I tend to have several books on the go at any one time. At the moment, I’m half way through The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin (Phoenix), which is slow, gentle and rather disappointing. I have just finished Peter Carey’s Wrong about Japan (Faber), which I enjoyed, though I wasn’t quite sure by the end what I had learnt from it. I have also just finished The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming (Penguin), which I’ve failed to read several times before. It’s the last novel Fleming wrote, and he died before completing it (Kingsley Amis tied up the loose ends). At his best, Fleming is fantastic, but this is more like a short story that he decided to extend into a novel. There’s almost no plot, and there’s an extraordinary episode early on where Bond is brainwashed into attempting to assassinate M. Nobody seems the least bit put out by his behaviour, and he’s quickly dispatched on another mission.

Charlie Higson will be appearing at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, April 16.

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