As the latest James Bond film, Spectre become a global hit, and rakes 31.9 crores on opening weekend in India, despite the ‘kiss’ controversy, the one criticism by 007 fans is that this brooding, politically correct Bond is not quite the real thing.

The ‘real’ Bond—that is, the Cold War era racist, sexist, macho throwback—appears in the new novel Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz, which is the eighth book based on the character created by Ian Fleming. Today, no film could possibly have a character called Pussy Galore, who appeared in Goldfinger, and was (imagine the protests today) the leader of a lesbian crime gang, whose sexual preferences are set right by roll in the sheets with Bond. But she returns in this book, as Bond’s sultry houseguest, who gets so domesticated that the superspy starts feeling stifled. Bond girls are not meant to be fixing his breakfast, the eggs “boiled for three and a third minutes, just how you like it”! That’s just too prosaic.

Horowitz is the eighth author (after others like Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd) to have written a 007 book, since Fleming’s death in 1964. There was no way the author’s estate or the owners of the film franchise (Albert Broccoli’s family) would let such a popular character just fade away.

Trigger Mortis is not an updated, modern version of the 007 series (like the recent movies), instead it opens two weeks after Fleming’s Goldfinger (1959) ends, and so, is set in the Fifties when it was okay to have Russian villains planning to sabotage America’s space programme and bomb New York, and the chief Bond villain to be a Korean called Jason Sin. (Today, they would be the ISIS, or some such terrorist outfit).

Horowitz had access to some original, unused Fleming material, written for an unmade Bond TV series – in which 007 raced on the tough car-racing tract at Nürburgring in order to protect a popular British driver from an assassination attempt by the Russian espionage agency SMERSH. This fabulous action sequence is cleverly incorporated into Trigger Mortis.

The mandatory Bond girl is Jeopardy Lane (an improvement on Honeychile Rider) an American spy, who ends up as 007’s helper and life saver; there is a tense sequence in which Bond is buried alive and is able to push his way out of the coffin due to Ms Lane’s presence of mind.

Amidst the action sequences and some perfunctory bedroom antics, Bond actually shows sympathy towards a gay colleague (back then the closet was firmly shut), and shows that he can be ‘human’ when there pops up a line about a Maserati engine sounding like “a vast sheet of calico endlessly torn,” or Bond noticing a woman’s resemblance to Jean Seberg (the Saint Joan actress). Who’d have thought Bond stepped into a cinema hall to watch a movie.

Jason Sin is a worthy adversary, the emotionless villain (he gets a respectful back story) who gets his thrills gambling with people’s lives. In comparison, Bond, who has no qualms about killing baddies, has the decency to spare the life of an innocent young man working for Sin. And that, he believes, distinguishes one killing machine from another.

Bond fans probably won’t find much to complain about. Read it to figure out what the title means, or because you can’t put down a book that begins with the line: “It was that moment in the day when the world has had enough.”

Trigger Mortis is just begging to be turned into a movie.