James Bond author William Boyd on his 007

There was only one place to meet William Boyd, the latest novelist to take on Bond: in the bar of the Dorchester, the London hotel where his novel, Solo, opens. We ordered Vesper martinis, the cocktail James Bond dreams up in the first Ian Fleming book, Casino Royale, written in 1953.

It’s potent – three parts gin, one part vodka. This was a weekday afternoon. But needs must.

William Boyd, of course, is the best-selling novelist of Any Human Heart, Restless, Brazzaville Beach, to name a few. So why would a novelist of that standing want to take a commission from Ian Fleming Publications Ltd?

‘Trembling hands’

Unsurprisingly, it boils down to his being a fan of 007, ever since he read From Russia With Love with “trembling pre-adolescent hands” and found it “the most sexy, thrilling piece of literature”.

Bond is a global phenomenon and the Fleming family guard 007’s reputation closely. During the 18-month writing process, Boyd had to run synopses and drafts past them. He told me it was “good benevolent surveillance… everyone in the world has heard of Bond, you can’t take the character lightly”.

There was debate about his portrayal of 007’s relationship with M. He told me the keepers of the Bond legacy felt Boyd had gone too far showing a strong filial yearning, so he toned it down and made it implicit. But he won on a revelation about Bond’s experiences in world war two which is described at the beginning of Solo.

Boyd took his responsibilities seriously and had re-read all Fleming’s 12 Bond novels and eight short stories “with a pen in hand”. He used the information gleaned from that research to make his Bond true to Fleming’s original – and that includes service in the war.

Boyd’s Bond has the sex, the cars, the booze, the licence to kill – but Solo is set in 1969, a few years after Ian Fleming’s last Bond book was written, and that’s allowed Boyd to update James Bond.

Bond’s softer side

There’s none of the casual sexism or racism of the Fleming books and we see a softer side of the hero: Bond cares about the starving children he comes across in a fictional West African civil war reminiscent of the Nigerian-Biafran conflict that killed more than a million people in the 1960s. Boyd lived in Nigeria at that time. Those images “still haunt one’s mind,” he told me. “I look back at it as one of the most formative moments of my life.”

William Boyd’s interest in Ian Fleming comes from an interest in another English writer, Evelyn Waugh. Both were misanthropic novelists who wanted to die, he says. So he finds himself intrigued that, Fleming having sold 40 million copies of his books, his wife wrote to Waugh: “Ian sits in his bedroom all day, staring out the window, in a state of utter misery.”

Fleming drank, smoked and took prescription drugs, living a life similar to many of the English upper class at the time. He died in 1964, aged just 56, “in a hurry to get to the grave”.

As for Boyd, he’s looking forward to the reaction to his book by the Bond pedants. He feels he’s out-pedanted them: “I can quote chapter and verse, but I’ve unearthed stuff people will have forgotten about.”

His book is published on Thursday, 26 September.