Ian Fleming died in 1964 with Bond only half-finished — literally, in the case of The Man with the Golden Gun, the unrevised manuscript he left behind. But the character he created didn’t stop there. In the six decades since, a long line of authors have kept James Bond going in print, each bringing their own approach to a character that, by now, belongs as much to its custodians as to its creator.
Kingsley Amis (as Robert Markham)
The first continuation novelist was also, fittingly, a serious Bond scholar in his own right — Amis had published a critical study of Fleming’s novels, The James Bond Dossier, the year before Fleming died. Commissioned by Glidrose Productions (the company controlling the Bond literary rights, later renamed Ian Fleming Publications), Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham, pitting Bond against a Chinese intelligence officer. It remains one of the more highly regarded continuation novels among longtime readers.
John Pearson
Not strictly a continuation novel, but worth including: Pearson, Fleming’s own biographer, wrote James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007 in 1973, a playful fictional biography that treats Bond as a real person and blends genuine Fleming material with invented backstory. It’s also the source of the enduring, if disputed, idea that Bond’s Chelsea flat was at 30 Wellington Square.
Christopher Wood
Wood, a novelist and screenwriter, wrote two novelisations in the late 1970s based on the film versions of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker — an unusual case of the films feeding back into the print series, rather than the other way around.
John Gardner
Gardner took on the series properly in 1981 and stayed with it far longer than anyone else, writing fourteen novels and two novelisations through to 1996. He updated Bond for the Cold War’s final years and its immediate aftermath, giving the series its longest and most sustained continuation run.
Raymond Benson
Benson picked up where Gardner left off, writing Bond novels, novelisations, and short stories between 1997 and 2002 — including the short story that finally revealed the fate of Bond’s son, first introduced at the end of Fleming’s You Only Live Twice.
Charlie Higson and the Young Bond series
After Benson’s departure, Ian Fleming Publications shifted direction, commissioning Charlie Higson to write Young Bond — a series imagining Bond’s teenage years at Eton, published between 2005 and 2008. Higson’s series was well received for capturing Fleming’s tone while working in a genuinely different register. Steve Cole later continued the Young Bond series after Higson stepped back, and Higson himself has since returned to write adult Bond novels, including On His Majesty’s Secret Service (2023), set around the coronation of King Charles III.
Samantha Weinberg (as Kate Westbrook)
Running alongside the Young Bond series, The Moneypenny Diaries reimagined events from Fleming’s novels through the eyes of M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny — written by journalist Samantha Weinberg under the pseudonym Kate Westbrook.
Sebastian Faulks
In 2008, to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth, Ian Fleming Publications commissioned Sebastian Faulks to write a single new novel, Devil May Care, deliberately set in period and written “in the style of Ian Fleming,” picking up shortly after The Man with the Golden Gun.
Jeffery Deaver
Rather than continue Fleming’s original timeline, American thriller writer Jeffery Deaver rebooted Bond into the present day with Carte Blanche (2011), following the example the film series had already set of periodically refreshing Bond for a new era.
William Boyd
Boyd’s Solo (2013) returned to a period setting, placing Bond in 1969 — and Boyd, notably, also did some of the most detailed textual detective work of any continuation author, arguing in a widely read essay for the precise real-world location of Bond’s Chelsea flat.
Anthony Horowitz
Horowitz has written several Bond novels drawing directly on unused Fleming material, including Trigger Mortis (2015), which incorporates an original, previously unpublished Fleming chapter, along with Forever and a Day and With a Mind to Kill.
Why the continuation novels matter
It would have been easy for Ian Fleming Publications to let Bond end with Fleming. Instead, six decades of continuation authors have kept the character in active print, each working within — and sometimes against — the template Fleming set down. Reading across them is a genuinely interesting way to see how differently writers have interpreted the same handful of defining traits: the cold professionalism, the appetite for luxury, the loyalty to an increasingly outdated idea of Britain, and the damage underneath all of it.