One May morning, a phone call summoned me to offices in Mayfair, the London headquarters of the Fleming family – art collectors, philanthropists and proprietors of one of Britain’s most successful private banks. Over fillet of beef, rare, and a bottle of Clos de Vougeot 2000, they asked if I would write a James Bond novel to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth.

I declined. My last novel, Human Traces, had been a 650-page exploration of human consciousness through psychiatry and evolution. Although it had drama, too, there was not a Walther or a bikini in sight. Have some more burgundy, they said; at least have a look at the books again.

So I did. I hadn’t read them since the age of 12, when a boy at school introduced me to From Russia with Love – the paperback edition with Tatiana’s blue dress and black stockings. Then, soon afterwards, I discovered “literature” and Bond was off the menu.

When I picked the books up again, I expected them to be real pulp fiction, but I was surprised. This Bond, this solitary hero with his soft shoes and single under-powered weapon, was a man in dreadful danger. You feared for him. And the style was clean, journalistic, devoid of cliché; it was occasionally playful, but it was never arch. It was fun.

I like parodying other writers and I thought I could “do” Fleming easily enough; but where a pastiche has 125 per cent of the author’s characteristics, in a homage or tribute I thought I should pull up short and incorporate perhaps only 75 per cent of the original manner. That would work.

But I still said “No.” I didn’t want to be distracted from my real writing, I said. Then they gave me an article by Ian Fleming which revealed that he wrote the books in only six weeks. It was also full of tips on how to drive the story forwards. Still I demurred. I do inner lives, I said, not underwater explosions.

I carried on reading Fleming’s novels, though, in chronological order. The best pace was in the crime stories, where Bond is an international policeman breaking up a racket; the best chills, though, are when national catastrophe looms. Suppose, I thought, I wrote a hybrid, with elements of both – the pace of Live and Let Die and the creepy menace of Moonraker. Suppose I took all the best of Fleming and none of the slow or silly bits… And then I had an idea for what the villain might be up to; and then I found a location overlooked by Fleming. Then I blocked six weeks out of my diary. Then I wrote it.

My Bond is Fleming’s Bond – not Connery, or Moore or Craig, for all their charms. The family were touched and pleased “to have the old spy back”, as Fleming’s niece Kate put it. Barbara Broccoli of the film dynasty said it was as though they had found a manuscript in Fleming’s desk after his death. And, yes, my Bond drinks and smokes as much as ever. My female lead – the “Bond girl” – has a little more depth than Fleming’s women, but not at the expense of glamour; my plot has a fraction more political complexity, but not, I hope, at the cost of pace. This is not a “reinvention” for our world; this a playful homage to a playful character.

James Bond was born into a world of Fifties austerity. Through the decades he has spoken not just to schoolboys, but to the inner child that survives in most of us – in women almost as much as in men. I tried to imagine Fleming having recovered his appetite for life and for his character, then tried to write a book that showed both men at the top of their form. For decades, James Bond has been a beacon of dependable excitement in many a drab existence, and Devil May Care is my attempt to offer thanks for this to his creator. Happy birthday, Mr Fleming.

BOOK EXTRACT

DEVIL MAY CARE

Bond is back in London after an enforced “sabbatical” on medical grounds. He returns to the summer of love in full swing – and a dangerous new global threat to conquer.

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