None of this would be happening, of course, if somebody hadn't written the book. Ian Fleming Publications approached Sebastian Faulks to write Devil May Care in 2006. Lucky for us, and for you, he said yes.
Sebastian Faulks is best known for his French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. I remember reading Birdsong as a teenager, while suffering from tonsillitis. I was in the doctor's surgery in floods of tears as I neared the end of the book (although the doctor clearly thought I was an hysterical hypochondriac). It is regularly voted one of the nation's favourite books, and has sold a massive 2,500,000 copies. It's not hard to see why. Like I said before, we dream of selling such numbers in publishing. Charlotte Gray was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett...so we have a Hollywood author, no less, on our hands. Sebastian's most recent novel, Engleby, was widely acclaimed when it was published last year. You can see why we are honoured (and quite frankly chuffed to bits) that we are publishing Devil May Care.
So, Sebastian Faulks has taken up where Ian Fleming left off, and written a James Bond novel that will happily stand up alongside the others. In case you don't know, here's how he did it:
'I tried to isolate the essential and the most enjoyable aspects of the books. Then I took that pattern and added characters and a story of my own with as much speed and as many twists as I thought the reader could bear.
I developed a prose that is about 80 per cent Fleming. I didn't go the final distance for fear of straying into pastiche, but I strictly observed his rules of chapter and sentence construction.
My novel is meant to stand in the line of Fleming's own books, where the story is everything.
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.'
I can assure you after meeting him, that he couldn't be more perfect as a Bond author. And who better, to be one of the judges of our theme tune competition? Speaking of which, we asked Sebastian how entrants would know they had hit the right note with their entry and what we can expect with Devil May Care. Here's what he said.
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