Bond. James Bond. In the 007 Case Files, join me as I read all of the James Bond books, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.
In the decades following Ian Fleming’s death, his creation took on a life of its own—portrayed by multiple actors and shaped by shifting cinematic approaches. In print, James Bond’s adventures continued through the decades-spanning works of John Gardner and Raymond Benson, sometimes aligning with—and at other times diverging from—their film counterparts. After Benson’s final original Bond novel in 2002, which coincided with the release of Die Another Day, both versions of Bond took a brief hiatus.
By the time Sebastian Faulks published Devil May Care in 2008, Daniel Craig’s grittier take on 007 was about to return to screens in his second outing. But Faulks opted for a different direction—ignoring the passage of time entirely and planting his feet firmly in the 1960s. Much like Kingsley Amis before him, who wrote the first post-Fleming novel under the pseudonym Robert Markham, Faulks—writing as Ian Fleming—sets his story in 1967, sometime after the events of The Man with the Golden Gun.
After an extended cold open, involving an Algerian man caught in a drug deal gone wrong and the reintroduction of ally René Mathis, we find Bond a changed man. He’s recovering from the events of the previous book, off the booze, considering leaving the service (again), and politely declining casual bedroom invitations.
In every other respect, Faulks is almost aggressively traditionalist. Once the story kicks into gear—with Bond reactivated to investigate the megalomaniacal Dr. Julius Gorner, a chemist with a fanatical hatred of England—Faulks successfully transplants his style from 2008 back to the 1960s, warts and all.
When the book was released to major fanfare, The Times remarked that Faulks was writing “Bond as Fleming abandoned him.” Many reviewers echoed the sentiment, and the evidence is right there on the page—from the singularly obsessed villain to the copious helpings of scrambled eggs and jugs of martinis. Even the cover, featuring the silhouette of model and actress Tuuli Shipster, nods to the title sequences of classic cinematic Bond.
Gorner and Bond’s first encounter takes place over a tense tennis match, a clear echo of Goldfinger’s golf game—complete with Bond turning the tables after discovering Gorner is cheating. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of the looming drug trade in Britain and the United States, a perceived threat only just gaining attention in Fleming’s day.
Yet Faulks also brings with him the more outdated trappings of the era. Gorner’s grotesque deformity—an enlarged, hairy hand dubbed a “monkey’s paw”—follows a long line of Bond villains whose physical differences serve as shorthand for their moral corruption: Le Chiffre’s haemolacria, Dr. No’s metal pincers, and so on. The period setting means the sexism is also intact, from Moneypenny’s flirtatiousness to workplace harassment, and casually patronising lines directed at women (“Try not to emotional…”) that lands with a thud.
The back half of Devil May Care is so jam-packed that it begins to feel like Faulks has stapled a whole second novel onto the first. Bond hops from Paris to Persia, Afghanistan to Russia, ricocheting between secret bases and escape sequences with barely a breath in between. There are captures, shootouts, and final confrontations aboard a plane, a train, and even a riverboat. I must confess to getting a little muddled toward the end, perhaps having mentally checked out before Bond did.
Still, Faulks leaves us with a tantalising thread—a new 00 agent, and the hint of where Bond might go next. But of course, that promise had already been realised by the many films and the twenty or so continuation novels that came before. Faulks bowed out after just one book, and the next writer would take the opposite tack—doing what the films had already done so well: updating Bond for the 21st century.
James Bond will return…in Carte Blanche.
