Deaver said Fleming’s work was important to him, “both literarily and personally.”

“They appealed to me as wonderful stories but they also stood as singular examples of a thriller writer’s craft,” he said in a news release. “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 straightforward prose.”

In 2008, British novelist Sebastian Faulks wrote a Bond novel to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth. That book, called “Devil May Care,” was released around the world and landed on best-seller lists. “Devil May Care” was set in 1967, and featured some of the trademarks expected in a Bond story: a glamorous woman with an improbable name, Scarlett Papava, and a menacing villain who had a monkey’s paw for a hand.

Deaver, who lives in North Carolina, has sold more than 20 million copies of novels worldwide. “The Bone Collector,” was made into a film in 1999, with Denzel Washington playing Rhyme and Angelina Jolie his trusted sidekick. A new Rhyme novel is due out in June in the United States and July in Britain.

Another novel, “Garden of Beasts,” won the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, given for the best adventure or thriller novel written in Bond-like style.

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. managing director Corinne Turner thought then that “James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver’s hands.”

His Bond book, to be set in the present day, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain and Simon & Schuster in the United States. More than 100 million James Bond books have been sold around the world.

In April, it was announced that work on the next Bond movie — known only as “Bond 23″ — had been stopped indefinitely because of uncertainty about the future of distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. The film was due to be released in 2011 or 2012.

Millard Kaufman published two books with McSweeney’s — his debut novel, “Bowl of Cherries,” when he was 90 years old, and then “Misadventure,” his posthumous final novel. Born in 1917 in Baltimore, Millard served in World War II and fought in Guadalcanal, Guam, and Okinawa. He is the cocreator of “Mr. Magoo,” and wrote two Oscar-nominated screenplays. He led an extraordinary life, to be sure, and accumulated an impressive list of accomplishments. But the staff at McSweeney’s will remember him more for the stories he told. Endlessly self-deprecating, Millard was always telling stories, never failing to capture our attention with the breadth of his experiences. Below, Jordan Bass, Millard’s editor at McSweeney’s, tells a story of his own about coming to know a writer, who, even after ninety-two years, still had much more to offer. 

I first heard the name Millard Kaufman in September 2006, when McSweeney’s was on the hunt for new books to publish; his agent had passed away, and his novel had made its way to us. Our books editor at the time, Eli Horowitz, sent me a few links as background: an IMDB page featuring Millard reminiscing about Humphrey Bogart (“a wonderful chess player”); an excerpt from “Shade of the Raintree,” a history of the film “Raintree County,” with a quote from the critic Bosley Crowther calling the screenplay (which Millard had written) “a formless amoeba”; a San Francisco Chronicle article which quoted Millard saying, “I don’t know how Sinatra was with other people, but around me he was very real.”

We were dealing, in other words, with a writer who had survived half a century of Hollywood (he wrote a number of other screenplays besides “Raintree County,” including the great “Bad Day at Black Rock“; Bosley Crowther liked that one better), a writer who seemed to have known everyone and had the stories to prove it. On top of all that, he had alighted in his late eighties with a finished manuscript for a novel of reckless youth. Eli and I passed the pages back and forth, agreed that it was fantastic, and bought it. 

Millard had many more stories (he is the only first-time novelist I’ve met who could relate first-hand writing advice from Charlie Chaplin), but I came to know him through the novel — “Bowl of Cherries,” that first book, is the tremendously sharp, tremendously funny story of Judd Breslau, a fourteen-year-old child prodigy who recovers from being kicked out of Yale by chasing an Egyptologist’s daughter to Iraq.

It reads not at all like it was written by an eighty-nine-year-old, except for the wry inclusion of words like “bosky” and “thew” and “slubber”; it is a dead-on portrait of an addled young man, with a spirit of high-comedic adventure and an understanding love and ambition that those of us born after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles should only hope to match. We brought it out in 2007, at which time it had a very fine run as a small-press novel; Millard, meanwhile, celebrated his ninetieth year on this earth with a few events around LA (he wasn’t traveling anymore by then, or we would have sent him everywhere we could) and went to work on novel #2.

That book, “Misadventure,” came to us in 2008. It was a more grown-up, darker story, although still full of the wit and romantic entanglements that peppered the prior one — it was a noir this time, set in and around LA, exploring among other things the cratering real-estate market and several more deadly kinds of familial strife. Millard was as ready as ever to dig into it with us; as we got into the edits, he was already talking about the next story he wanted to write. It would be a Hollywood story, centered on powerful men older yet again than the teenagers of his debut or the just-shy-of-thirty schemers of the newer book; he would put down on the page the scandals and the skeletons his scriptwriting days had revealed to him. We couldn’t wait to see it.

Millard, though, was already ailing, by that time; as he finished up the work on “Misadventure,” honing every double-cross, his health kept getting worse. He passed away on March 14, 2009, just after his ninety-second birthday. Our last conversation had been about his latest edits — he had that same agile mind to the end, that same joy in the work. He was gone before we knew it. 

A year later, though, having gone back to the book, and having enlisted Millard’s son Frederick, an author himself, to help us make a few last refinements we did our best to bring a bit of his voice back again — “Misadventure,” with all its luckless strivers and bloodthirsty vixens, hit shelves last month. Frederick’s own take on it is below; it’s a hell of a book, by a hell of a man. We’re thrilled to have known him, and to have worked with him, and we’re sorry he isn’t here anymore.

From the Afterword to “Misadventure “

My father died before the edits came through for this book, so the final calls fell to me. His death, lousy in all other respects, delivered a not unwelcome sense of déja vu: Although it was the first time Millard had died, it was not the first time I had edited this book.

The task initially fell to me when I was fresh out of college, earning less than minimum wage from a textbook publisher who worked the gifted-and-talented racket. I operated the freight elevator, and the boss called me Cheetah.

One day, Cheetah was summoned to a musty corner of the warehouse. Here, the boss informed me he was looking to expand his literary offerings beyond brain teasers and math problemoids, and did I have any ideas? I mentioned that my father had just finished a novel.

Millard had been writing novels ever since he became permanently pissed off at Hollywood for the treatment his friends and fellow citizens had received during the blacklist, and thus was born the exit strategy that would bear fruit half a century later, when he published “Bowl of Cherries” and became America’s most famous ninety-year-old boy novelist.

Back in my elevator-operator days, Millard was an unpublished novelist of sixty-six. Which was when I first became his editor.

It was fabulous, an Oedipal fantasy realized, a reversal befitting the search-and-destroy mission for a father at the center of the book in question. After all those years of him telling me how to write, the tables had turned.

We disputed our way through his prose. On the west coast, among his cronies gathered around the table of the Hamburger Hamlet, Millard must have made light of such redaction by his son, and I imagine he was not entirely displeased when six months down the line the boss once again summoned Cheetah to his bunker to say that all novelistic ambitions for the company had gone kaput. “Misadventure” would have to wait another quarter century to see the light of day. By not being published, the old man had won another round.

This time, the edit was easy, and not because the author wasn’t around to argue. Except for a spot here and there where the talented Jordan Bass asked for a clarification, I didn’t touch a word.

A week before he died Millard was too weak to talk but somehow, despite the needles and exhaustion, he would whisper a word or two for me to take down. For his next novel, he told me. Collaboration and irony to the very end, and beyond.

– Frederick Kaufman, January 2010

Here’s a short video of Millard that McSweeney’s put together after publishing “Bowl of Cherries.” 

Hold up — what? That’s not May-December romance, that’s sex with a child too young to consent. And while Vizinczey told Walsh the book isn’t strictly autobiographical, he says, “I did have my own experience to draw on. I was very lucky, at 14, to have a girlfriend, a neglected wife in her 30s. I learned a great deal from her about English poetry.” (So that’s what kids called it back then?) Obviously, the author doesn’t recall the experience as traumatic — which I’m glad of, for his sake — and 12-year-old Walsh didn’t mind the thought of it. But the double standard is still shocking; imagine those lines appearing in an article with the genders reversed, and no one batting an eye.

Having said that,  I do think Vizinczey has some very interesting things to say about double standards that apply to couples who are old enough to consent. And at a time when the “cougar” label just will not die — yet pairings of young, beautiful women and much older men remain unremarkable as ever — his thoughts are awfully refreshing to hear. For instance, here’s his take on 25-year-old women: “I’m sure they’re very attractive. But I’d say to them, ‘If you are 25 and intelligent, you’ll be a more intelligent and worthwhile person, at 40 or 50.’ I’m not against youth. But I think I’m a wiser and better person than at 25.” He expands on that theme in an interview with Celia Walden for The Telegraph: “The sex appeal of a woman has very little to do with the kind of things magazines talk about. It doesn’t have much to do with big breasts, small breasts, figure — the most important part of sex appeal is humanity, an affectionate nature, intelligence.” And in response to the claim that older woman/younger man couples won’t last, Vizinczey, who’s been married for 47 years to a woman 6 years his senior, says, “Most relationships don’t last, regardless of the age of the couples. Enduring relationships depend not only on the ages of the couples, but whether or not they are people on the same wavelength, which is why I think mine will go on lasting.”

Contrast that with psychologist Oliver James, who tells Walden that “the ‘older woman’ dynamic is not straightforward, because women, on the whole, are not attracted by nubility in younger members of the opposite sex — whereas men are” and states bluntly, “There probably is something wrong with women who persist in going for very large age gaps.” Ah, that’s more familiar! Men like sex and women don’t. Men are attracted to youth and beauty, while women are only attracted to money and status. Men who date women their daughters’ age are just being rational — grandpa caveman still want symmetrical features and good waist-hip ratio for make baby caveman! — but women who date men even a few years younger are stunted, vain and predatory. Given how rare it is to hear anyone argue against those points, it’s no wonder Vizinczey’s originally self-published book has sold millions of copies.

Nevertheless, even a fan like Walsh seems skeptical of whether it deserves Penguin classic status “along with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.” And although I agree with Vizinczey when he says “Predatory relationships … can exist even between people of the same age,” I’m still unsettled by the implication that relationships between 12-year-old boys and fortysomething women should be seen as consensual and mutually fulfilling. (Demi and Ashton, I get. Demi and a seventh grader? Very different story.) But as long as cougar-panther-puma mania persists, casting pretty much all women who dare to express their sexuality past the age of 22 as simultaneously ridiculous and threatening, there’s something to be said for a bestselling author who believes ” The sexiest thing about a woman is her intelligence” and “the intelligent 20-year-old will be even more interesting and exciting when she’s 40 or 60.”

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
  A Silicon Valley pioneer on why the Web hasn’t lived up to its potential.

• Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
  Heavyweight political writers from New York magazine and Time magazine take on the 2008 election.

• Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Joseph E. Stiglitz
  Nobelist explains how America screwed up the world economy — and how we can fix it.

• Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift — June 1948-May 1949 by Richard Reeves
  Columnist and presidential biographer on one of the pivotal moments of the Cold War.

• The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine by Francis S. Collins
  The new head of the National Institute of Health on what genetics will do for medicine.

• Just Kids by Patti Smith
  The music legend about bohemian life in New York City in the ’60s — and her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

Fiction

• Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler
  The author of “The Accidental Tourist” writes about a retired teacher and father of three grown daughters as he contemplates the end of his life.

• Wild Child and Other Stories by T.C. Boyle
  From the author of “World’s End,” a new collection of stories.

• Fun With Problems by Robert Stone
  From the National Book Award-winning author of “Dog Soldiers,” a new collection about addiction, sex and violence.

• Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
  The latest from the praised author of “Restless.”