page_title: Colonel Sun
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Colonel Sun / Background
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Insel Agios Minas (Fourni), im Hintergrund die Insel Samos
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: The original creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, died in the early morning of 12 August 1964, eight months before the publication of The Man with the Golden Gun. After his death, Glidrose Productions (now Ian Fleming Publications) held the rights to Fleming's works. The company decided to publish two short stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights", on 23 June 1966.
  As the Bond character could not be copyrighted, and to retain rights in the Bond product, Glidrose decided to commission a sequel. Initially the company approached author James Leasor to write a continuation novel, but he declined. Glidrose then commissioned Amis, who wrote Colonel Sun. Critic and future novelist Sally Beauman noted that it was "unusual, not to say unprecedented, for an established author to pick up the torch in this way," though she admits that "Bond [is] too big, and too profitable, a property to be placed in the hands of an unknown."
  Fleming's wife, Ann, did not endorse any further Bond works and disliked Amis, saying that he would create "a petit bourgeois red brick Bond". 
  In 1965, Amis produced The James Bond Dossier—a critical analysis of the Bond books under his own name—and The Book of Bond, a tongue-in-cheek manual for prospective agents, using the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William ("Bill") Tanner. Amis followed these books with the 1966 novel, The Anti-Death League, which had a plot filled with popular fiction elements and helped Amis prepare for Colonel Sun.
  Amis and his wife Jane spent September 1965 holidaying on the Greek island of Spetses and Amis used his experiences as the background to the novel. Amis followed a tradition set by Fleming of using the names of people he knew or had met during the researches for his book and Amis drew on the names of people he met in Greece for Colonel Sun. The boat Bond uses—The Altair—was the name of the boat Amis and his wife used on holiday, whilst the Bond girl's fictitious colleagues, "Legakis" and "Papadogonas" were friends who helped Amis in Greece, whilst the doctor who treats Bond in Chapter two was named after Amis and Jane's own doctor.
  In a 21 May 1967 letter to Philip Larkin, Amis mentioned that he had already finished writing the Bond novel.
caption: Amis drew upon a holiday in the Aegean islands to create a realistic Greek setting.
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