It has been ten years since Daniel Craig announced he was done with James Bond and four years since his 007 was killed in No Time to Die. “James Bond will return” ran the end credits, but amid the fallout from Amazon’s recent takeover, it is hard to imagine that we will see the world’s favorite spy on screen any time soon.
On the page, however, things are moving at a greater lick. After the Young Bond novels from Charlie Higson and then Steve Cole, and adult Bond novels from writers including Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz, a new wave of authors are reinventing 007 for a generation who may never have seen the films.
The Sunday Times can reveal that the crime writer MW Craven has just been signed to write a new series of Bond books aimed at 8 to 12-year-olds. The first, James Bond and the Secret Agent Academy, will be published next June. It will feature a retired Bond, his license to kill revoked, training a new generation of teenage spies. Craven left school at 16 to join the army so knows some of the territory.
Adult readers are also getting new Bond-adjacent books. Raymond Benson, who wrote a clutch of 007 continuation novels at the turn of the century, has written The Hook and the Eye, the first to make Bond’s CIA buddy, Felix Leiter, its hero. It’s out in October but the first of ten installments has already been published as an ebook. The next nine will be released once a fortnight from now until the end of September. Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan will also be published in the autumn — the first novel centered on Bond’s gadget-wielding armorer Major Boothroyd, aka Q.
Are Bond spinoffs burgeoning because the film franchise is floundering? Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) shrugs this off, saying only that it is “always looking for innovative things to do”. Earlier this month, IO Interactive unveiled the first trailer for the James Bond video game, 007 First Light, set to be released in 2026, about a young Bond on a recruitment mission. Meanwhile, Craven tells me he is delighted to finally be able to talk about his books, a year after being offered the gig. “I’ve been doing events at bookshops, and I’ve had to be weirdly cryptic,” he says. “I’ll be nosing around the children’s section, looking at what’s coming out and they’ll say, ‘What are you doing, Craven, the crime books are over here?’”
He tries to use clear, accessible language in his adult books — the seventh installment of his award-winning Washington Poe crime series comes out in August and he’s two books into a Jack Reacher-ish series about a former US law-enforcement officer — but even so it has taken a shift in his thinking to keep his storytelling child-friendly. Much though Fleming liked to drop in brand names, Craven has just written a sequence about Gregg’s the bakers that he suspects will have no place in the finished draft. “In a kids’ book there’s no way I can spend a page and a half on sausage rolls.”
Will Bond still show a cavalier attitude towards the opposite sex in Craven’s book? He will, but with pushback. “If Fleming were writing today he wouldn’t write Bond the same way,” Craven says. “But I’m going to give Bond some of those attitudes and I’m going to have the children challenge him. Also, they will know how to use new gadgets that Bond doesn’t, so they will learn from each other.”
Will any child between 8 and 12 know much about Bond after a series of doomy Daniel Craig films that skewed to a more adult audience? It’s up to him to get them interested, Craven says, which also means writing a snappy first page that will lure any parents leafing through the book in a shop. “Like most writers, I suspect, I spend far more time on my first page than any other,” he says.
Craven’s book is set in the modern day, or slightly into the future. Like any author working with the Fleming estate he can use any element from the books but he can’t contradict them. “If a character was alive at the end of the 12 novels and two short story collections, I can use them,” he explains. “I’m going to do some wacky things. There is a lot that is fair game.”
However, nothing can be used that originated in the film series: that falls into a different, Jeff Bezos-controlled universe and no doubt a whole heap of copyright headaches.
Craven has reread the Fleming books and loves them all apart from the last one, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), because Fleming died before he could revise it. He also read and reread some children’s literature (“Roald Dahl is virtually a serial killer when it comes to killing children”) including Robin Stevens’s Murder Most Unladylike boarding-school mysteries. “There’s a dead body in all of those books and they are aimed at 8 to 12-year-olds. Children can take more darkness than some adults give them credit for.”
Craven knows how many more competing distractions children have compared with when he was growing up in a village near Newcastle in the Seventies, borrowing as many books from the library as he could. “I’m not in it to just write another book. I want to change the landscape slightly and to encourage children to read.”
The contract is for two Bond books, although Craven would like to make it seven. Does he think his Secret Agent Academy might feed into Amazon’s fiendish plans? He shrugs, pointing to a printout of do’s and don’ts from his publishers that warn him off this question. “I’m sure they will have a look at it but I’m just going off what I’ve read in the papers,” he says.
Raymond Benson began his Bond career by writing the encyclopedic The James Bond Bedside Companion in 1984 before novelizing several of the Pierce Brosnan films. He insists he has no insider knowledge about what Amazon’s takeover might mean for spin-offs involving side characters such as Q or Miss Moneypenny.
“My guess is they are going to concentrate on doing a Bond movie first. Then they will probably establish their own little universe and they will have their Felix Leiter in it, their Miss Moneypenny. They will take the same actors and probably develop a TV series around them.”
Benson’s book is set in the early Fifties with Leiter using the prosthetic arm and leg he got after being fed to a shark in Live and Let Die. (Leiter is Benson’s favorite side character partly because both men hail from Texas.) He joins the Pinkerton detective agency after the CIA declares him fit only for desk work. Would a Fifties Felix fit into Amazon’s screen plans? “No … I may have written myself into a corner there.”
For Khan, growing up in east London, 007 films were a way of bonding with his Pakistani dad. “I would watch the Roger Moore films with him. This is a man who didn’t speak a lot of English, who wasn’t very educated, but there was something about Bond — the suaveness, the Britishness — that got to him. I fell in love with that too.”
Khan’s novel, which is set in the present, features a Q who has been made redundant from MI6 and who returns to his home town to solve a mystery. And while, yes, the Fleming-era attitudes to sex and race need updating, Khan doesn’t see it as his mission to offer a corrective. “I’m not one for preaching. I think the foremost requirement of someone writing a book like this is for it to be enjoyable.”
Q is not a big presence in Fleming’s books so he has had to do a lot of inventing. The two main screen incarnations — Desmond Llewelyn from 1963 to 1999 and Ben Whishaw from 2012 to 2021 — are wildly different. In his Quantum of Menace, Khan pitches him somewhere between the two: “Tallish, late forties, early fifties … sandy haired with a little grey at the temples.” His Q once had a relationship with Moneypenny and likes Bond, despite considering him “an insufferable egomaniac”.
Khan is already at work on a follow-up, The Man with the Golden Compass, and is more optimistic than Craven and Benson about screen spin-offs: “I think they would make wonderful TV.”
He knows that Bond, when it clicks, is the acme of escapism but he adds there is a serious strain to it too. “Which is that Britain is a country that stands for certain values, is resolute in the defense of those values on the global stage, but at the same time is being impacted by change: immigration, criminality, political chicanery. Things don’t always resolve themselves well in the real world — but with Bond we can expect justice to be served.”
Dominic Maxwell is a commissioning editor and writer at The Times of London
