Within the first three pages of Casino Royale, you know everything you need to know about Bond and his universe, a headrush-inducing gasp of smoke and sleaze and ambiguity that makes you long for another poisoned drag. Yet even with all his brutishness, Fleming was a gifted and striking prose stylist. A modern Bond-chronicler could copy these things and create a distinctively Flemingish fiction, but also one that would repulse all but the most unapologetic Ukipper. Women are bitches, anyone non-white and non-anglophone is definitively subhuman, and torture is lingering and explicitly erotic.

It’s a literary cliche to acknowledge that Fleming was a sadist, a racist and a misogynist, and there is nothing covert about the viciousness that infuses Bond’s world. It’s not that Fleming is exactly inimitable, but the parts of his style that are easy to pastiche are also intolerably obnoxious, while the things that are worth copying are as elusive as they are distinctive. The truth is that, payday aside, stepping into Fleming’s blade-heeled brogues seems a thankless business. Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd wrote a single novel each, and now we get Trigger Mortis, Anthony Horowitz’s attempt at reviving the cold war relic. Since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, Bond has passed through the hands of numerous authors – four of them since 2008. Obviously, a literary character that generates billions of dollars over more than six decades is not the worst sort of problem to have, but he presents a problem all the same. James Bond seems to have become a problem.

Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz