Somebody Did It Better

By Lev Grossman

Last year the estate of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond (and also, fun fact, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), invited the novelist Sebastian Faulks to write a new Bond book under the Fleming pseudonym. Devil May Care (Doubleday; 278 pages) begins magnificently: a world-weary 007 drifts through the pleasure capitals of Europe, recovering from the exertions of Octopussy and wondering if it might be time to hang up his 00's for good. The 20th century is leaving him behind: it's the 1960s; there are hippies in the streets, and M is making him do yoga. But when Bond gets the call to take on a drug dealer, he answers it. There's a buzz in the air, and Bond is going to kill it.

Faulks is a graceful writer with a bracing cold streak and a sharp eye for period detail (Bond's girl of the moment drives a white Sunbeam Alpine). But by now, Bond is so bound by convention--there must be exotic settings (Paris, Persia, Russia) and vehicles (the unstoppable Ekranoplan!), and the villain has to have an exotic handicap (a weird, deformed monkey hand)--that it's all poor James can do to wriggle convincingly under all that baggage. And escape, my dear 007, is quite impossible.