Fleming seems to have been a very aware person, with a keen sense of the present moment that translated his fantasy world into a striking and still immediate reality – you can still almost taste the meals, smell the scents of his heroines, and feel the cool of those sea island cotton shirts, or the tang of the cordite during some tense final gunplay.

Given the relative shortness of each novel, he’s created an amazing legacy of communication, which despite being written almost in shorthand bears testament to the strength of his prose.

Sebastian Faulks’s Devil May Care, although an honourable homage to Fleming’s works, took 320 pages in the larger size “B format” paperback edition (oh, and if you ask me, a major slide into becoming SF’s work, not Fleming’s as attributed, in the final third) yet enjoyable as it is, it leaves somewhat less of a visceral impact than Fleming achieved in just 208 pages, on the old standard-sized paperback edition of From Russia With Love.

With that in mind, any new attempt to create an iconic and relevant cover for the books, which honours and echoes Fleming’s ability to reach into your imagination with very few, definitive, strokes of the brush, is to be welcomed, and I have to say: these aren’t bad.

Women (in particular, slightly isolated, bruised, gutsy outsiders) are a key part of each and every novel, so while I don’t think these covers are in any way definitive, I’ve enjoyed their addition to the fold.

I’ll stick with my Pan covers for now, as they were extremely well thought-out, but anything better than the senseless “chicks riding guns” cliché so many wrongly attribute to these books is welcome.

Btw I found this post through googling Bond covers, as I’m planning to create a DIY slipcover for Devil May Care, based on the Pan edition’s æsthetics – an ambitious project given my high standards for the novels, and my enormous respect (as a woman, and a feminist, incidentally) for Fleming’s works. But I like the cut of your jib sir, so consider yourself bookmarked by one more reader!