New James Bond Novel

Daniel Craig stars as James Bond in “Quantum of Solace," the latest film about the dashing British superspy, soon to be released. A new novel surfaces. A number of Ian Fleming impersonators, including Faulks, have taken a turn with 007 but with less style.

Had he lived, 007's creator, Ian Fleming, would be 100 years old today. A number of new books have been timed to the centenary -- including the 15 volumes under review here - - and London's Imperial War Museum is staging an exhibition, “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond," which explores the numerous connections between Bond and the author's real-life experiences, particularly those that occurred during his service with British Naval Intelligence in World War II. The exhibit continues through March.

Handsome, charming, witty and sophisticated, cultivated but unpretentious, Fleming imbued his literary alter-ego with many of his own sybaritic tastes, including an abiding pleasure in the company of beautiful women. There were certain departures -- Bond's extreme fondness for scrambled eggs, for example, while his creator relished the haute cuisine of France. They shared, however, a prodigious appetite for distilled spirits and cigarettes, of which Fleming smoked about 80 a day. The combination is generally blamed for his early death in 1964 at age 56, attributed variously to heart failure or complications of pleurisy brought about by an ill-advised round of golf (another passion) in foul English weather.

All the Bond books -- 12 novels and two collections of short stories -- were written over a dozen years, beginning when Fleming was 44, and all were composed during his annual three-month sojourn at his beloved retreat on the Jamaican coast, Goldeneye. (The name was borrowed from a particularly ingenious intelligence operation Fleming conceived during the war.) There, each day, the author rose early, went for a swim in the cove below his home, then went to work on a portable Remington typewriter for three hours. Cocktails and lunch were served on the terrace with its spectacular views, followed by an hour more of work and the completion of each day's quota: 2,000 words. The rest of the day and evening were spent in the glittering company of friends -- Noel Coward, first among them, but also W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Eden and a “Who's Who" of British literature and politics.