Jeff Deaver and James Bond....

From Shelfawareness:

"Jeffery Deaver told a crowd gathered at the downtown Manhattan restaurant Imperial No. Nine that when the estate of Ian Fleming had asked if he'd be interested in writing an authorized James Bond novel. "I debated all of five seconds," he joked, and soon after got started on Carte Blanche, which Simon & Schuster released in the U.S. this week. The main challenge, he said, in updating Bond for the 21st century was to retain the flair and panache that Fleming gave Bond in the 1950s while making him a believable figure in a more politically correct contemporary setting. In addition, "I had to make the character work in my type of thriller"--plot-driven, where Fleming placed greater emphasis on character, he explained.

What did Deaver make of the mild controversy that's emerged in the U.K. about Bond being handled by an American thriller writer? "It's an author's job to create credible, living, breathing characters," he said. Bond was just another challenge... and it was just as challenging for me to write about Felix Leiter, the American CIA agent." Deaver did plenty of research for the novel, spending months overseas studying the intricacies of the British intelligence network and the nuances between American and British English. "And the book's been out for three weeks there," he noted, "and nobody has caught me in any slip-ups."--Ron Hogan