George Smiley, the Anti-James Bond

That 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. 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).