In the new 007 novel, James Bond’s mission is to thwart a plot to assassinate King Charles on his coronation day. The title, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, is a neat tweak on Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was published 60 years ago. The original plan was for the new book, set in the present, to have the royal stamp of approval from the Prince’s Trust, but when the charity found out about the regicidal plot, it respectfully declined to endorse it.
What, though, I ask the author Charlie Higson, would King Charles think of the book? “He’s a bright guy and has a sense of humor and is a Bond fan,” Higson says. “Maybe one day we can meet and talk about it.”
Higson has a long history with Bond. We meet at the offices of Ian Fleming Publications in London, where the doormat says “I’ve been expecting you”. Inside, shelves are filled with Fleming’s novels, plus the officially commissioned titles by renowned authors including Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz. Higson is responsible for the best-selling “young Bond” SilverFin series that tackled the spy in his Eton days, and On His Majesty’s Secret Service is his first foray into adult Bond. He has also written successful crime books and co-wrote and starred in the seminal 1990s sketch show The Fast Show. Which is why you recognize him — he was Swiss Toni, the quiff-haired car dealer.
So, who is Higson’s Bond? With Daniel Craig’s tenure as the film 007 over, there is fevered speculation about who may replace him. Could Bond be white, black, gay, straight … American? The Bond in On His Majesty’s Secret Service is in his mid-thirties — as he was in Fleming’s stories. Higson provides little detail about how Bond looks, but does use the Flemingesque description of the spy having a lock of dark hair. He’s white, right? “It’s black hair,” Higson says with a smile, leaving the ethnicity open.
Most controversially, this new Bond eats kimchi. Higson shrugs. His book is set in 2023. This is not a man of the 1950s, smoking umpteen cigarettes a day. He is a superfit international hero who reads the New Scientist and drinks the faddy gut concoction kombucha.
“It doesn’t bother me if someone says he’s a bit woke,” Higson says. “Younger people tend to be. There is nothing wrong with being woke.” He is realistic about who 007 would be these days and avoided phrases that he thought were “too Fleming in the Fifties”. For instance, one passage mentions a spy fooling about with “a pretty girl”. That is where Fleming would leave it, but Higson, in the novel, adds, “or a handsome young man”, hinting that women, or gay men, could be spies now.
Most controversially, this new James Bond eats kimchi.
We are far from Fleming’s 1962 novel The Spy Who Loved Me, with its line: “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.” Still, as Alan Partridge once shouted: “Stop getting Bond wrong!” Higson’s favorite Bond film is You Only Live Twice. “It’s not the best, but I was ten. Great theme song. Great villain. Best villain’s lair ever.”
Higson says there is a formula for Bond. “Guns, cars, a supervillain and a woman. M, Q, Moneypenny. 007 is a fantasy figure who solves things with a fist and doesn’t overthink.”
Which does not sound like the Bond Craig made. He was angst-ridden and even had the heart to fall in love. “I think that was wrong,” Higson says. “I went to see No Time to Die with my oldest boy, Frank, who is 30, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people who are embarrassed to make a Bond film.’ You had to watch two films in advance to know who such and such is and you think, ‘Oh, f*** off with that.’ Make it a new mission each episode and let him be Bond.
“They overcomplicate him,” he continues. “The best ‘Bond films’ now are the Mission: Impossibles. There is no inner life, it’s just, ‘Woah! Look at that building — I’d love to climb it and blow things up.’”
“The best ‘Bond films’ now are the Mission: Impossibles.”
Higson, 64, was born in Somerset. At the University of East Anglia he met Paul Whitehouse, with whom he would later write The Fast Show. He also fronted a band, the Higsons, but focused on writing, initially for the comedy bigwigs of the era, like Harry Enfield, before he and Whitehouse started The Fast Show in 1994. It ran for six years. Catchphrases and the brevity of its sketches set it aside. Ron Manager. Competitive Dad. Ted and Ralph. Everyone has a favorite. It has all been available on BBC iPlayer since January.
“We just wanted a social comedy about people,” Higson says of The Fast Show. “It’s lasted well — if something is funny, it tends to.” But does Higson look at any sketches and think they would not be written now?
“People always say, ‘You wouldn’t be able to get away with that these days.’” He shrugs. “But it’s shown happily on TV and nobody complains. This idea of what you can and can’t do is overdone.
“Obviously there are extreme things we don’t do anymore, particularly from the Seventies. Jokes about rape. But, by the time we made The Fast Show, most of the generation coming up in the Nineties were politically correct and didn’t set out to offend.”
He remembers Little Britain, which started in 2003, and being surprised by the comedy that Matt Lucas and David Walliams were doing. If The Fast Show, for instance, had a Black character, they would tend to use Colin McFarlane. Walliams donned blackface. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, are you allowed to do that stuff now?’”
Next up for him is a podcast about the history of the monarchy, based on the rhyme he learned at school: “Willy Willy Harry Stee, Harry, Dick, John, Harry three …” And so on. Each episode will be on a different monarch up to Charles III and, like his book about killing the King, will start in time for the coronation. “I am neither royalist nor republican, but I am fascinated by this dysfunctional story. ”
“It doesn’t bother me if someone says [Bond is] a bit woke… There is nothing wrong with being woke.”
The villain in On His Majesty’s Secret Service claims to be a descendant of King Alfred the Great and, as such, wants to off King Charles to claim the throne for himself. He amasses a storm of reactionary politicians, militants and talking heads who never stop ranting about the state of England while having a pop at foreigners. They call him “King Charles the Woke”. It is like a sneak peek into Nigel Farage’s diary. Whom are these firebrands based on? “They’re an amalgam of all those twats.”
It would seem that, in the book, Bond has moved on from Blofeld to focus instead on the culture wars. “The culture wars are, on some level, an irrelevance,” Higson says. “A distraction people have weaponized. But it can spill over into actual violence, like with the Capitol riots. You have to be guarded and I’m sure that MI6 keep a very close eye on the culture wars and people using it for their own ends.”
So Higson’s Bond is as Fleming wrote it, but shaken and stirred. “I wanted it to be about something,” Higson insists. “We’re having a coronation. But what is he king of? It’s a dangerous area to get into.”
The future of Bond is up in the air. Amazon Studios has the rights and there are rumors that it may do a TV show and a couple of spin-off movies. It recently announced a Bond reality show hosted by the Succession actor Brian Cox. Could they do SilverFin?
“I’d imagine if they do a young Bond they’ll just do their own,” Higson says. “Though they do own the rights to my young Bond because they own the rights to anything to do with Bond.” Maybe they could start off with a film about somebody trying to kill the King.
Jonathan Dean is a senior writer at The Sunday Times’s Culture section