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“This place is… so culturally vibrant, so picturesque, so full of fascinating, multicultural individuals,” Jeffery Deaver said during a talk in Dubai. “This is an exotic city that is worthy of James Bond.”

While in Dubai about a year ago, “I became enamoured of the city. I walked around, I took notes, I took a lot of pictures, and I said, some day, I’m going to set something here,” Deaver said.
After agreeing to write the next Bond novel, “I knew at that point, at last, I had found a story to set in Dubai,” he said.

Deaver was reticent about plot details, but he did say that in “Carte Blanche,” Bond is “a young agent for the British government. He was born, roughly, in the late 1970s, and the book takes place in the present day.”

In the course of the book, Bond “flies here and gets involved in a lot of intrigue, very fast-paced action, races through the streets.”

“He does meet some local folks who are extremely helpful to him, and by and large has some wonderful food, wonderful drink as I have done here, and then I have to say he does jet out,” Deaver said.

He did not mention plans for a film version of the novel, but The National newspaper said Tuesday that the possibility of a movie adaptation “has already been raised.”
Parts of the latest “Mission: Impossible” film, another spy thriller series, were filmed in Dubai.

Deaver said Sean Connery, one of the first actors to play 007 in the hit films inspired by the books, and Daniel Craig, the latest to do so, are his favourites, but that his image of Bond came from creator Ian Fleming’s novels. Deaver is the latest in a series of authors who have kept writing the Bond books since Fleming died in 1964. “Carte Blanche” is due out in May.

Dubai is best known for its man-made islands, indoor ski slope and hyper-modern skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest building-AFP