Who?

I think that a fictional character has become a myth if he is universally recognized even by people who are unfamiliar with the book or other work(s) in which he appears. A measure of mythical status is that a later writer can refer, e.g., to Sherlock Holmes, without having to explain this reference to his readers. We are all too aware that Poul Anderson refers to Sherlock Holmes but here is another such reference:

"'If you wanted James Bond, you sure were mistaken.'
"She gave him a blank glance. 'Who?'
"'Never mind,' he said, largely to cover his own astonishment.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, Chapter Two, (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1968), p. 18.

Lockridge has to be astonished at Storm's ignorance of James Bond. He does not yet know that she is a time traveller from a much later civilization.

We can all too readily compare Anderson's Dominic Flandry to Bond (see here) although no such comparison is made in the texts. I recently compared Flandry's Merseian antagonists with Bond's Russian opponents (see here) although SM Stirling commented that the Merseians remind him of classical Japanese.

We cannot escape without a dose of synchronicity. Part II of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2006) is, for very good internal reasons, entitled "From Russia With Love." Larsson does not really need to tell us that this is:

"...a homage, of course, to Ian Fleming's classic novel." (p. 86)

But it is indeed a classic.