Where Facts Are Sacred

The literary correspondent at the Guardian, Alison Flood, reports that the estate of Ian Fleming has commissioned an American author to write a new James Bond cash-in. The author, Jeffery Deaver, is pledged to retain "the persona of James Bond as Fleming created him", so fans of Fleming will have to hope that Jeffery Deaver knows his subject a little better than Alison Flood. Her report refers to "Fleming's 14 James Bond novels"; in fact Fleming wrote twelve James Bond novels, one of which (The Spy Who Loved Me) is arguably short enough to count as a novella, and two James Bond story collections called For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy and The Living Daylights. Flood also refers to Bond as "the quintessential English spy, suave, laconic and comfortable in a dinner jacket", although a slightly better case might be made for Bond's Englishness on the grounds that he's a sexually incontinent thug with a low boredom threshold and a drinking problem. However, Bond as Fleming created him refers to himself in The Man With the Golden Gun as a "Scottish peasant", and his first and most popular film incarnation was in the person of the quintessentially English Sean Connery.