Aren’t you glad you indulged? Whether you’re that rare creature, a Bond virgin, or whether, like me, you simply haven’t revisited the original books for several years, I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised, especially if you’re a woman. Because with all the excitement around this month’s release of Skyfall - the latest, and according to most reviewers, one of the greatest, in the Bond film franchise, which also happens to mark the fiftieth anniversary since Dr. No brought James to our screens in 1962 – it can be easy to underestimate the skill and subtlety of a writer associated with girls dipped in oil and gold like bankers’ crudités.

For me, the most immediate accomplishment of ‘Seascape with Figures’ – a chapter heading more reminiscent of Virginia Woolf than Pussy Galore – lies in the author’s aptitude for detail. Like any good journalist, Fleming names rather than describes what he sees, and his specificity – the plant species, the exact distances and sizes of things, the names of the playground enclosures, the colours and flags on the boats – evokes vividness without sentimentality. This is filmic writing from the off, where minute close-ups alternate with wide-lens sweeps, and contrasting shades and shapes are carefully juxtaposed. My first reaction is not surprise that such successful action movies have been made from such lyrical books, but that the films themselves aren’t more beautiful. Fleming’s writing is more Boudin than bonkbuster, and it throws the action into sharper relief.

The next delight occurs when we plunge from the plages straight into Bond’s head, only to bypass the self-assured sophisticated for a childhood James: grubbing in the sand, dirty, frustrated, vulnerable, chastised. It gives instant depth and humanity to the focused killer, for all that he quickly shakes off the memory with a flick of his cigarette.  And this is swiftly followed by Fleming’s wit, a harsh blade which has none of the glibness of the films and which judges our hero more harshly than we might expect. Bond, caught in a moment of introspective weakness, asserts himself with gruff self-dramatisation as a woman-hunting spy; Bond observes coldly, scientifically, the prominence of French girls’ navels and their relationship to fertility. It’s funny, damning, bizarre. I simultaneously laughed out loud and cringed.

There is darkness in this passage too; genuine darkness, without the camp histrionics of a movie set piece. The “briefly, grittily” writhing lovers on the dusky abandoned beach and the fragility of the white, hunted girl on the bloody sunset-streaked sand is more Don’t Look Now than For Your Eyes Only. And finally, you get the smooth Drambuie savour of his masterfully engineered plot. In the text, the end-of-chapter segue to flashback, which can come across as so clunky on screen, makes you want to punch the air with glee.

Admittedly, I’ve picked a good ‘un. Fleming certainly has his flaws, and reading too many Bonds can leave you with a stale aftertaste akin to a Martini hangover. The writing’s earnestness and endless references to aspirational cars, drinks, clothes and cigars can be wearing. The sexism (which even Fleming’s niece Lucy concedes) is difficult to dismiss as a trait that belongs solely to Bond. And individual novels are of variable quality; Fleming himself tried to block the UK paperback edition of The Spy Who Loved Me after critics and fans alike quite rightly lambasted its slapdash characterisation, sleaze and violence.

The literary establishment has traditionally been rather dismissive about Fleming; the Oxford Companion to English Literature concludes his three-line entry with the sneering aside that “Bond has appeared in many highly popular films which mingle sex and violence with a wit that, for some, renders them intellectually respectable.” The fact that other novelists, such as Sir Kingsley Amis (under the pen name Robert Markham), John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks and Jeffrey Deaver have been roped in to produce their own Bond novels over the years, has also reinforced an unhelpful belief that while Fleming’s central idea is precious, his prose is not.

However, the importance of that central idea is not to be underestimated. In Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Fleming’s plots are hailed as some of the best examples of the ancient ‘Overcoming the Monster’ archetype, their hold over our collective imagination timeless and timelessly satisfying. As for prose, when Faulks was asked to write Devil May Care, a one-off instalment to celebrate the centenary of the author’s birth, he was surprised, on re-reading, “by how well the books stood up. I put this down to three things: the sense of jeopardy Fleming creates about his solitary hero; a certain playfulness in the narrative details; and a crisp, journalistic style that hasn’t dated.”

Indeed, Fleming’s ability to inspire not just filmmakers and merchandisers but other writers is a sign of how potent his mixture of lyricism and action, interiority and object fetishism, really are. In a 2007 BBC Radio 4 programme Amis, Amis and Bond, Martin Amis spoke with equally effusive super-fan Charlie Higson about the deep impact Fleming had on his father. In fact, as a stunt for the premiere of Skyfall, Higson has even been squashing 007 plots into 140-character tweets: Bond as (repetitive) poetry, no less.

So whether you’re inspired by or indifferent to Daniel Craig’s majestic brooding, I’d urge you to give Fleming’s original texts a try. Having raced through three, I’m continuing to uproot my action/thriller aversion and finding other unexpected joys in John Le Carré, A.D. Miller’s recent Booker-shortlisted debut Snowdrops and even that old stalwart Wilbur Smith. Shaken out of my snobbery, stirred by surprise, I’m being reminded that genre prejudice remains the book-lover’s true criminal mastermind.

Milan, 2012. Photographer Valentina Rosseli is happily living with her partner of one year, Phillip Rembrant, but she can’t help feeling the passion in their relationship has waned. When she is offered an intriguing photography assignment, to take pictures of those engaged in the darker side of desire, she gets drawn into a shadowy world that reveals a part of her sexuality she has not yet explored….

Venice, 1924. Belle is on a quest. Unfulfilled by her husband and caged by the constraints of society, she strives to liberate herself by using her body in a secret life as a courtesan. She longs to meet the man who can not only fulfil her sexually, but also love her.

Belle and Valentina are living parallel lives, but what connects them? Theirs is a story that taps into the secret desires of all modern women, and explores the relationship between sex and true love.

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Summer, 1936. The writer, Josephine Tey, joins her friends in the holiday village of Portmeirion to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, are there to sign a deal to film Josephine’s novel, A Shilling for Candles, and Hitchcock has one or two tricks up his sleeve to keep the holiday party entertained – and expose their deepest fears.

But things get out of hand when one of Hollywood’s leading actresses is brutally slashed to death in a cemetery near the village. The following day, as fear and suspicion take over in a setting where nothing – and no one – is quite what it seems, Chief Inspector Archie Penrose becomes increasingly unsatisfied with the way the investigation is ultimately resolved. Several years later, another horrific murder, again linked to a Hitchcock movie, drives Penrose back to the scene of the original crime to uncover the shocking truth.

Bruised from the breakdown of her marriage, Esther Lomax needs to get away, and Malaysia’s unspoilt shores seem the perfect place. But a day’s boat trip takes a desperate turn when Esther and six other holidaymakers are taken to a desert island and their guide does not return. The group have no way of getting back to the mainland and know nothing about each other. As the days pass, tensions erupt, secrets emerge and time increasingly runs out, Esther must ask herself the ultimate question: will she leave the island alive?

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Jonathan and Theo’s childhood is one in which money is abundant but nurture is scarce. With a father who died when they were very young and a mother who starts drinking at lunchtime, the brother and sister are largely left to roam around their sprawling estate in rural Wales, looking after only themselves and each other. Until, that is, their grandmother Eve returns to the family home. Eve is a figure who is as enchanting as she is forbidding, and she takes the children under her wing, answering their questions about their family history that have always been ignored. Yet as they grow older, they discover that much of what they’ve been told is a fiction, and that something very sinister lies in their past.

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One of my favourite procrastinatory activities, after having sat for a few minutes with my fingers quivering above the keyboard as if I were bloody David Helfgott contemplating Rach 3, is to shy like a pony and slope off for a dose of Writers’ Rooms from the Guardian archives. Compulsively consuming the details of Sebastian Faulks’s student-digs study, or Martin Amis’s glass-ceilinged nook provides sweet reassurance that even brilliant, long-practiced writers hoard bizarre talismans, stare out the window and get tempted by Spider Solitaire.

The photographs for the series are taken by Eamon McCabe, who mounted an exhibition a few years ago; you can still watch his audio slideshow on the BBC website. Browsing these spaces is a way of feeling closer to authors you love, of picking up on telling hints about their personalities and daily routines, but I’m also sure some small, irrational part of me searches these scribes’ pads for coded secrets of success. If my desk were vintage cherry, not Ikea MDF, might I develop the ability to resist adverbs? Would the manic energy of a Pollock on the wall render me incapable of cliché? Wait, is that Montaigne I see on a bookshelf again? Dear God, why have I never read Montaigne?

Once you fall into the (sound-proofed, rattan-floored) rabbit hole, you realise how many pushers there are out there tempting you to indulge. Just this week I’ve been distracted by the Huffington Post’s slideshow of ‘Famous Writers’ Retreats: The Rooms Where Classics Were Created’ (poet Robert Stephen’s Hawker’s Hut puts a whole new spin on suffering for your art) and, slightly bizarrely, an album of 15 writers’ bedrooms from Apartment Therapy, as if soft furnishings have the ability to convey bons mots to the sleeping brain.

The more images you see, the more you notice a tension between the sensualists and the minimalists. Predictably, as most authors famous enough to be profiled are middle-class and relatively mainstream, there is tendency towards shabby chic, art-filled wombs with tribal masks on the wall and sash windows looking out onto trembling lime trees. But there are still proponents of what McCabe calls the “bare-lightbulb” approach: a shabby simplicity that harks back to a long tradition of starving wordsmiths and which feels, no doubt unfairly, like a more authentic habitat for those with supremely colourful brains. McCabe remembers being most surprised by V.S. Naipal’s Spartan “sixth former’s study” but on further reflection this bareness seems the perfect foil for a mind transported to the rich chaos of India. Russell Hoban’s crammed basement hovel  “should carry a health warning” but is also “the best room ever” – in the tradition of CS Lewis’s wardrobe, its mundane mayhem looks like it could be a purposefully innocuous portal to other worlds.

It’s a tension that fascinates Kyle Cassidy, an American photographer whose ‘Where I Write’ project -showing fantasy and science fiction authors in their creative spaces – started as an insert in the Worldcon 2009 programme and is now graduating into a book, featuring Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, and many others along with interviews. “It’s always a bit of a surprise”, Cassidy explains. “I can’t really tell from someone’s writing if they’re going to have a cluttered space with a 15 year old computer and a layer of dust or an immaculate one with a bowl of fresh fruit and a collection of fountain pens and handbound journals. It does seem that once you get super-successful your room gets a little less interesting (though possibly more functional) because you have people to help you out with things, and very likely because you’re so busy that you have to get more organized.”

Unlike McCabe, his photos feature the writers within their rooms, and the intimacy he shared with his subjects while he shot were a bibliophile’s dream. “I think probably the most fun I had anywhere was at Piers Anthony’s. I got to watch him shoot a bow and arrow — and how many times are you in the woods watching Piers Anthony shoot a bow and arrow at a paint can? Though Harry Harrison’s place was like the most awesome party you’ve ever been to where there was nobody there but you.” He’d like to shoot the spaces of J.K. Rowling, Joss Whedon, or Stephen King just for the fanboy fun, but “there are some that I think I’d love to photograph because I have absolutely no idea in my mind what they’d look like – like George R. R. Martin or Harlan Ellison. “

Playing through the literary keyhole isn’t just something that intrigues other creative types. When I say that I write, one of the first questions people invariably ask me is not what, or why, or how, but where. The implication is that creativity needs special treatment: isolation from the mundane, or extra oxygen. But writing is about five percent creativity and ninety-five percent hard graft, and for your average spare-time hack, time to write is such a luxury that place becomes purely opportunistic.

Personally, I favour the sociable anonymity of a library. My annual membership of the London Library – intimate in feel, epic in knowledge, with a calm yet charged atmosphere – is a worthy investment. But I will write anywhere; I must, if I am ever to hit my word count. Admittedly, nailing a difficult sentence in someone else’s spare room while everyone gets ready for a wedding, or crouched on the filthy carpet of Las Vegas airport illicitly stealing the plug space of a fruit machine, is not ideal. But rootless writing often returns the best results, and my ideal writer’s rooms is a moving one. Train carriages and airplanes send me into a productive trance, as if the movement negates my own restlessness and allows the words to flow as freely as the scenery. The excuse of poor connectivity means that I can shut out the world, hunker into a corner, let the randomness of strangers filter quietly through my ears, and get a hell of a lot of shit done. If I could afford the fare, I’d spend my days rattling back and forth from London to Aberdeen with nothing but a lunch box and some eye drops.

Do you have an ideal writing or reading space? Whose would you love to peek into if you could?

Alaska, the 1920s.  Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before.  When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?

Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic.

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Photo credit: Elixabete Lopez

‘I got up at 7.30 and wrote for an hour before I got on my train. I wrote on the train for two and a half hours. I went out there during the lunch break and wrote for another hour. And I’ll do two and a half on the way back.”

This casual comment burrowed into my brain like a burr at June’s Writing In A Digital Age conference (which I covered for Bookdiva here), and I still can’t get it out. It came from the young author Kerry Wilkinson, and back then, there was plenty of uncomfortable shuffling around me as he explained his day’s writing schedule. The shuffling turned to audible squeaks as Wilkinson shared that his output averaged “around 1,000 words an hour”. His message, delivered with no trace of a boast, was blunt. He loves to write, he lives to write, and nothing – not travelling from Lancashire to London, not sitting on a panel, and certainly not schmoozing with industry bigwigs over pinot – was going to get in his way.

Wilkinson – a 31-year-old sports journalist who sold more than 250,000 ebooks in six months, topped the Kindle charts and subsequently netted a six-book deal from Pan MacMillan – is an e-publishing hero, and the assembled audience was eager to know his secrets. Sure, he obviously had a big dose of luck and a terrifying work ethic, but how did he, above all those thousands of other wannabes, scoop the dream duo of grassroots and establishment success?

Was it his social networking tactics? His crime thriller genre? His pricing strategy? His cover designs?

The answer was, typically, simpler and more profound than the questions: Wilkinson achieved conventional success because he didn’t chase it. He has repeatedly said in interviews that “you should write for yourself, not because you think you can make lots of money or have a bestseller”; an easy truism, and one almost every author would subscribe to (publicly, at least). But Wilkinson genuinely doesn’t seem to crave the money and validation he has achieved. He is pleased about it all, of course, but up on that podium, with his impassive and distracted manner, his mind seemed to have already flown away from all this timewasting debate and back to his book.

Back in May, advertising supremo Robert Bean presented excerpts from his book Nine And A Half Golden Rules of Branding at Like Minds, an innovations festival in Exeter. A very different man at a very different conference; but Bean’s central tenet, that brands such as BMW, Honda and The Body Shop have succeeded by “winning in their own way” applies perfectly to Wilkinson. Wilkinson didn’t succeed because his methods of success were different, but because his criteria were. He still had defined goals – to write as well as he could, as much as he could, and to make that content available to readers who might love what he did. But those goals were strictly in his control, unlike getting a publishing deal or coercing others to buy his book. By ruthlessly pursuing those aims and ignoring the cultural baggage involved in ‘being a writer’, he ironically won not just in his own way, but the industry’s.

Rather than being the consummate man of our times, Wilkinson is a throwback: a rare example of that endangered breed, the happy amateur. Once endemic in Britain – from our age-old tradition of tinkering in sheds to the brilliance of Charles Darwin’s layman naturalism – amateurism has become a source of contempt. In The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, Andrew Keen argues that quality creative content is being dispersed and undermined by a parasitic online public. But the problem is subtler and more psychological than this. In a culture of public sharing, even talented amateurs producing careful, original work no longer feel that their output has value unless it achieves mass exposure, plus a nice financial kick-back on the side. Five years ago we were content to blog about our passion for noodles, delighted with one comment from a friend. Gradually we started to feel inadequate if we didn’t have hundreds of hits a day and a stable of ads embedded on the sidebar. Now we feel a failure if our noodle-based crime thriller isn’t downloaded by hundreds of people we’ve never met.

‘Amateur’ means ‘lover of’, but love is now expected to bring us both kudos and cash. This is embedded into how online platforms operate; every day we sell, in the form of data, the details of our family, friends, activities and tastes in exchange for free services from Facebook and Google. The divide between the personal and professional is dissolving and in a sharing-obsessed world, doing something for yourself means doing it for everyone. If it doesn’t achieve professional-scale exposure, it can feel like personal failure too.

Wilkinson has a disconcerting lack of ego that would be easy to mistake for arrogance. When, later in the conference, an agent was told that he had never considered courting a traditional publisher, her puzzlement bordered on the comic. His single-minded dedication to telling stories and his utter lack of angst about his status as a writer are reflected in his Twitter stream. With a modest 600-odd followers, I doubt Wilkinson has a ‘social media strategy’, but I defy anyone who browses his tweets – 90% of them responses to others – about the joy of cheap sandwiches, reading in the garden and train stations (“a goldmine for potential nutcase characters”) – not to like him instantly and then want to read his books.

One topic that cropped up again and again at the conference was how to promote your book using social networks. But most of the tactics discussed – offering bloggers free copies, imploring readers to post Amazon reviews, sneaking sales calls into tweets – miss the point that Wilkinson so blatantly gets. Social media is a terrible marketing tool. Trying to aggressively promote yourself in such a personal environment will leave you feeling frustrated and soiled. But focus on conversing with likeminded others and, if your book is good enough, the emotional connection will slowly convert to curiosity and readership. Again, shift the criteria for success to something that you can control, and you have the best chance possible of ensuring that the uncontrollable follows suit. If it doesn’t, at least you still feel good about yourself.

Aspiring writers simply must escape from their anxiety deadlock. It is no good for them or their work. Yes, it is excruciatingly hard to make a book a commercial success; there is no magic bullet. Traditional publishing is crowded, risk-averse and prone to unpredictable commercial fads; self-publishing is no easier, being even more crowded and requiring you to morph into an always-on hybrid of writer/editor/designer/publisher/media whore. There is, however a third way. Focus on the work itself, create goals you can control, and make sure the journey is as satisfying as the end game. Become a happy amateur, and you might just have a chance of becoming a happy professional after all.

I feel its approach,
Inevitable as death:
Internet dating.

Unsolicited relationship advice from relatives, disastrous dates, men who wear thumb rings, and the moments of deep satisfaction when a single girl realizes that (unlike her smug married friends) she can do whatever she wants with her time – it’s all here in this brilliantly incisive and witty collection of haikus. Every woman – whether single or not – will laugh until she cries, and then start laughing all over again.

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‘I got a letter one day, a long letter that wasn’t signed.’

Camille reads this narration of events from pre-war France, certain that it has been sent to her by mistake. Then more letters start to arrive – They tell of a friendship struck up between a young village girl, Annie, and Madame M, a bourgeois lady. To begin with the women simply share a love of art, but when Annie offers to carry a child for her infertile friend, their lives become intimately entwined. The child is born on the eve of the German invasion of France, and the repercussions of her birth are still felt decades later.

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