Alex Rider author Anthony Horowitz weighs in on the Bond legacy through books and films

The films are flawed, the books somewhat crude, so why, in his creator's centenary year, are we still in love with James Bond? The writer Anthony Horowitz, whose Rider novels were inspired by 007, says he's a Byronic hero of our time - with a touch of Harry Potter, reports The Times.

I have in front of me a battered and stained copy of Dr No, priced at 3s 6d. My own name, in childish handwriting, is scrawled across the cover and my mother's name is signed inside. I was 10 years old and any book I took to school had to be signed by a parent to show that he or she approved. For my teachers, Dr No was a borderline case - on the edge of what, in 1965, might be considered pornography.

The book changed my life. After three years closeted in an all-male boarding school in north London, here was the glamour and excitement that was missing from my day-to-day existence. I imagine that when the books were first released to a nation just coming out of wartime austerity, other readers must have felt much the same. Here was travel. In the early 1960s, before package holidays, visiting places as far away as Jamaica was quite an undertaking, even for a fairly wealthy family, and I had never been farther than the South of France.

And here was sex. Honeychile Rider, crouching on the beach - 'the belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic' - arrived like some forbidden fruit. When Ursula Andress played the part in that white bikini, I began to see that there might be life beyond the repressed atmosphere of Orley Farm School. It's no surprise that the name, 'Rider', stuck in my mind, and was still there 30 years later.

That was when I wrote Stormbreaker, the first Alex Rider novel, creating my own homage, pastiche, or whatever you want to call it. But I wasn't alone. Just about all of us have been touched, one way or another, by Bond. Ian Fleming sold 40 million books in his lifetime. A further 27 million more sold in a single year - 1965 - after his death. Bond has spawned an industry worth billions of pounds - it has been estimated that a quarter of the world's population has seen a James Bond film.

Why? What is it about Bond that has endured, while Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, Mike Hammer, Harry Palmer and many other heroes have slipped into the shadows? Is it just the films that have guaranteed his longevity - along with the accompanying computer games, the merchandise, the media hype - or can the secret be found in Ian Fleming's books? It's a question the Fleming estate may well be asking, with Sebastian Faulks about to re-invent the hero in a book likely to be the highlight of Fleming's centenary year, Devil May Care. They will be aware that past attempts have not exactly covered themselves in glory.

There have always been two camps when it comes to the Bond books. There's the 'sex, snobbery and sadism' criticism expounded in the New Statesman by Paul Johnson, who began his article by describing Dr No as 'without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read'. Both Casino Royale and Live and Let Die were poorly received in America. Even Fleming's wife, Anne Rothermere, requested that a book should not be dedicated to her.

But Noël Coward was an admirer - he called Fleming 'an uncommonly fine writer' - as was Raymond Chandler, who described Fleming as 'probably the most forceful and driving writer of what I suppose must be called thrillers in England'. And when, in 1984, Anthony Burgess compiled his collection of the 99 greatest books written between 1939 and 1984, he found a place for Goldfinger. This month, The Times included Fleming in its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 - he came in at number 14, beating Salman Rushdie by one place.

In many ways, Goldfinger encapsulates both the best and the worst of Fleming and may help to find the right place for him in the literary pantheon. Published in 1959, it was the seventh and longest James Bond adventure and, for many, remains Fleming's masterpiece. Certainly, it has more than its fair share of iconic images, starting with perhaps the most bizarre murder in literature, the naked girl painted gold... morto-eroticism, one might call it. But then there's Oddjob's bowler hat. The game of golf at Royal St Marks. And Bond himself, spreadeagled in front of a slowly advancing circular saw, which somehow worked just as well in the movie when it was transformed into an industrial laser.

The characters are equally memorable, starting with Goldfinger himself, whom Bond first encounters cheating at cards. He establishes himself as one of literature's great monsters from his first appearance, 'wearing nothing but a yellow satin bikini slip' in the Miami sunshine. Even the minor characters are brilliantly drawn. Look at the hoods who gather to take on Fort Knox and who are essentially given only one chapter. Mr Springer, 'with the glazed eyes of someone who is either very rich or very dead'. The deeply chilling Billy Ring, who has 'a face out of a nightmare'. Few other writers would expend such energy on characters who barely appear in the rest of the story.

The plot of Goldfinger is hugely enjoyable and moves with breakneck speed. From the opening card game in the Miami sun it becomes a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe. Then comes the attempt to rob Fort Knox and finally a truly brutal fight on a Stratocruiser above the Atlantic (in the book it is Oddjob, rather than Goldfinger, who gets sucked through the window).

Then there's the style, hard-edged and laconic. Take this single paragraph as a gloomy Bond waits for his flight out of Miami: 'The last light of the day had gone. Below the indigo sky the flare paths twinkled green and yellow and threw tiny reflections of the oily skin of the tarmac. With a shattering roar a DC7 hurtled down the main green lane. The windows in the transit lounge rattled softly. People got up to watch. Bond tried to read their expressions. Did they hope the plane would crash - give them something to talk about, something to fill their empty lives? Or did they wish it well? Which way were they willing the 60 passengers? To live or to die?'

Weltschmertz and diesel fumes. Fleming had one of the most distinctive voices in modern literature and everything about this passage - its economy, its attitude - is uniquely his. And yet... and yet...

As much as I love it, I have to admit that the book is full of implausibility: holes so huge that if you stop to think about them for even a minute the fabric disintegrates. Goldfinger doesn't kill Bond when he has the chance - on the contrary, he employs him as an assistant, even though it is clear that no assistant is required. Bond leaves a message for the CIA under a lavatory seat on a plane. Despite all his security, Goldfinger doesn't find it - and the message reaches the CIA with extraordinary speed. Why does Goldfinger untie Bond at the end - even when he's learnt who and what he is? Has he got a suicide wish?

And then there's Pussy Galore. Forget the dismal schoolboy humour of her name. Here's a hard-edged lesbian, raped by her uncle when she was 12, in charge of a tough, all-female gang. And yet we're expected to believe that she'll turn into a weak-kneed sex kitten ('get back in your basket, Pussy') after one glance at Bond. We can excuse the naked sexism, which simply connects the book to the time it was written. It's the psychology that surely offends.

The overview, then, might be of a superbly written, fast-paced and entertaining thriller... pulp fiction with wonderful characters and unforgettable scenes that pop up throughout the oeuvre. The bridge game that destroys Drax at the start of Moonraker. The near death of Felix Leiter when he is savaged by a shark in Live and Let Die and its brutal rejoinder: 'He disagreed with something that ate him.' The first chapter of From Russia, with Love which introduces the psycho of all psychos, Donovan Grant. Even the titles themselves. The makers of the Bond films and the imitators of Bond have never been able to come up with anything half as good.

But none of this explains Bond's roots in the British consciousness, how he has endured for 50 years, a hero who has managed to leap effortlessly across at least three generations. The answer perhaps lies in the character of Bond himself.

It is tempting to say that the real source of Bond's longevity is down to the films - 21 of them since Dr No in 1962. The success of that first production was, itself, something of a surprise. Joseph Wiseman, who played the title role, said: 'I thought it might be just another grade-B Charlie Chan mystery.' And he might have been right. We can all heave a sigh of relief that Ian Fleming didn't get his way with the main casting. He wanted his friend David Niven or Roger Moore (who was already enjoying television success as the Saint). The history of modern culture might have been very different if the producer, Cubby Broccoli, hadn't insisted on his own choice, a virtually unknown Scottish actor called Sean Connery.

But how many of the Bond films are any good? How many of them even have any connection with the books on which they were based?

It's fascinating to look at the entire oeuvre, the work of more than 40 years, and to watch the Bond machine mutate. The first films were undoubtedly the best, bringing together the talent that would make the series so iconic: Ken Adams's set designs, John Barry's music, the title sequences created by Maurice Binder and the larger-than-life performances of Lotte Lenya (who was married to the composer Kurt Weill), Robert Shaw, Gert Frobe, Donald Pleasence etc, and of course Connery himself. When I ask children on my school visits, the majority choose him as their favourite Bond, even if he is now old enough to be their great-grandfather. The last poll - in 2006 for SFX magazine - also made him the clear number one.

And yet, even by the end of the Connery canon, the first signs of decay are present. The plots are becoming ever more fantastical, until one arrives at his last official outing in Diamonds are Forever, which has little to do with smuggling and finds Blofeld blackmailing the world with a diamond-encrusted satellite. Why? With all those diamonds, wouldn't he already be rich enough? Some of the lows in this film include Blofeld trying to escape from Bond in drag, the homophobic killers Wint and Kidd, desperately feeble special effects and Connery's toupee.

In particular, two seeds have already been sown that will become ever more embarrassing as the series continues: gadgets and gags.There are few gadgets in Ian Fleming's books and he didn't even invent the character called 'Q', though he certainly knew of Q-branch, which was part of the Ministry of Supply during the Second World War and which supplied, among other things, suicide pills for Special Operations Executive agents abroad. There are three gadgets in the novel From Russia with Love: a gun hidden in a book, a gun disguised as a telephone and a poisoned knife in a shoe, but none of them belongs to Bond - in fact, he is almost killed by all of them. The film took them on board and decided to equip Bond, too, with a tape recorder concealed in a camera and an exploding briefcase containing a knife, a folding rifle and an (also exploding) magnetised tin of talc.

Like some sort of rampant bindweed, there was no stopping the gadgets once they had been introduced and, with every film, they became more numerous and more ridiculous until, in The World is Not Enough (1999), you have the arrival of John Cleese, perhaps one of the most monumental casting errors in film history, turning the whole issue of weaponry into a Fawlty Towers-style joke. Gadgets now include comically inflating ski trousers and spectacles with a secret X-ray device (which weren't even credible when they were sold to children on the backs of magazines in the 1950s). It has also become a convention of the films that a range of gadgets that have no relevance at all will be fired off in the background. The lamest one I can recall was a sofa that swallowed anyone who sat on it (glimpsed in The Living Daylights), though the phone booth with exploding airbag (Goldeneye) comes a close second.

Hilarous, perhaps - but childish. And the same can be said for the gags which again proliferated, mainly after Connery had left the scene. I have to say that I may have laughed at the time. I was young. I didn't know any better. But looking back, they are wincingly embarrassing, horribly puerile. 'You always were a cunning linguist,' Miss Moneypenny purrs in Tomorrow Never Dies. 'I think he's attempting re-entry, sir,' Q remarks to M, watching as Roger Moore has sex in zero gravity in Moonraker. What has this got to do with the hard-edged, essentially cold-hearted world that Fleming created?

For that matter, what had anything in these films to do with James Bond? Watching the Roger Moore series again - seven of them in all - I was struck by how witless they were, how facile. Moonraker, for example, doesn't involve a Nazi renegade plotting to nuke London, as Fleming had imagined in 1955 (the book came out the year I was born). 'It is the best thing he has done yet,' Noël Coward wrote. 'Very exciting… although as usual too far-fetched.' Not as far-fetched as the film, which had a web-fingered but otherwise dapper Hugo Drax destroying the Earth and building a new civilisation in outer space. The film is little more than a rip-off of the Star Wars franchise which was so huge at the time, climaxing with a laser gun battle in outer space and Bond almost having to 'find the Force'.

The Roger Moore films were not just bad. Some of them - Octopussy, A View to a Kill - are terrible, closer to Carry On than Connery. Bond doing a Barbara Woodhouse impersonation (she was an elderly matron who trained dogs). Bond snow-boarding to the tune of California Girls. Bond aged 58 for heaven's sake - Roger Moore was born in 1927. They could have hidden the gadgets in his Zimmer frame.

Then came Timothy Dalton, who tried to make the character more intense and more emotional but who survived only two films, the second one being the disastrous Licence to Kill. And then it was Pierce Brosnan, who certainly invigorated the brand with Goldeneye (it took $350 million at the box office, worldwide) and its three sequels, even if they somehow never quite lived up to one's hopes. In 1999 (The World is Not Enough), Variety wrote of ?'a slavish devotion to a tired formula' and added that 'James Bond is beginning to look a lot like Austin Powers'. The success of Mike Myers's series shows just how ripe for parody the Bond formula had become.

Of course, anyone can have an opinion about the films, and the producers would doubtless point to the box-office receipts, which never wavered. But it seems to me that James Bond has not survived because of the films. If anything, the opposite is true. It's a wonder that he has survived in spite of them. So how has he survived? It can't be because of the books. Who reads them any more? It can't be the films on their own. There are simply too many duds. Surely, it must be something deeper, something buried within the character himself.

And yet Bond doesn't have much character. Rather, he has mannerisms. Those fine clothes (many of them brand names), the martinis, the 60-a-day cigarette habit - they are all mentioned by Kingsley Amis in The James Bond Dossier, the first and most serious examination of Fleming's work (he also wrote the first and, for many, the only decent sequel - Colonel Sun, published in 1968 under the pen name of Robert Markham). But as Amis concludes, 'His mind is a completely utilitarian organ.' Which is to say, Bond never reads. He doesn't listen to music. He has no interest in sport - unless it's bridge or golf. He has no sense of humour, telling only one joke in all 14 books (in Goldfinger - and it isn't very funny). He seems to have no hinterland or family history - his parents, Scottish and Swiss, died in a climbing accident when he was 11. Perhaps it is for this reason that the screen Bond has managed to change so often without anything being damaged along the way. From Sean Connery to Daniel Craig is quite a leap but they're both inhabiting an empty vessel.

'We don't want to have Bond for dinner or go golfing with Bond or talk to Bond. We want to be Bond,' Amis continues. In the dossier, he identifies the hero as 'an intruder from another age' - in short, the Byronic hero. 'Mr Fleming has brought off the unlikely feat of enclosing this wildly romantic, almost narcissistic and (one would have thought) hopelessly out-of-date persona inside the shell of a secret agent, and so making it plausible... and to all appearances, contemporary.'

Contemporary in 1953, when Casino Royale, the first Bond, was published. Contemporary half a century later in 2007, when Daniel Craig stepped out in those white swimming trunks. James Bond can only be understood and appreciated in the context of myth and legend. He is an archetype in exactly the same mould as King Arthur or Robin Hood, who have also been mauled in print, on stage and on screen (remember Kevin Costner in Prince of Thieves?), but who have, none the less, survived. Five hundred years from now, there will probably be those who believe that James Bond actually existed. Folk heroes don't die. They just become more real.

I'm not even sure that he belongs to adult literature - and, certainly, the films have never strayed close to a 15 certificate. Fleming described the stories as 'fairy tales for grown-ups' and added in an interview (quoted by Amis): '[I am concerned with] the business of getting intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds, to turn over the page.' Here he is again, in July 1963 (quoted by Andrew Lycett in his biography of the writer): 'James Bond is the author's pillow fantasy. And fantasy isn't real life by definition. It's very much... bang, bang, bang, kiss kiss, that sort of stuff. It's what you would expect of an adolescent mind - which I happen to possess.'

And finally, talking to the BBC: 'I am sufficiently in love with myth to write basically incredible stories with a straight face.'

A story for bedtime. A fairy tale. A myth for adolescents. Go past the sex, the sporadic violence, the alcohol and the cigarettes, and one is drawn, reluctantly, to the only other comparable publishing phenomenon, both in terms of sales and worldwide impact: Harry Potter. At first glance, any comparison seems idiotic. What can the world's coolest spy possibly have in common with a myopic schoolboy?

To start with, they are both orphans. Both have been educated at private boarding schools - Eton and Hogwarts. Both were created by British authors and belong to a Britain where the sun of empire has not quite set and the old values - chivalry and nobility - are still strong. Both will lay down their lives for their country. Bond is as loyal to M as Harry is to Dumbledore. In fact, most Bond novels begin with Bond being summoned, like a child into the headmaster's study. 'What the hell's all this about?' M snaps, in Goldfinger, when Bond laughs in front of him. 'Stop behaving like a bloody schoolboy.' When M is in a good mood, he will call Bond 'James'. But to Bond, M is always 'Sir'.

It's a potent myth, the child hero. J.K. Rowling exploited it and made publishing history (landing at number 42 on that same Times list). My feeling is that Ian Fleming stumbled on exactly the same archetype. James Bond may be colder and crueller, but he still connects with the child inside us all. And for that reason, no matter how times may change, he can never die.

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