Bond is back! He never really went away, of course, having gone through nearly as many screen regenerations as Doctor Who, and with a clutch of varyingly talented wordsmiths drafted in to keep Ian Fleming’s ghost hard at work.

But amid the feeding frenzy whipped up to mark the late master’s 100th birthday, it is the turn of the literary lion Sebastian Faulks to pick up the pen in Devil May Care, a much hyped new outing for the iconic British superspy.

This is vintage Bond, in a very real sense, located in the 1960s rather than updated, as some more recent novels in the franchise were, to the era of Pierce Brosnan and beyond.

M here is still male, curmudgeonly and pipe-puffing; Bond is the battle-scarred, reluctantly ageing veteran of a tragically curtailed marriage, brainwashing and a resultant spell as an amnesiac Japanese fisherman.

In short, he is Bond as Fleming abandoned him, shortly before his own death. Now suddenly, not for the first time, he finds himself summoned back to face down an evil mastermind.

In best Bond tradition — and Faulks does nothing if not reference the best (and the worst) of those traditions — the bad guy has a distinctive deformity: a main de singe, a right hand that resembles a monkey’s, covered with hair and without an opposed thumb.

He is also, in typical Bond-villain fashion, a sportsman who cheats to win — at tennis in this case — and has an evil oriental henchman who wears a French foreign legionnaire’s képi to conceal a traumatic, and vulnerable, skull injury.

So much, so familiar, and that is before we have got to the seductive twin sisters with the beguilingly sultry Fleming-esque names Scarlett and Poppy Papava. With names like those, no wonder that central to this yarn is the opium poppy and the embryonic heroin trade.

For this novel is, remember, set in 1967, the summer of love, a world of miniskirts and flower power that Bond finds jarringly unfamiliar, in this incarnation once again the spy who saw service in the Second World War and has still to come to terms with female emancipation, except between the sheets.

The location for most of the action, however, has been chosen with a distinct eye on modern readers: Iran. Or as it was then, Persia. From Rome and Paris, traditional 007 stamping ground,

we quickly flit to the hedonistic Tehran of the shahs, capital of a corrupt and self-indulgent regime propped up by the British and Americans and where the cruel Savak secret police are hand-in-hand with the CIA and Israeli Mossad.

This is a Tehran in which Bond can drink Bollinger and Johnnie Walker and swim naked among rose petals with similarly (un)attired local beauties. The drug trade, in which our monkey-pawed villain, Julius Gorner, an Estonian by origin, is heavily involved, has its origins across the border in the Afghan province of Helmand (scene of current British troop deployments).

Meanwhile, it is Vietnam, and the Wilson Government’s refusal to be drawn into that conflict, that irks the special relationship, confining the ever-faithful (and badly mutilated) Felix Leiter to a cameo role, but providing part of the subplot.

Blending the tradition of the hard-nosed original novels with the blockbuster movies leads Faulks to push the plot to Dr Strangelove proportions that would stretch credibility even without some lamentable lapses in Cold War geography. A ripping yarn, but don’t take it seriously.

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