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Sebastian Faulks has revealed that he wrote his new James Bond novel, Devil May Care, in just six weeks. Even 007 would be impressed. No doubt he was trying to emulate the original Bond creator Ian Fleming, who bashed out his "bang bang kiss kiss" books with considerable haste.
After breakfasting on scrambled eggs and coffee at Goldeneye, his Jamaican Shangri-la, Fleming would sit down in a silk dressing gown at his Royal portable typewriter, light a cigarette and disgorge a novel in four weeks; he wrote his debut, Casino Royale, he later said, to take his mind off the horrific prospect of marriage.
Faulks, who is happily married, doesn't need that excuse. It seems he thinks speed-writing is a good way to match Fleming's oeuvre for narrative drive and verve. Fatherland author Robert Harris is another exponent of quick writing. He says he likes to write novels fast, spurred by a "frighteningly tight" deadline. Even so, compared with Faulks he is a tortoise; he took around five months to finish his last work of fiction, The Ghost.
Although Fleming never thought much of his own output - he dismissed the Bond books as "fairytales for adults" - writing fast doesn't necessarily devalue a book in terms of its literary quality. Some modern classics were created in a febrile rush. William Golding's Lord of the Flies and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying were both written in six weeks. Nabokov dashed off Invitation to a Beheading in a "fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration"; Stendhal penned Memoirs of an Egotist in two weeks.
Sometimes speed writing needs to be compensated with slow editing. Jack Kerouac wrote the benzedrine and coffee-fuelled On the Road in three weeks in one unbroken paragraph of "spontaneous prose" - typing at 100 words a minute on a 120ft long paper roll - but he took the next five years trying to make it fit for publication.
However, none of the above could match Georges Simenon for his prolificacy or rapidity. He wrote more than 400 books and boasted that he could churn out a novel in just over a week. When advertisements appeared announcing that another writer was publishing "his first novel for three years", Simenon responded with his own flyers boasting "the first Simenon for eight days".
Truman Capote famously sneered of Kerouac's work: "That's not writing, that's typing." To which one critic responded that Capote's work was not writing but research. Bond lovers the world over will be hoping that Faulks proves himself to be a master of typing, writing and research.
