Colonel Sun.

AMIS, Kingsley [Writing as Robert Markham].

Item Number: 131634

London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.

First edition of the first Bond title published by Kingsley Amis. Octavo, original cloth, cartographic endpapers. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Tom Adams.

Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published 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 centers 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 emphasized 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.