James Bond is facing his greatest challenge courtesy of award-winning crime writer M W Craven - going back to school to help train the next generation of secret agents. The author says his new children's series will bring 007 into the 21st century by using the super-spy's young proteges to challenge his outdated sexism. But this is not James Bond going woke, Craven insists; rather a clever reimagining of the world's most famous secret agent in a spin-off designed to get youngsters reading.
And the Newcastle-born author believes exploring Ian Fleming's iconic character through the eyes of children is "moreinteresting" than simply following in the footsteps of other established writers who have penned adult Bond books.
Best-known for his Cumbria-based Washington Poe-Tilly Bradshaw series, the seventh of which, The Final Vow, has just been published, Mike has been commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write a new series with the overarching title of James Bond and the Secret Agent Academy. Each book will see "quite a grumpy Bond" teaching 12- and 13-year-olds to become the next generation of agents on His Majesty's Service.
The author, 57, says: "The Fleming estate has got a definite way of doing things. "So the only character who has been announced is James Bond himself. There will be a lot of other characters, some very familiar, others straight out of my imagination."
He adds: "Their initial plan was to have Bond as an older character. I wanted to have Bond's licence to kill revoked so he's only a couple of years older than he is in Fleming's books, sort of late thirties. He doesn't want to be there, so he's quite a grumpy Bond. He's a bit like Poe in that sense and I find grumpy men quite easy to write. But I'll stay as true as I can to the original Bond."
Written in the 1950s and 60s, Fleming's original thrillers sometimes portrayed ideas about women that, while acceptable at the time, may now be viewed as old-fashioned and unpleasant. So writing for a younger audience will allow Mike to challenge some of these viewpoints while maintaining Bond's best qualities.
He says: "Some of the tropes are just too unpleasant but certainly the misogyny - I will have the kids challenging that. But staying true to the character of Bond is also important, so I don't want him to come across as a buffoon. He will come across as a bit of a dinosaur sometimes but when the chips are down Bond steps up and shows exactly what he can do as a secret agent."
Mike is already on his third career after spending a decade in the Army and 16 years in Cumbria's Probation Service, rising to the rank of assistant chief officer. He is now one of the stars of modern British thriller writing. His 2018 book The Puppet Show, introducing Poe and Tilly, set him on the road to success. Their fifth outing, 2022's The Botanist, won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel ofthe Year Award in 2023, and his sales and profile have been soaring.
He was asked to do the series of Bond children's books a year ago.
"That was in June last year. I didn't tell anyone but my close family," he confides. And they had been thinking about this for a whole year before approaching me."
As a huge fan of Fleming's books and the Bond films, he admits the initial approach was slightly overwhelming but he quickly decided to say "yes" and then pestered his agent David Headley until the offer was officially accepted.
Mike, who lives in Cumbria with wife Jo, says: "Bond has been part of my identity forever really, so it was a huge thrill and I was nervous about taking it on.
"But there was no doubt about taking it on, to the extentthat I was haranguing my agent David, saying, 'Have you got back to them yet?'. I read all the books when I was younger and re-read them all when I got this commission. I enjoyed them a lot more this time around. With my writer's hat on, I could appreciate the craft and what a good thriller writer Fleming was.
"And I love the films as well, so Bond has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. On Christmas Day you watched the Queen's Speech and then it was a Bond film, a turkey sandwich and off to bed."
He has nearly finished the first draft of the book, due out next year, and to make sure children recognise the popular culture references it contains he recruited some of his local schools for feedback. Mike admits: "I found a joke about Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games fell flat, so will delete that."
But the books will also appeal to adult readers, he hopes. "There will be lots of layers and some will go straight over children's heads and will appeal directly to adults."
With Amazon, through its purchase of MGM, having recently taken creative control of the Bond film franchise, Mike is hoping the new studio might even adapt his children's series. He says: "It is two separate things now, the books and the movies are very distinct Bond universes. But I'd be very surprised if they didn't at least look at it."
Despite being excited about reaching a global audience in joining the Bond universe, fans of his Poe series about a detective sergeant in the National Crime Agency paired with Tilly Bradshaw, a civilian analyst with off-the-chart IQ but zero social awareness, will be relieved to know he has no plans to stop writing about them.
Their latest instalment, The Final Vow, was inspired by the social fear of mixing with people during the Covid lockdowns. But he stresses it is not set during the pandemic.
"It's specifically about the very early days of Covid when we felt quite uneasy about going outside the house," he explains.
"I had a little springer spaniel then, Bracken, and I'd take him for a walk every morning. I'd get in the car and we'd drive off, and everywhere was deserted and it was quite spooky. The feeling stayed with me and I wanted to write about it. But I didn't want to write about thepandemic because it would be exploitative and people have already done it. So I decided on a sniper, which is random creeping death just like the pandemic. No one's safe, that was my starting point."
What follows is another rip-roaring thriller as Poe and Tilly try to track the killer - who appears to be striking at random - while the body count rises. In fact, despite 25 people being killed in his new book, Mike describes it as "probably the lightest one I've written in terms of content". He continues: "[Previous instalment] The Mercy Chair was my darkest book and I couldn't go that dark again. So this one is lighter and then the next one will be slighter darker."
Growing up in Newcastle, the son of a cigarette salesman and a nurse, he joined the Army on a whim, spending 12 years in the Royal Elec-trical and Mechanical Engineers, before studying social work at university. From there, he joined the Probation Service and worked his way to the top in Cumbria before taking redundancy when the service was privatised. But it was abrush with death from a rare cancer 20 years ago, aged 35, that set him on the road to being a writer.
Before starting his hit Poe series, Mike wrote two thrillers about a former Marine turned policeman, Detective Inspector Avison Fluke. As both series are largely set in Cumbria, he decided to introduce Fluke's close friend Matt Towler, a former special forces soldier with a violent streak, as a new permanent crossover character in the Poe series in The Final Vow.
Mike, whose tattooed fingers bear a symbol relating to each of his Poe books so far, has also written two thrillers about an elite US Marshal Ben Koenig - rendered impervious to fear by a previous bullet injury to his head - with the first, Fearless, currently in development for TV.
But for the time being, he has no plans to release creative control of his beloved Poe books, saying: "I still have the rights to the Poe books, which I am not letting go any time soon, unless someone comes in with an offer that I think is absolutely right."
- The Final Vow by M W Craven (Little Brown, £20) is out now. The first James Bond and the Secret Agent Academy book is due out next year
