Charlie Higson, the bestselling author and comedian, has revealed his top picks for the next James Bond, including Slow Horses star Jack Lowden and Callum Turner, as he publishes his first full-length Bond novel, King Zero.
Higson, a former co-creator and star of The Fast Show, has written King Zero, a blockbuster new James Bond novel involving an anti-technology conspiracy. Despite its title and plot, Higson insists it is not a satire on the UK's sustainable energy programme. "No, no," he chuckles. "It's certainly not Bond goes to war with Ed Miliband!"
The climate change minister turned Foreign Secretary is not in 007's crosshairs. "Net Zero isn't about switching everything off, anyway," Higson continues. "It's just finding new ways to power it."
A contemporary Bond for modern readers
King Zero starts with a robot surgeon being hacked, killing a former double-oh agent on the operating table by turning his brain to mush before he can spill a secret. It ends with a cinematic set piece. Bond's only lead on the assassination is a playboy film producer and his tattooed ex-cage fighter bodyguard, sending the secret agent hunting for a traitor in Saudi Arabia, and onto a showdown in the Congo via the Maldives.
The book is set in a present day of scarce resources and ever more powerful technology. One sequence involving a driverless car feels especially timely, while Bond's method of communicating securely with Moneypenny involves a Spotify playlist and Adele.
"Most of the other continuation authors – Sebastian Faulks, Anthony Horowitz and William Boyd to name a few – set their stories within the Fleming time of the 1960s," explains Higson, a youthful 68. "They didn't necessarily want to acknowledge the films at all. They're good books, and they've done well, but I wanted to write a thriller that will sit happily on the airport shelves next to Lee Child or Mick Herron and other contemporary writers."
The villain and the Bond multiverse
His baddie is Martin Koenig, an 80-something mining magnate losing his mind, who's created an archetypal fifties English village, Kingsdown, in the heart of Africa. Higson was inspired by Fordlandia, Henry Ford's real-life plantation town in the Brazilian rainforest. "I liked the idea of this all-powerful, typical Bond villain type who has dementia and is losing his powers – slightly farming it out to AI – alongside fake nostalgia for a wonderful golden past which probably never really existed."
"People living in the fifties had the same nostalgia for the twenties; people in the twenties would have had nostalgia for the pre-war. Everybody's convinced they're living in a s****y age and things were better in the past, which is probably not true."
"But I wanted an action sequence on the streets of a little English village, which you can't do in Bond because he's MI6, not MI5, so he's always abroad. So I set it in Africa, and it became a slightly surreal sequence instead."
Higson's Bond pays homage to his roots while remaining contemporary. "There are lots of different Bonds out there, and they're all in slightly different worlds – it's like the sort of Bond multiverse," he says. "My 007 is an amalgam of all the Bonds from Fleming through to Daniel Craig, although there's not much of Roger Moore in him... So King Zero has something of all the cinematic Bonds and Fleming's… but in my mind, he's just James Bond."
Hopes for the next movie and casting tips
Higson has a theory that on-screen Bonds swing between lighter and darker characterisations. After Daniel Craig's cynical, glowering secret agent was controversially killed in 2021's No Time To Die, we might be in for something a bit more fun. "I don't have any insights," he sighs. "But I do think Amazon has set out their stall – they've hired one of the most respected and best directors around [in Oscar-nominated filmmaker Denis Villeneuve] who's very good at action sequences. And they've got a British writer [Peaky Blinders creator] Steven Knight."
"They're good indicators it's going to be a big, prestigious film. I just hope there's more of a sense of fun and adventure than there was towards the end of Craig, particularly in the last film, which was a bit kind of glum and cold and dark. I saw it with my eldest son, who's quite savvy, and he said, 'That felt like a Bond film made by people embarrassed to be making a Bond film'."
On the next on-screen 007, Higson says Bond can happily be black, but insists he must be a man because the franchise is all about masculinity. He had doubts when Tom Hiddleston was rumoured to be in the running because he wasn't "a convincing hand-to-hand fighter. With Daniel Craig you can believe him kicking the s*** out of someone".
"To play Bond, you've got to do more than just look good in a tuxedo," he continues. "You have got to be sexy and you've got to be physically confident and convincing in a fight scene. To be able to do both is harder than it looks."
As for Daniel Craig's oft repeated remark that he'd "rather slash his wrists" than play Bond again, Higson puts it down to the pressures of publicising the films. "He probably spent more time promoting them than he did filming them. It was the same with Sean Connery who felt like a tiny cog in a big machine. Whereas, Roger Moore loved it."
Higson's tip for the next Bond is someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously and doesn't mind handing over their life to Amazon for the next few years. He likes the look of Slow Horses star Jack Lowden – like Bond, a Scot – and Callum Turner.
King Zero by Charlie Higson (Penguin, £22) is out now.
