I just refuse to call myself Sir James Bond. “Bond… Sir James Bond-no ring to that.” He regards himself as “merely a Scottish peasant. In the last Fleming novel, The Man With the Golden Gun (1965), Bond declines an offer of knighthood from the Crown, a designation that would certainly hamstring undercover work. No (1962), the Harlem and New Orleans of Live and Let Die (1973), or even the Tokyo of You Only Live Twice (1967).īond is so well-known that when he disappears in one book, his boss, M, writes his obit for The Times of London. Joe Rogen asked rhetorically on his podcast, “Where would he [a Black Bond| be able to hide?” The answer is in just about every James Bond movie ever made, where a Black man would be no more conspicuous than a white Englishman, such as the Jamaica of Dr. Lashana Lynch, after all, plays a “00” agent in No Time to Die, and with Daniel Craig gone, who’s to say she won’t get a promotion? (Maybe Phoebe Waller-Bridge can write the whole script.) Or are we ready for a Black Bond-why not? Former NFL star Bernie Casey was in Never Say Never Again (1983), and Jeffrey Wright has played in three Bond films beginning with Casino Royale (2006)-and why not Idris Elba? Now, in the twenty-first century, there’s a strong possibility that the next James Bond may be a woman-or if Bond is not a she, then she at least may be a 007.

Anthony Burgess called it right in 1962 when he predicted that James Bond “is likely to end up as one of the great twentieth-century myths.” Bond, Burgess thought, was “as universal as Sherlock Holmes… And he is a fuller man than Holmes: he loves women.”

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