Authors who reprise the greats need a bold touch

Almost 40 years after the little grey cells stopped whirring, fiction’s most famous Belgian is brushing the dust off his moustache and heading out on the crime-solving trail. Author Sophie Hannah is to write the first authorised Hercule Poirot mystery since Agatha Christie’s death.

Exciting? Maybe – but not surprising. In an age when “characters” and “stories” have given way to “brands” and “franchises”, literary Valhalla now comes with a revolving door. This month, William Boyd’s new James Bond book is released; in November, we will be treated to Sebastian Faulks’s take on Jeeves and Wooster; and Anthony Horowitz is beavering away on his second Sherlock Holmes adventure.

The cynical argument is that – beyond their authors’ talent – there’s nothing to separate such efforts from the fan fiction that clutters up the internet. Boyd, Horowitz et al may have the blessings of the authors’ estates, but it’s hard to see precisely why a writer’s distant descendants should have any intrinsic artistic authority over their work.

Still, the best characters, or settings, are so compelling that we have always longed to spend more time with them – hence the tremendous appetite for such works. Yet there are definite rules about what does and doesn’t fly.

The first, which may sound obvious, is to have genuine passion for the job. When Faulks tackled James Bond, before Boyd got the gig, he made it clear that imitating a writer as lousy as Ian Fleming was rather beneath him, and that slight froideur came through in the work.

Second, don’t mess with perfection. Sorry to pick on Faulks, but the idea that he – or anyone – can equal Wodehouse’s perfectly crafted frivolity is laughable.

Third, echo rather than mimic. If you try to produce a lost Sherlock Holmes story indistinguishable from Conan Doyle’s own, the result will be mere pastiche. Horowitz understands this perfectly: in his first Holmes book, The House of Silk, he aped the familiar prose style, but added something new by incorporating themes, and crimes, that would have been taboo for any writer in Doyle’s day.

The fourth rule is not to give the public what they think they want. The idea of P D James rewriting Jane Austen as a police procedural seemed irresistible – but Death Comes to Pemberley, while clearly a labour of love, was too respectful to be more than the sum of its parts. By contrast, Seth Grahame-Smith’s go-for-broke chutzpah with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adding “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action” to Austen’s text, worked surprisingly well.

That, indeed, is the final rule: to play as fast and loose with your source material as possible. My girlfriend is currently devouring Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a novel set among the servants of the Bennet household. It works largely because the familiar characters are essentially peripheral: you get the same frisson when they briefly appear as when Flashman bumps into Bismarck or Lincoln. Sticking with Austen, you didn’t have to have read Pride and Prejudice or Emma to enjoy their knowing reworkings in Bridget Jones’s Diary or Clueless. Or Charlotte Brontë, to be gripped by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.

The real danger with the current trend for authorised reworkings is that, under the watchful eye of the literary estate, writers will be dutiful rather than playful, inhibited rather than inspired. For example, while I loved The House of Silk, I found Michael Chabon’s gleefully unauthorised The Final Solution – which used the Holmes myth obliquely to address the horrors of the Holocaust – a braver and more interesting book. There are plenty of pasticheurs, amateur and professional, who can give us The Further Adventures of Harry Potter, or a new case for Poirot. Better to take the old ingredients – the familiar characters or plots – and turn them into something new.