Pussy Galore returns in new Bond novel Trigger Mortis

The most famous of Bond girls, Pussy Galore, is set to return in a new 007 novel by Anthony Horowitz. The sultry female character will make her return in Trigger Mortis – a book based on an original Fleming idea.

Horowitz, the creator of Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, unveiled the title and a plot outline for the forthcoming Bond thriller today to mark what would have been Fleming's 107th birthday, The Guardian reports.

The new novel, due out in September, is set in 1957, two weeks after the end of Fleming's original novel Goldfinger. Trigger Mortis uses the backdrop of the Soviet-American space race and begins with an idea Fleming wrote for an unmade TV series, Murder on Wheels, in which Bond gets involved in a Formula One race in Nurburgring in Germany.

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For Horowitz, the story was an opportunity to reintroduce Pussy Galore, the violet-eyed lesbian gangster who ran a troupe of female acrobats turned cat burglars in Goldfinger. Pussy was played by Honor Blackman in the film adaptation of the novel and is thought to have been based on Blanche Blackwell, a Jamaican of Anglo-Jewish descent, who was reportedly the love of Fleming's later life.

In Horowitz's new novel, Pussy returns to kick up trouble for Bond on the eve of a historic US rocket launch. Bond will not only reunite with Pussy in the story, he will encounter another Bond girl, Jeopardy Lane, as well as a "sadistic, scheming Korean adversary hell-bent on vengeance" named Jai Seung Sin.

Horowitz is the latest contemporary novelist to be officially commissioned by the Fleming estate to write a Bond novel.

The Fleming family describes the new novel as "nail-biting", saying it could have "come from Ian's own typewriter", reports the Daily Telegraph.

Horowitz said: "It was always my intention to go back to the true Bond, which is to say, the Bond that Fleming created – and it was a fantastic bonus having some original, unseen material from the master to launch my story."

He added: "I was so glad that I was allowed to set the book two weeks after my favourite Bond novel, Goldfinger, and I'm delighted that Pussy Galore is back! It was great fun revisiting the most famous Bond girl of all – although she is by no means the only dangerous lady in Trigger Mortis."

The book will be published on September 8 by Orion Publishing.