THE name's Joules. Olivia Joules, the latest ass-kicking, fast-living action hero. Except that where James Bond leaves swooning women and smoking guns this girl leaves a trail of panting men and perfume.

And the differences don't stop there. Where Q kits out Bond with a bomb in his Rolex, Agent Joules keeps her weapons stuffed down her bra.

Yet they both manage to save the world and bed the love interest. Joules goes one better than Bond and also finds time to ponder the meaning of life.

Only the overactive imagination of Helen 'Bridget Jones' Fielding could have produced such a character.

Like her heroine, who transforms herself from a working class lass into an international spy, Fielding has cast off her presumed station in literary life. After accidentally inventing chick-lit, Fielding has left behind Chardonnay, fags and nights in to seek out Cristal, cigars and jet-setting.

Her new heroine Olivia Joules is, in fact, everything Bridget Jones is not: glamorous, confident and clued-up, well, almost.

For try as she might Fielding can never escape the colossal shadow of Ms Jones. So although Agent Joules is simultaneously ridding the world of terrorists and writing for style magazines, she is also falling in love with the wrong men and mislaying her MI6-issue earrings.

Perhaps it is because, like all the best characters, there is a little of the author in each. In Jones Fielding took the mick out of herself, in Joules she shares her daydreams.

For example, the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists takes journalist Joules to Miami and Hollywood via a dangerous but dashing Osama bin Laden look-a-like and a sexy CIA agent. As Fielding might say to describe this madcap collision of genres and themes: it's comedy slash thriller slash romance.

Perfect film fodder, then. And Renee Zellweger won't even need to put on weight to play the first true Bond girl.

Olivia Joules and The Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding, (Picador, £12.99 hardback).