Meet Jeffery Deaver: author of the next Bond novel

On the edge: Jeffery Deaver, photographed at Great Falls National Park in Virginia, has a novel, Edge, out Tuesday. His untitled James Bond novel is due to hit shelves in May -  photo by H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY


Story by Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

RESTON, Va. — Jeffery Deaver looks more like a brainy villain in a James Bond movie than a "00" agent in Her Majesty's secret service.

Best known for his thrillers starring quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme, Deaver has a new mission: Bring Bond into the 21st century in a new 007 novel.
The yet-to-be-named book is cryptically referred to as "Project X" by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., which owns the rights to Fleming's work.

How did Deaver, who grew up outside Chicago, land this top-secret mission?
The family-owned Fleming business took notice when Deaver won the U.K.'s Crime Writers' Association's coveted Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Garden of Beasts (2004), a thriller about an American assassin sent to Berlin during the run-up to Hitler's rise to power.
In his acceptance speech, Deaver talked about Fleming's influence on his work.

Most of the details surrounding Project X, to be published in May, are being kept under wraps, but under intense interrogation (more like gentle coaxing) Deaver begins to spill his guts.
"The novel," he says, "is set in the present day, in 2011. Bond is a young agent for the British secret service. He's 29 or 30 years old, and he's an Afghan war vet."
That in itself is big news. After all, if Bond were aging in real time — he first appeared in Fleming's Casino Royale in 1953 — the now doddering (although assuredly still handsome) 007 would be nearly 90.

But first up: a new stand-alone Deaver novel, Edge (Simon & Schuster, $26.99- Hodder & Stoughton - UK,NZ, Aust)), to be published Tuesday. It's about a federal agent who risks his life to protect a Washington police detective from a man hired to extract information from him using any means at his disposal.

Deaver's modest home in a woodsy neighborhood in this Northern Virginia suburb has a masculine, clubby feel. He fell in love with the area while researching a novel he set here, then moved to Virginia from New York in the early 1990s. He likes being close to Washington and to friends he has in the area.
His main residence, though, is in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he and his business partner Madelyn Warcholik raise champion briards, French herding dogs. In recent years, two of their dogs have won best of breed at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

Sipping coffee while seated on a leather chair in a sitting room decorated with portraits of his dogs and show ribbons, the mild-mannered author who writes about murderers and serial killers talks about his career and the solid fan base that has allowed him to pursue writing full time since 1990.
"I may not sell as many books as John Grisham (although he has sold a cool 20 million), but I have a very loyal fan base," says Deaver, 60, who wrote some of his novels while working as a Wall Street lawyer.

Deaver's initiation into the Bond family — more than 100 million 007 novels have sold worldwide — could significantly raise his profile.
Other novelists have written Bond novels since Fleming's death in 1964 — including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and, most recently, Sebastian Faulks (his 2008 book Devil May Care reached No. 38 on USA TODAY's best-seller list) — but they all took place in the original era. Deaver is taking a new approach.
The full piece at USA Today.