I was determined it wouldn’t spoil the pleasure of the book. It isn’t in my nature to create characters who are, dare I say it, Pussy Galore or Plenty O’Toole. If there is one thing we mistrust Bond for in the 21st century, it’s his attitude to women. “It seemed to me,” says Horowitz, “in this time of MeToo - although that wasn’t in my mind when I wrote it it was more prescient - I knew in my blood I had to have a very strong, intelligent, independent woman and one who wouldn’t go weak at the knees and fall into bed the moment Bond came into the room. “You make love like a schoolboy,” she tells him. She’s a three-dimensional character, about 10 years older than Bond and she has his measure. Madame 16, who is high on the CIA’s Most Wanted List for international espionage and selling trade secrets, is the woman at the heart of the novel. He is just this cold-blooded, dangerous assassin. "He doesn’t read books or go to the cinema. “The second thing they have is a hero, a man who is a dark knight, who is sort of the man with no name. What they do have is they are grounded in that post-war period in Britain. They certainly don’t have safari suits, as worn by Roger Moore, for example. “The books are different from the films - they don’t have gadgets, double entendres. If you think Cold War, the Atomic Age, secrets, betrayals, spies, your first port of call is James Bond, particularly in the original books. “He absolutely epitomises the age in which he lives. “What makes us intrigued with Bond, what makes us wary of him? What is it that makes him so memorable? It’s a combination of things,” says Horowitz. The Bond that Horowitz conjures is rich in colour - with a three-inch scar on his right cheek an unashamed lover of the good life, in an age when it wasn’t embarrassing to flaunt luxuries he’s perfectly happy in the kitchen, but he makes a point of never cooking for himself and he’s gloriously intolerant of things like opera, with “its absurdly large women, its histrionics, its noise”. In some of the Ian Fleming novels – not all of them – there is no journey. "The book presents a real journey for Bond. It was a wonderful moment to catch him at. “To go back and visit it again in some depth - as a young man just earning his licence to kill fascinated me. Because this is a prequel, which looks at his second ‘kill’ - his first one is in New York the second one is in Stockholm, and we know that from Casino Royale where he alludes to what it was like to kill those two people.
“In the Bond novels, he cheerfully dispatches people left, right and centre,” says Horowitz.
He thinks of the grieving family he will leave behind just before he launches a knife into his neck muscle. Bond is unable to eat beforehand he’s able to smell his target as he creeps up on the sleeping man.
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