Fifty years ago, the literary giant wrote a James Bond novel under a pseudonym. With all the shoddy spies and friendly Soviets, it is staggeringly un-Fleming-like The omens were good when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel not written by Ian Fleming, 50 years ago today. 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. Amis was the obvious heir. At first, Colonel Sun appears to be a super-faithful quasi-pastiche, opening (like Goldfinger) with 007 wielding a putter. But after that, everything gets very perplexing. 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. 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. 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. Continue reading...
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