So, Sebastian Faulks has penned - with, one trusts, panache and a writing implement that doubles as a flame-thrower and emergency penis for those times when the pussies really do become too galore - 007’s centenary novel, Devil May Care, to keep readerly testosterone and revenue streams flowing until Daniel Craig can don the mantle/blue shorts once more.

Meanwhile, Charlie Higson is writing the Young Bond series, about James’s various proto-manly escapades at Eton. Thus 007 lives on for boys of all ages.

Heroines ripe for reinvention seem thinner on the ground, possibly due to a dearth of fertile literary material. The sequel to Jane Eyre would need to be the story of her attic incarceration after a breakdown under the pressure of caring for Mr Rochester and trying to master the new national curriculum. Then she could governess on the side, and pay for repairs to Thornfield Hall and the minimum wage to a maid threatening to leave for a Saturday job that got her a discount at Topshop.

Similarly, the only realistic future for Elizabeth Bennet involves her divorcing Darcy for his emotional illiteracy and refusal to make small talk with her mother. Then she’d turn her half of Pemberley into a corporate spa retreat and face ruin when her accountant realises its success is not built on her Meryton Mudwraps or pre-ball pampering packages. Rather, it owes it all to the fact that Wickham is secretly ensconced in the gate lodge and lowering his britches for every lady in the south Derbs area who is finding that supervising even the most complex loggia at home is leaving her unfulfilled.

Then again, it’s a daunting task to resurrect the school stories that once populated every girl’s childhood with an array of noble, pinafored heroines with spirits as irrepressible as their curls. They spent their school days hiding in gorse bushes to thwart art thieves in the staff quarters, yanking each other up cliff faces during storms and delivering heartfelt lectures on the importance of upholding the honour of the school, rather than undermining the whole ethos of the Lady Rippyngly-Topping Foundation by wearing the wrong colour hockey knickers during an away game at St Pleb’s.

But nowadays teachers are vexingly short of inherited Van Dycks to prop carelessly against mahogany desks. The girls are all pregnant or obese, and pulling one up a cliff is now considered only as part of advanced army fitness training. And half the book would be needed to explain to bemused youngsters the phrase "the honour of the school".

In desperation, I turned to my Mandy comics, lovingly preserved since their weekly purchase from the newsagent during the mid-80s. Alas, the characters whose adventures I once followed with breathless avidity and awe now seem slightly lacking in truly heroic capacities. Twinkle-Toed Tina fights her way out of the council estate ghetto with nothing but a pair of borrowed magic tap shoes and a dream! Lady Angela Dimwith turns her back on a life of privilege to raise a stable of orphans on potato peelings and the occasional pawned earring before dying of TB in the arms of her grieving but proud family! The Girl In The Mask stays in her mansion because her stepfather has told her she is ugly! The mask falls off one day as she is passing something shiny! She is not ugly! She can leave the house! That her stepfather may have locked her up for her own safety flits across the mind!

No. We must just keep rewatching the Buffy box set. And wait.