The Name's Boyd. William Boyd.

Last week it was announced that James Bond was coming back to life under the pen of William Boyd. He’s setting the new novel in 1969, only five years after Ian Fleming’s death, so there’s a sense, Boyd tells me, that “it is still closely linked with the Bonds Fleming wrote, inhabiting the ‘classic’ milieu of the originals, still picking up on their reverberations as it were.” In returning to this period, Boyd’s also distancing the novel further from the cinematic counterpart—a franchise that has, he argues, “inevitably confused” the image of Bond in the world: “The literary Bond is a far more nuanced and intriguing character than the screen Bond,” he explains, something, he admits, that in itself was one of the attractions of writing a Bond novel as opposed to a Bond screenplay.