Excellent responses Dan Lighter and Zencat. I think you both get at the ongoing problems in the Bond community regarding any post-Fleming novels, and it is somewhat reminiscent of the patronizing attitudes I would get when I would tell people that Roger Moore was my favorite Bond, or that I find FRWL (the movie) boring and tedious. Some people have never been able to accept life after Connery, or Fleming....
So, then, how do you explain the fact that many of us here were hugely excited about DEVIL MAY CARE prior to its publication?
The fact is, we were let down by the content, not the concept. It's not that we couldn't let go of Fleming - it that's DEVIL MAY CARE proved to be a significantly worse book than any of us had expected.
If there are "ongoing problems in the Bond community regarding any post-Fleming novels", the problem is that people have read those novels and found that, by and large, they're total crap.
I believe there's an observation in
The Bond Files by Lane and Simpson to the effect that IFP never produced the continuation novels to the same standard of quality as was the case (even at their worst) with the Eon films. Let's be honest: the continuation novels are largely just cheap cash-cow cash-ins (although I do appreciate that IFP's standards have risen somewhat in recent years). They're knockoffs, written quickly, and were brought into this world solely to keep a copyright going.
I think you'll find that "the Bond community" is far more open-minded than most authors, critics and regular members of the public to the notion that people other than Fleming can write decent Bond novels. The problem is, it hasn't happened very often.
I speak, by the way, as someone who considers Faulks' ENGLEBY and A FOOL'S ALPHABET among the most amazing books he's ever read, so it's not as though I
wanted to dislike DEVIL MAY CARE. I had two big stakes in it: I was a Bond fan and I was also a Faulks fan. However, it just isn't very good, pure and simple. It's been bettered by some of CBn's own fanfic writers, such as clinkeroo and Jim.