For a start, (and I know I am going be shot down in flames here) the fact he is American is so wrong. I really believe only a British author can capture and just plain get that curious upper class snobbery and manners that are so prevalent in Fleming’s and even Amis’s books. No disrespect but you just don’t get it, as we just don’t get some of your mannerisms.
As an American, I fully agree that this is a reasonable concern. Part of the charm of Fleming's writing, for me, is the (sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle)
British-ness of the writing - descriptions, as well as dialogue - that I'm not convinced an American writer, even a very good one, is going to be able to pull off, or is even likely to attempt. Fleming might have had something of a tin ear when it came to how real Americans speak, but his own nationality, and that of his British characters, was never in question.
One of my major gripes with Gardner - and I've just finished
TMFB, so I've only a few to go - is how, particularly in the later books, he seems constantly to be pandering to his American readers...constantly translating and explaining things at length, sometimes even in the dialogue (..."as our American cousins would say"...) and tossing in American cultural references for no apparent reason.
That's certainly
not to suggest that a writer of the caliber of Jeffrey Deaver would ever be likely to engage in such silly and annoying antics; nevertheless - and I certainly hope I'm wrong - I suspect that the subtle, almost indefinable British perspective that permeates the Fleming books (and so many of my other favorites) will be lacking, if not entirely absent.
The next thing, re-boot fills me with horror. It is such a comic book geeky fan boy thing. Also it reeks like everything these days of a marketing angle. What is wrong with it just being the same old Bond? Who cares about a timeline and whether it was possible for him to have done this and that. If his whole history is ripped away from him it will simply not be Bond. Most of the films never worried.
I wonder how fans of the films - which, for the most part, I must confess I'm not - could ever seriously claim to be concerned with continuity, since the main character's face completely changes every ten years?
As for the matter of continuity with the books, if a novel set in present day is going to feature "the same old Bond", with the known and recorded history intact,
either, as an example, the events of
Goldfinger are going to have to have occurred just a few years ago, rather than in the late '50s, or we're stuck with a James Bond who is ninety years old. One tampers considerably with the history, moving events a whole fifty years along, while the alternative promises a very, very slow-paced adventure.
. I've started another one and so far it's so bland I can't even remember the title (it's a Lincoln Rhyme book). Add to this that I'm not impressed with Bond's supposed age in the new book, don't see the need for a reboot and think the whole 'Indian/Pakistanian' maid thing shows a foolhardy lack of research on his part but hey, I'm still looking forward to it. I'm quite happy to admit I've been wrong before and I have every hope that Deaver will prove me wrong again. 
