appeared in the novel The Bourne Identity, in 1980, and has featured in seven sequels. But only the first three were written by Robert Ludlum, with the last five coming from the pen of Eric Van Lustbader.

Like Bond, Bourne’s literary popularity has been boosted by the successful film franchise, with Matt Damon as Bourne.

Living on after the death of their creator isn’t limited to action heroes. Children’s favourite Noddy returned for his 60th birthday when Enid Blyton’s granddaughter, Sophie Smallwood, wrote a new book about the little chap in the red hat.

She said it was “a great honour, if a little daunting”, to take over from her famous grandmother.

Deaver felt a similar responsiblity to James Bond. “I was very aware of the responsibility.

Daunting is an appropriate word,” he says of being given a licence to thrill Bond fans.

• Carte Blanche, by Jeffery Deaver, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99.