On His Majesty's Secret Service

"I was approached to write the Young Bond series about 20 years ago. I’d written four thrillers in the early 90s. My editor, Kate Jones, had ended up working for the Fleming estate, and she knew I was a fan of the James Bond books. I really love American stripped-back, hard-boiled fiction, which Fleming did too. He was the first English writer who really embraced that brand name fiction, where you don’t describe a car in great detail over three pages—you just give the color, the make and the model and the year. It keeps things very concrete and very tight. Kate felt my writing style would work well for younger readers. When she approached me, I thought, ‘How would you go about writing a new James Bond book when there have been so many books and continuation novels and films? I wouldn’t know where to start.’ But then she told me it was to write young James Bond books. I thought, ‘That would be fun, because Fleming didn’t really write about that. It’s an area that has not been covered, so there’s enough space for me.’ I have three boys and I’d been trying to think of a good action-adventure story idea. Writing about the young James Bond was absolutely perfect. So I leapt at it, and luckily, they liked my ideas, and I had huge fun writing five Young Bond books. Then, in February last year, the Ian Fleming estate approached me. The coronation of King Charles was coming up, who is a big James Bond fan. It was also the 60th anniversary of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service . They wanted to do something called On His Majesty’s Secret Service for charity, in time for the coronation. They said it was probably best not to do a story about trying to disrupt the coronation or assassinate King Charles, at which point I said, ‘Yes, that’s the plot! Brilliant. It’s got to be that.’ The story sprang fully formed into my mind. We ended up doing it with the National Literacy Trust , which is a charity that I am quite involved with, as is Camilla, who is a patron. They do a huge amount of research on literacy, looking at disadvantaged children and access to books and reading standards and a lot of lobbying in Parliament. It’s a great charity, so I was very glad that we were able to do the book with them. Initially they asked for 4,000 words, because there wasn’t much time, but they said it would be great if I could stretch it to 10,000. So I went back and I read all of the James Bond short stories to see how you do Bond in a short format. I started writing it at the beginning of last March. I had so much stored up inside me, it ended up at over 40,000 words, which is about the same length as the shortest of Fleming’s books. I had accidentally written a short novel in a month. I’d spent so long in that world and trying to get inside his mind! I didn’t try and write it in his style, which is very distinctive; one good reason to read the books is his narrative style. But I wanted it to be in the spirit of Fleming. I wanted James Bond to be true to Fleming, but also to be a contemporary 35-year-old man who hasn’t been shaped by the Second World War, who hasn’t witnessed that brutality and carnage and been part of the British Empire at its peak before it collapsed after the war. Yes, and extremism, because in the end, Bond is an instrument of the civil service. He’s about trying to hold things together and prevent chaos and disruption. When I was looking to write the book, I was thinking, ‘Who are the people who really, at the moment, are threatening the stability of Britain and leading to chaos and destruction? It’s not immigrants. It is disruptors, it is populists. It’s the likes of people like Nigel Farage.’"