The Moneypenny Diaries Edited by Kate Westbrook John Murray, 272pp, £12.99 ISBN 0719567408 James Bond: the man and his world Henry Chancellor John Murray, 250pp, £20 Ian Fleming and James Bond: the cultural politics of 007 Edited by Edward P Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman Indiana University Press, 283pp, £12.95 Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design Christopher Frayling Faber & Faber, 316pp, £20

Between 1953 and 1966, Ian Fleming published a book a year about James Bond. Since Fleming's death in 1964 (the last two books came out posthumously), that rate of production has barely slowed. It would be nice to say that Bond has been kept alive by a love of Fleming's muscular prose, but all his imitators - Kingsley Amis aside - have had tin ears. Certainly, his scrupulously readable style counts for nothing in Kate Westbrook's risible parody The Moneypenny Diaries.

If Bond lives on, it is because of the movies. As I write, Daniel Craig has just been cast as the new Bond. Given that he was already a thirtysomething when he sprang to life, our least secret secret agent ought by now to be hobbling around on a Zimmer frame (with built-in Martini shaker). Still, it was more than his recent death that prevented John Mills from being a shoo-in. Age shall not wither 007, nor custom stale his infinite variety. His name may forever be Bond, James Bond, but his face must be a moveable feast if we are to continue dining out on his spurious thrills.

Dining out is a large part of Bond's life, of course. As Henry Chancellor reminds us in James Bond: the man and his world, Fleming's 007 was fonder of fatty food than a fitster secret agent perhaps ought to have been. "Please buy us lunch," he orders Tilly Masterson in the novel Goldfinger. "For me, six inches of Lyon sausage, a loaf of bread, and half a litre of Macon with the cork pulled." Fleming's Bond was in a lot better shape than I am, but I still don't understand how he could see after a lunch like that, let alone point a gun accurately. And pointing a gun accurately is what Bond was put on this earth for.

Actually, it's what he was put on a secret service expense account for. Chancellor has a habit of not quite getting to the point, but he almost manages to make plain that Bond's high life came courtesy of the tax-payer. While it is commonplace to suggest that 007 was a creation of the cold war, it is equally true to say he was a product of the welfare state. Blanc de Blancs Brut '43 is undoubtedly delightful, but it must taste even better when someone else is picking up the tab. Luckily, Fleming had a knack for making us not mind we were paying the bill for something we never got to taste. Handsome as he was with that dark comma of hair falling across his brow, Bond was all the more attractive because of his conspicuous consumption in an age of austerity.

What made him even more attractive was his ability to get the job done when all around him - especially the Americans - had screwed up. Such derring-do went down well in an England adjusting to losing the peace. Which is another way of saying that Fleming, who had trained as a journalist and was a stickler for facts, never told the truth about his home country. Work your way through Bond and you will find no reference to the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, nor to how in 1956, when 007 was but four books old, his homeland was rocked by the Suez crisis. The imperial game was up, but Fleming did his best to keep it going for another decade.

According to Skip Willman, his politicking did not stop there. Willman thinks one of the reasons JFK wanted to oust Castro in Cuba was that he had been reading From Russia With Love. At least I think that's what he's saying. He is one of the contributors to (and editors of) Ian Fleming and James Bond: the cultural politics of 007, and like all the other profs gathered therein, he is hard to follow. In this instance, we learn that Fleming's "legitimate background in British intelligence . . . and his familiarity with the Caribbean [meant that he] represented for the Kennedys what Jacques Lacan calls 'the subject supposed to know', the 'central axis, anchor, of the phenomenon of transference'". That may be so, but there can be no doubt that, for Skip and co, Lacan himself (along with Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek and Guattari ) is a bit of a "subject supposed to know".

It is Freud, though, who takes centre stage in my favourite essay, Dennis W Allen's "Alimentary, Dr Leiter: anal anxiety in Diamonds Are Forever". According to Allen, Sean Connery's last Bond movie proper isn't about smuggling and world domination, but about 007's uncertain sociosexual status and concomitant fearful fantasies of sodomy. As Connery's Bond might have said: "Bugger me."

With relief one turns to Christopher Frayling's latest work of highbrow common sense, Ken Adam. Ken who? Ken "the guy who dreamed up just about any 007 movie set you can call to mind" Adam, that's who. Adam's designs are one reason why the early Bond movies have dated so little. When ITV reran the whole series earlier this year, it did so in reverse order, with the result that the pictures seemed to get more rather than less modern. When Adam (and John Barry, the composer of the lyrically jazzy scores of the first dozen or so movies) got too expensive for the notoriously stingy producers, the series became what it had at heart always been - a bunch of junk.

Nobody, not even Willman and Allen, could pretend we are talking about great art here. Unlike John le Carre's George Smiley, Bond is not designed to illuminate some hitherto unlit quarter of the human condition. But who wants to read about hitherto unlit quarters of the human condition all the time? Bond simplifies life, but we would hardly be alive to life's complexities if we didn't enjoy their being simplified now and again. Shortly before his death, Fleming said his mission in life was to get "intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages . . . to turn over the page". Mission accomplished.

Christopher Bray's Michael Caine: a class act is out now from Faber & Faber

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