Colonel Sun
First edition cover
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| Author |
Kingsley Amis writing as Robert Markham |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Tom Adams |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | James Bond |
| Genre | Spy fiction |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
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Publication date
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28 March 1968 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 255 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published by Jonathan Cape on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Colonel Sun is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's 1964 death. Before writing the novel, Amis wrote two other Bond related works, the literary study The James Bond Dossier and the humorous The Book of Bond. Colonel Sun centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond and his mission to track down the kidnappers of M, his superior at the Secret Service. During the mission he discovers a communist Chinese plot to cause an international incident. Bond, assisted by a Greek spy working for the Russians, finds M on a small Aegean island, rescues him and kills the two main plotters: Colonel Sun Liang-tan and a former Nazi commander, Von Richter.
Amis drew upon a holiday he had taken in the Greek islands to create a realistic Greek setting and characters. He emphasised political intrigue in the plot more than Fleming had done in the canonical Bond novels, also adding revenge to Bond's motivations by including M's kidnapping. Despite keeping a format and structure similar to Fleming's Bond novels, Colonel Sun was given mixed reviews.
Colonel Sun was serialised in the Daily Express newspaper in 1968 and adapted as a comic strip in the same newspaper in 1969–1970. Elements from the story have been used in the Eon Productions Bond series: The 1999 instalment The World Is Not Enough used M's kidnapping, whilst the villain of 2002 film Die Another Day, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, owes his name to Colonel Sun Liang-tan. Chapter 19 ('The Theory and Practice of Torture') was adapted for the torture scene in Spectre (2015). Though Blofeld replaced Sun as Bond's tormentor, much of Blofeld's dialogue in the scene was written by Amis for Sun, resulting in an acknowledgement to Amis' estate in the end title credits, though no mention of the book itself.
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