007 came to life fully-formed in 1952 when Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale. Since then over 100 million James Bond books have sold worldwide.

In 2004, Deaver won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for his book Garden of Beasts. In his acceptance speech he talked about his life-long admiration of Fleming’s writing.

Corinne Turner, Managing Director of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, was in the audience. She explains, ‘I’d always enjoyed Jeffery Deaver’s thrillers, but I particularly liked Garden of Beasts: it demonstrated that he was not only a master of the contemporary American thriller but could also write compelling novels of period suspense within a European setting. I didn’t know anything about the author himself and expected a fairly low key response from him when he received our award.

‘I was surprised and delighted when he spoke very fondly of Ian and about the influence that the Bond books had had on his own writing career. It was at that point that I first thought that James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver’s hands.’

Deaver comments, ‘I can’t describe the thrill I felt when first approached by Ian Fleming's estate to ask if I'd be interested in writing the next book in the James Bond series. I began reading them when I was about nine or ten, ignorant of the Cold War politics they explored but enthralled by their sense of adventure and derring-do. I continued to read and reread them, which was fortunate because as a teen and adult I found, of course, nuances, that were invisible to a child.’

He continues, ‘The Bond books were important parts of my life – both literarily and personally. They appealed to me as wonderful stories but they also stood as singular examples of a thriller writer’s craft. I learned, through osmosis as well as design, much technique from Mr. Fleming’s work; compactness, attention to detail, heroic though flawed characters, fast-pacing, concrete imagery and straight-forward prose.’

Unlike Sebastian Faulks’ centenary novel, Devil May Care, Project X will be set in the present day. Jeffery Deaver has started work on the book and his title is yet to be revealed.

David Rosenthal, Executive vice-president and Publisher of Simon & Schuster, comments, “For Simon & Schuster, Deaver and Bond are a peerless combination: clever, suspenseful and sophisticated. Jeff Deaver will produce a popular entertainment of the highest order.”

Jeffery Deaver is the author of a number of internationally bestselling crime series. He is best known for his Kathryn Dance and Lincoln Rhyme books, most notably The Bone Collector, which was adapted for film in 1999, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Deaver has also written two award-winning short story collections, as well as stand-alone novels including Garden of Beasts and The Bodies Left Behind, which was named Novel of the Year at the International Thriller Writers’ Awards in 2009.

Jeffery Deaver was born near Chicago in 1950. Before becoming a full-time author in 1990, he was a journalist, like Fleming, and attorney. He started writing suspense novels on the long commute to and from his office on Wall Street. His books are now translated into 25 languages. Deaver lives in North Carolina.

Jeffery Deaver’s latest Lincoln Rhyme thriller, The Burning Wire, will be published in the US on June 1st and in the UK on July 22nd. A standalone thriller titled Edge will follow in November 2010 in both the US and the UK.