Decades later, upon learning that John le Carré had described Bond as an “ideal defector” and “the ultimate prostitute,” he vented in a letter to Philip Larkin: le Carré’s comment was a “piece of bubbling dogshit,” he wrote, adding that he preferred Bond to the “dull fuckers” of le Carré’s own fiction.

Amis’s Bond, while retaining the familiar psychopath’s obsession with menus, tailoring, and branded goods-“Bond almost felt relaxed, finding the charcoal-grilled lamb cutlets with bitter local spinach very acceptable”-is also a suspiciously Kingsley-esque conservative, deploring newly built houses and the rise of a “vast undifferentiated culture, one complex of super-highways, hot-dog stands and neon … stretching from Los Angeles to Jerusalem.” Amis would maintain a fierce moral allegiance to 007. Perhaps the most rewarding of the pseudo-Flemings, however, has been Kingsley Amis, whose Colonel Sun appeared in 1968 under the nom de plume Robert Markham. The latest of them, Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche, was published this year, and as recently as 2008, Bond nuts were solemnly delighted-or I was, anyway-by Sebastian Faulks’s even-better-than-the-real-thing novel, Devil May Care, which featured a partially lobotomized lead goon and a villain with a main de singe, or “monkey hand” (hairy wrist, non-opposable thumb). T hat violent nullity James Bond having long outlived his creator, it has fallen to an interesting gang of alpha novelists and superhacks to keep him busy: since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, more than 20 new Bond books have been written.

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