Colonel Sun

Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published by Jonathan Cape on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". It is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming died in 1964. The novel 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 that would implicate Britain. Bond, assisted by Ariadne Alexandrou, 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. To create a realistic setting and characters Amis drew upon a holiday he had taken in the Greek Islands. 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, with many reviewers commenting that Amis lacked Fleming's style in writing. Colonel Sun was serialised in the Daily Express in March 1968 and adapted as a comic strip in the same newspaper between 1969 and 1970. Elements from the story have been used in the Eon Productions Bond series: the 1999 film The World Is Not Enough used M's kidnapping; the name of the antagonist in the 2002 film Die Another Day, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, comes from Colonel Sun Liang-tan; and one scene inspired an element of the 2015 film Spectre.