Dracula Raised from His Coffin; Winnie The Pooh Back to 100 Acre Wood

What do Winnie The Pooh, Arthur Dent, James Bond and Dracula have in common?

They've all recently been reprised by other authors and Alison Flood in The Guardian takes a look at the trend of appropriating other authors' characters for sequels. she says :

Such continuations of the work of popular authors, who have inconveniently interrupted their output by dying, are big business for the literary world these days. Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies.

I've blogged about Eoin Colfer writing a further installment of The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Sebastian Faulks continuing the James Bond legacy with in Devil May Care.

Dracula is revived from the dead by Dacre Stoker who just happens to be the great grand-nephew of Bram. Dracula: The Un-Dead is published later this month.

There's David Benedictus' Winnie The Pooh revival Return to the Hundred Acre Wood which is released next month.

And then of course there's Tilly Bagshawe Mistress of The Game follow-up to Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game.

Not surprisingly all those picking up the baton from great writers now deceased admit to a sense of trepidation : reputations are on the line, and no-one wants to follow the original novels with a dud.

Which characters created by a deceased author would you like to see revived in print ... and which modern day author would you choose to do the job?

Postscript :

I twittered the question and got some great replies :

• jerng - "Frankenstein 2100 by Chuck Pahlaniuk, Wuthuring Heights 2100 by Irvine Welsh".
• Umapagan - "Gatsby. By Michael Chabon."
• yrakab - "Ulysses. By me. But very short one." (Suspect this one a bit tongue in cheek lah)

Obama Gets a Nibbie

There's lots of book award news needs blogging, but perhaps the best headline was the one in The Bookseller : Obama Takes Home a Nibbie.

Yes, Mr. President won one of Britain's 2009 Galaxy British Book Awards ("The Nibbies") which highlight more popular titles. Dreams from My Father was awarded the Tesco Biography of the Year. Kate Summerscale who won two seperate awards (Galaxy Book of the Year and Play.com Popular Non-Fiction Award) for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

Aravind Adiga who seems to be showing up on every fiction award going, won the Borders Author of the Year for The White Tiger. Tom Rob Smith was named Waterstones' New Writer of the Year for Child 44 and Richard and Judy's Best Read of the Year was Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News.

The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was awarded the Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, while Sebastian Faulks won the Sainsbury's Book of the Year Award for his Bond novel Devil May Care, and Stehenie Meyer took the W.H. Smith Children's Book of the Year award for Breaking Dawn.

Michael Palin was awarded an outstanding achievement award which I think he thoroughly deserves. As TV presenters Richard and Judy said at the ceremony, he is a :

... modern day Renaissance man – a successful actor, comedian, playwright, diarist, documentary maker, charity founder, explorer and, of course, author.

The Name is Faulks

Is this the most spectacular book launch ever?



Copies of the new James Bond novel Devil May Care are escorted along the Thames to waiting press on board HMS Exeter at Tower Bridge, and author Sebastian Faulks receives the first from "Bond bird" Tuuli Shipster, the launch timed to coincide with what would have been Ian Fleming's 100th birthday. (More about the anniversary celebrations, here.)

The novel is reviewed in The Independent and The Guardian.

For Your Eyes Only

In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.

Sebastian Faulks describes his experience of following in Fleming's footsteps to write a new Bond thriller, Devil May Care. The launch on May 28 this scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Fleming's birth.

In London the Imperial War Museum has an exhibition running from until 1 March 2009. It examines:

... the extent to which the book and films reflect the reality of the Cold War and how much they were a product of Fleming’s prodigious imagination.

The IWM's website is worth a visit so you can spin the roulette wheel and learn some Fleming trivia. (And if you think you have enough at your disposal already, you can take this Bond quiz on the Guardian website!)

In the Guardian, Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series, takes a critical look at Fleming's life. He puts down the enduring apppeal of Bond to this :

It is simply that he is the man who knows. He's a professional who always does the right thing at the right time: "Nobody does it better." This is the ultimate male fantasy, to know how to order good food and fine wine in fancy restaurants, how to charm a lady into bed, how to drive fast and how to kill. We plodders reading the novels can only dream of this level of savoir-faire, and Fleming himself knew his own limitations. Bond is very much the creation of a man who never quite felt that he was a success.

Postscript :

From The Telegraph, a reading guide to Fleming's novels.

Sebastian Faulks Shaken Not Stirred

Sebastian Faulks has been named as the author commissioned to write a new James Bond story to mark the centenary of the birth of the original Bond creator, Ian Fleming. The novel Devil May Care will be published next May. Says Faulks, of his take on OO7:

Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission. ... He has been widowed and been through a lot of bad things ... He is slightly more vulnerable than any previous Bond but at the same time he is both gallant and highly sexed, if you can be both. Although he is a great seducer, he really does appreciate the girls he seduces and he doesn't actually use them badly.

The novel is set in 1967, the year after Fleming's final Bond book - a collection of short stories called Octopussy and the Living Daylights - was published posthumously. The Fleming family is said to be delighted with it.

Faulks says he did his best to emulate Fleming's working method when writing the novel, which took him six weeks to complete:

In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.