James Bond (Sebastian Faulks) Books in Order

In the mid‑2000s, the custodians of Ian Fleming’s estate approached Sebastian Faulks with an unusual invitation: would he write a one‑off James Bond novel to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth? The result was Devil May Care, published in 2008 with the playful credit line “Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming”. It is the only time Faulks has stepped formally into Bond’s world, and it stands slightly apart from the rest of his work.

The book is set in 1967, following directly on from Fleming’s final Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. M, concerned that his ageing agent is run‑down and unfocused, brings Bond back from a forced sabbatical and sends him to investigate Dr Julius Gorner, a brilliant but vindictive chemist with a distinctive physical deformity. Gorner runs a legitimate pharmaceutical empire that appears to mask something far more destabilising: a plan to flood Europe with cheap heroin and engineer a confrontation between superpowers that could cripple Britain.

Bond’s enquiries take him from London to Paris, then onward to Iran and the desert, with the usual mix of casinos, surveillance, last‑minute escapes and brutal fights. Along the way he encounters Scarlett Papava, whose twin sister is entangled with Gorner, and Chagrin, the sadistic bodyguard who echoes Fleming’s classic henchmen. The plot nods to concerns of the late 1960s – the spread of hard drugs, the shadow of Vietnam, the cultural turbulence of the era – while staying firmly within the glamorous, heightened world of the original novels.

Faulks studied Fleming’s prose closely, aiming to reproduce its clean, reportorial style: plenty of concrete nouns, strong verbs and sharply observed detail, with very little ornament. Readers who know him from Birdsong or Human Traces may be surprised by the leanness of the sentences and the unapologetically pulp flavour of some set‑pieces. At the same time, his long‑standing interest in war, espionage and the psychology of violence quietly informs the book.

You do not need to have read every Fleming novel to enjoy Devil May Care. It works as a standalone Cold War thriller in which Bond is slightly older, still grieving his murdered wife and aware that the game he plays cannot last for ever. For fans of the original books it offers the extra pleasure of seeing familiar rituals – the briefing from M, the file on the desk, the first cocktail in the hotel bar – filtered through a different sensibility.

For Faulks himself, the Bond project was a kind of holiday: six intensive weeks trying on another writer’s suit, then hanging it carefully back in the wardrobe.

This page gathers information around that brief, authorised detour in his career. If you are reading Faulks chronologically, Devil May Care sits between the unsettling psychological territory of Engleby and the multi‑voiced London panorama of A Week in December, showing how freely he has been willing to move between literary fiction and genre storytelling.