Good at bad guys

Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of the Spy Novel in the Age of Osama bin Laden’.

The high tide of these get-togethers is the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place every July, over four days, in Harrogate. This year, the guest of honour was Jeffery Deaver, recognised across the pond as one of America’s pre-eminent thriller writers.

To much fanfare, Deaver was recently invited by Ian Fleming Publications to pen a James Bond novel, for publication next summer. Provisionally entitled Project X, the book will follow on the heels of Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks’s colossally successful homage to Bond which, to date, has sold around half a million copies worldwide.

British to his brogues, Faulks was a natural fit for Bond. The son of a QC, he was educated at Wellington and studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Like Fleming, Faulks is urbane and charming: in a different era, you could imagine the two men calmly discussing the Suez Crisis over a plate of kidneys at White’s.

Deaver, on the other hand, is as far removed from the Fleming template as it is possible to imagine. Come across Faulks on a dark night and you’d probably end up inviting him to Glyndebourne; run into Jeffery Deaver and you’d call for a priest. He has the cold-eyed, spectral demeanour of a serial killer from central casting and, indeed, has made his reputation writing about any number of diabolical fiends on the American criminal landscape.