“Excellent. Excellent. Mr Bond is with us at last” (234).
After Ian Fleming suddenly died on August 12, 1964 (a handful of months before the publication of his final James Bond novel The Man with the Golden Gun), Gildrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications) sought to continue the success of Fleming’s literary legacy by publishing a string of James Bond continuation novels, much to the dismay of Fleming’s widow, Ann, who felt it cheapened her late husband’s accomplishments. Nevertheless, Gildrose first approached writers like James Leasor and Geoffrey Jenkins to carry on the saga before eventually settling on Kingsley Amis, a friend of Fleming who actually offered editorial suggestions for Fleming’s final novel The Man with the Golden Gun (though these suggestions were apparently never taken under consideration). Amis had previously published the James Bond Dossier, a guide and critical analysis of James Bond, so he seemed like a natural fit to continue the saga. The initial plan was for various writers to pen new James Bond novels under the collective nom de plume “Robert Markham,” but this was later abandoned, however not before Kingsley Amis published the first post-Fleming Bond novel, Colonel Sun, in 1968 as “Robert Markham.” Upon initial publication, despite receiving some mixed reviews, Colonel Sun soon cemented itself as a terrific, explosive, cinematic installment in the Bond canon –a fan favorite. In it, M is kidnapped by terrorists and Bond is whisked off to the idyllic Greek isles where he encounters a secret plot to disrupt a Russian peace conference by a sadistic Chinese communist terrorist who hopes to distract the Cold War powers and reignite war between the Soviet Union and the West. In 2023, latter-day Bond continuation novelist Anthony Horowitz praised Colonel Sun as the best of the Bond continuation series.
At the beginning of Colonel Sun, we first encounter James Bond golfing on a mild, sunny English afternoon with Bill Tanner (M’s chief of staff and Bond’s best friend in the Secret Service). It was last summer that Bond had his scuffle with Scaramanga and once again, Bond worries that he is going soft, becoming too routine-driven. He has recently taken a trip back to the states this year which turned out to be a sort of discourtesy visit and then a “miserable flop” out east in June in which he was sent to Hong Kong to supervise the conveying to the Red mainland of a certain Chinese man and a number of unusual stores but the man disappeared and was found nearly decapitated in an alley.
Worried about M’s health, Bond pays his boss a periodic visit at Quarterdeck where he is unwittingly tailed by several men (including a “man in sunglasses”), but upon arrival, Bond faces a violent scene. M has been taken hostage by a shadowy group of goons. Upon arrival, Bond is given a strange shot but battles his way out of the house against four men. He awakens in a police station where he learns that ex-chief petty officer Hammond and wife were murdered and M is missing (we are reminded M’s real name is Admiral Sir Miles Messervy which was first revealed in The Man with the Golden Gun). Could the culprits be international gangsters? A rival secret service agency? Who kidnapped M? A clue comes from one of the dead man (killed by Bond) who was found in Quarterdeck with a crumpled list of names and numbers in his pocket –names like “Paris” and “Antigone” direct the search to Greece. Needless to say, this is all a bit ridiculous.
Nevertheless, Bond heads to Greece where he tries to invite his own capture with the help of the staff at “Station G” headed by Stuart Thomas (who was previously agent 005 before an ocular issue prevented his ability to use firearms, and now he runs a bookstore in Greece as cover). Q Branch outfits Bond with various gadgets –including a picklock, hacksaw blades, and a midget transmitter that serves as a homing device hidden inside his clothes (though Bond apparently never actually uses the devices throughout the novel).
In a bar, Bond meets a beautiful young woman named Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek agent for the communist party and an obvious ploy to lure Bond. Despite knowing she is a plant, Bond decides to pursue this little fantasy anyway. He “rescues” Ariadne from a disagreeable Turkish man in the bar and then she leads him up to the Acropolis as a decoy where a pair of men immediately try to grab Bond until Ariadne betrays them at the last moment and Bond and Ariadne flee together in a taxi. They escape to her friends in the Greek communist resistance and soon they come upon Niko Litsas, a tanned man who is described as remarkably handsome in his mid-forties with greying black hair, an old friend of Ariadne’s father. Niko agrees to help Bond track down the terrorist cell that kidnapped M, but only after he learns that a man named “Von Richter” is involved (full name: Herr Hauptmann Ludwig von Richter). Von Richter is a Nazi war criminal who once committed unspeakable atrocities during World War II. The trio make use of Niko’s boat, the Altair, which is loaded to the teeth with weapons. It transports them around the Greek isles amid various minor misadventures –until they eventually switch boats from the Altair to another boat called the Cynthia to avoid detection, while the new “temporary captain” of the Ariadne is tortured and killed by the goons trailing Bond. They soon arrive on the island of Vrakonisi which lies between the coasts of southern Greece and Turkey –the location of an upcoming Soviet peace conference. Ariadne informs her Soviet superior in the GRU, General Igor Arenski, of a plot to disrupt the conference she has uncovered but he does not believe her. Instead, he instructs Ariadne to bring James Bond to his office so that he may earn himself the moniker of “the man who killed James Bond.”
“James Bond must be in the proper spiritual state to meet the death I shall give him. The deepest pitch of hopelessness and grief and misery a man can attain” (263).
However, Ariadne goes forward with Bond’s plan anyway in defiance of General Arenski as she, Bond, and Niko infiltrate the island of Vrakonisi to prevent destruction and rescue M, but something goes awry. On the night swim from the boat to the island, Ariadne suddenly disappears and Bond is knocked unconscious. He wakes up imprisoned in a room with the fearsome Colonel Sun Liang-tan, a nearly six-foot-tall Chinese leader of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army. Colonel Sun was a former prison interrogation guard in Pyongyang, North Korea where he first became enamored with various forms of torture and he also became fascinated with the West, particularly with British soldiers. After greeting Bond, Sun coldly and rationally addresses him about the horrors he is soon to face. First, he allows Bond to speak briefly with M who is tied up in the same room, before leading Bond that down into a sound-proof cellar where Bond is to be brutally tortured in a “squalid sadistic charade.” Sun talks about his love for Marquis de Sade and he hails that they are both about to enter into a sacred relationship together in which Bond will be slowly tortured to death; Sun’s intent is that he will detonate a massive explosion on the island to disrupt the conference and then leave behind the bodies of Bond and M to convince the Soviets that it was actually the Brits who sabotaged the “event,” and not the Chinese. But first, Sun promises to take great delight in watching Bond’s suffer. In the lengthy torture scene, Sun drills various objects into Bond’s skull via his nose and ears before asking one of his female associates to strip down in front of a badly wounded, tied-up Bond. At first, she refuses, but then she agrees to do it. However, in pure disgust at this unfolding scene, she secretly betrays her master and releases Bond’s ties to his chair while sneaking a knife into his hand. She then turns to Sun (who appears to be taking sexual gratification in this whole torture sequence) and she informs him that Bond appears to be dead. And when Sun rushes over to Bond, Bond musters all his strength and stabs Sun in the back. A medical doctor, Dr. Lohmann, who has been forced to sit nearby and watch this whole sickening charade, informs Bond that Sun is close to death. He asks if Bond would like to finish him off, but Bond shudders and mysteriously declines (how does this make any sense? It seems a stretch to imagine that Bond wouldn’t eagerly put an end to Colonel Sun at this point). Notably, much of this whole torture sequence represents one of the few moments from a Bond continuation novel in which dialogue has been added into an Eon film, in this case Spectre (indeed the estate of Kingsley Amis is even acknowledged in the credits for the film). The characterization of Colonel Moon in the film Die Another Day also appears to have been borrowed from Colonel Sun, the Greek setting can be found in the film For Your Eyes Only, and M is kidnapped in the film The World Is Not Enough. Thus, Colonel Sun seems to have left a lasting legacy on the Bond films.
At any rate, Bond rescues Niko from imprisonment elsewhere in the house (Niko promptly ventures off to kill von Richter), then Bond rescues Ariadne who has been forced into an orgy with another woman and a Sun associate named de Graaf. And finally Bond rescues M, but this comes only moments before Bond discovers a trail of blood leading out of the cellar where he had been tortured. The girl who helped him has now been viciously killed and Dr. Lohmann is also on the verge of death. “Somehow” Colonel Sun has survived his fatal wounds (at least for the time being) and he escaped the cellar leaving a trail of cruelty. Bond follows the trail of blood to an outdoor cliffside where he faces off one final time with Colonel Sun who is holding a mortar bomb. After an exchange of words, Sun attempts to toss the bomb at Bond in an effort to kill them both, but he fails and Bond suddenly dashes at him, plunging a knife into Sun’s heart.
“Quite against the cards, we’ve pulled off something that’s going to have a favourable effect on the world balance of power” (288).
In the end, Bond is praised by M and his fellow Secret Service operatives for successfully thwarting Sun’s plan. Bond is praised by M and his superior Sir Ranald Rideout (a goofy British bureaucrat who appears several times in the novel). Bond is then offered the Order of the Red Banner by the Russians for saving their peace conference, but he declines the prize. Bond then regroups with Ariadne briefly. Still smitten with her, he invites her to join him back in London, but alas she cannot. She remains a committed Soviet GRU agent and, after all, secret agents are mere “prisoners.” As Ariadne says, “We’re prisoners. But let’s enjoy our captivity when we can” (296).
Colonel Sun is certainly an impressive outing –it is a fitting pastiche to the works of Ian Fleming. Notably, Colonel Sun was published around the same time that Kingsley Amis had switched his political allegiances from left-wing to right-wing, he publicly signed a letter to Time in 1968 in support of the American war in Vietnam (in fact, Vietnam and the threat of Ho Chi Minh pops up several times in Colonel Sun). Perhaps this contrarian right-wing turn is exactly why Amis included so much talk in the novel of racial bloodlines, bone structures, inherited intelligence and so on –eugenics has long been the guiding light of right-wing politics. At any rate, every page of Colonel Sun is crammed full of action-adventure, and the main antagonist, Colonel Sun, serves as a truly ominous and unsettling villain (in some ways, he reminded me a great deal of Fleming’s Dr. Julius No). Throughout the novel, we are given scenes of Sun gazing out to sea, patiently awaiting his dramatic confrontation with Bond, adding to the dramatic tension from the start (even if his characterization fits neatly into any number of vulgar “Oriental” racial tropes). Likewise, Ariadne Alexandrou strikes me as a potent paramour for Bond (her name points us toward the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and Ariadne). The romantic partnership between Bond and Ariadne paves the way for another famous pairing of enemy spies-turned-lovers much like the partnership portrayed in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me which features Bond (of the United Kingdom) and Anya Amasova (of the Soviet Union) on a joint mission together to stop a shared enemy (not to be confused with Fleming’s novella of the same name). In Colonel Sun, the true threat of the Cold War has actually arisen in the East (China), not in the Soviet Union. In my view, this is a satisfying pivot away from the usual suspects as portrayed in the Fleming novels, but if I had a note of criticism about Colonel Sun it would be that there are one too many plot-threads and characters littered throughout the novel (it’s tough to keep them all straight: Major Piotr Gordienko, General Arenski, Von Richter, De Graaf, among many others). As Bond and crew battle Chinese communists as well as remnants of German Nazis, Colonel Sun is at times a needlessly complex, overtly racist, and farcically ridiculous novel, but hey it’s a James Bond novel. At least it packs an inviolable punch.
Amis, Kingsley. Colonel Sun. Ian Fleming Publications, London, England, 2023. Originally published in 1968 by Jonathan Cape/Gildrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications).