AS THE AUTHOR of Pistache, an unashamedly academic pastiche - and piss-take - on the style of other writers, living and dead, Sebastian Faulks was already licensed to kill before he took on the superficially daunting task of bringing James Bond back to life.

Not since Kingsley Amis - under a pseudonym - stood in for a one-off after Ian Fleming's early death has a writer of his calibre taken on the mantle of perpetuating the 007 mythology. And messing with myths is as risky as dicing with death.

Devil May Care celebrates the centenary of Fleming's birth with a superficially classic Bond caper, set back in the late 1960s, at the point where Bond's creator abandoned him: recovering from bereavement and brainwashing, now recalled and coming to terms with a fast-changing world.

Pipe-puffing M - for the moment still male - tuts over William Rees-Mogg's famously liberal Times leader criticising Mick Jagger's cannabis conviction, as he sends Bond after an archetypal deformed villain plotting to bring down the Western world through drug addiction, or just possibly nuclear holocaust.

The baddie's gruesome identifying characteristic is a hairy right hand without opposing thumb, a condition known as “monkey's paw”. Which doesn't stop him playing a dab hand at tennis, even if he does require his Foreign Legion kepi-wearing henchman to tinker with the net.

All this, of course, is Faulks referencing the Bond canon: think Oddjob and Goldfinger cheating at golf (there is also an airborne shooting that reprises one of that movie's most celebrated visual jokes). This Bond, though, dislikes gadgets and has little truck with fast cars, which will dismay the product placement people.

As a sop to modern concerns, the action takes place in Iran (Fleming preferred the Caribbean) but before the regime of the mullahs, where local habits still include swigging Bollinger and mixed nude bathing. The drug trade, in which the villain is heavily involved, has its origins across the border in the Afghan province of Helmand.

Bond's perennially fraught love life is sauced up by steamy Scarlett Papava - just in case you missed the opium connection - and her enigmatic twin Poppy, both of whom get together to provide an entertainingly modernist final twist to the tale.

The trouble with writing post-Fleming Bond is that the ersatz author has to choose how he falls between the two stools of the original books and the self-perpetuating movie franchise.

The Fleming estate has, since his death in 1964, after only the second film - which was still close to his original - shamelessly mined the vein for all it is worth, with, apart from Amis's Colonel Sun, 26 mediocre Bond yarns from John Gardner and Raymond Benson.

That's not counting the five Young Bond books by Charlie Higson, improbably exploiting his “Eton years” for younger readers - since most Bond fans read the originals aged about 12, a readership hard to imagine - or the “chick-lit rough” Moneypenny Diaries.

Significantly, for the centenary Penguin's stylish new hardback collection - and a leather-bound Bentley collaboration - include only the 14 original books. It may seem to be missing the point of such a “fun franchise”, but I rather rated Fleming's books for what they were: hard-bitten, genre-defining period pieces.

His last two novels - skirting the controversial posthumous Man with the Golden Gun - had brought Bond to an an end worthy of a Shakespearean tragic hero: his wife murdered, his memory missing - that gave the whole series a higher literary merit than widely recognised.

The franchise, however, is about making money. And that means there is one title that will remain unwritten: James Bond, R.I.P. He should be so lucky.

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming
Penguin, £18.99; 320pp
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