007 Author: Sebastian Faulks

Who: Sebastian Charles Faulks
Born: 20 April 1953, Donnington, England

Sebastian Charles Faulks CBE is a British novelist, journalist, and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France — The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week In December (2009), and a James Bond sequel, Devil May Care. He is a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.

To mark the 2008 centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, the late author’s estate in 2006 commissioned Faulks to write a new James Bond novel. Faulks has said of the commission, “I’d just finished Human Traces and it seemed ridiculous. You’ve just spent five years in a Victorian lunatic asylum and then you go on to James Bond. But I think their hope is they’ll get two markets. The more I think about it, the more I think it was clever of them, because the mismatch is intriguing”. The result, Devil May Care, became an immediate bestseller in the UK, selling 44,093 hardback copies within 4 days of release. 

The Observer review of the novel said that “Faulks has done in some ways an absolutely sterling job. He has resisted pastiche”, and blamed the book’s weaknesses on the character of Bond as created by Fleming. The Scotsman review of the novel said, “To his credit, Faulks has imitated the haphazard plotting, sloppy characterisation, Colonel Blimp politics, sexist guff and basic incredulity of Ian Fleming to a tee. It’s a Nuremberg Defence of a novel: Faulks was only following orders”. Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian, praised it as “a smart and enjoyable act of literary resurrection. Among the now 33 post-Fleming Bonds, this must surely compete with Kingsley Amis’s for the title of the best”.

Sebastian Faulks’s 007 production:

• Devil May Care (2008)