Amis’s introduction of Sun is not unlike a Crufts judge inspecting an intriguing breed: “He was tall for a Chinese … one of the northern types akin to the Thamba Tibetan, big-boned and long-headed. Sun is ostensibly the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals. On first sharing ouzo with the book’s female lead, Ariadne, “Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, ‘classical’ look.” Of two men she introduces him to, “one was in his mid-30s, dark, good-looking, a little overweight: Greek … the other grey, dried-up, close-cropped: Russian”. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like.Īmis channelling Fleming – who died in 1964 – is a connoisseur of ethnicities, loftily informing us when sketching a woman (“a cocktail of heredities”) forced to sleep with Sun’s goons that Albanians “are much less a race than the end-product of successive admixtures with the native stock – Latin, Slavonic, Greek, Turco-Tatar”. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. Photograph: PA WireĬolonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. Kingsley Amis in 1965, three years before the publication of Colonel Sun.

And when 007 heads to Greece, the agency doesn’t become any more impressive: our (MI6) Man in Athens is taken out, so Bond must enlist locals for sidekicks. It’s not only him the whole of MI6 come across as such a hapless outfit that a carful of D-grade goons can easily kidnap its leader and nearly kill or capture its best agent the setting in Berkshire, AKA Berks, may be a clue to Amis’s view of it. Heading off post-golf to see his boss for supper, Bond fails to notice the foreign agents following his car, or that he’s leading them to the home counties mansion of M. But after that, everything gets very perplexing. Amis was the obvious heir.Īt first, Colonel Sun appears to be a super-faithful quasi-pastiche, opening (like Goldfinger) with 007 wielding a putter. The Lucky Jim author was already moonlighting in genre fiction and was such a Bond buff that he’d produced not one but two guides to him and his world.

The omens were good when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel not written by Ian Fleming, 50 years ago today.

Colonel Sun by Robert Markham