An attack on the Soviet headquarters kills all the agents except Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek Communist. Bond meets Soviet agents in Athens and they realise that not only is a third country behind the kidnap, but that there is a traitor in the organisation. He intends to attack the conference venue and use M and Bond's bodies to blame Great Britain for the disaster, leading to a world war. Sun had been sent to sabotage a Middle East détente conference which the Soviet Union is hosting. In the process, Bond discovers the complex military-political plans of Colonel Sun of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Intent on rescuing M, Bond follows the clues to Vrakonisi, one of the Aegean Islands. Kidnappers violently take the Secret Service chief M from his house and almost capture James Bond, who is visiting. Though Blofeld replaced Sun as Bond's tormentor, much of Blofeld's dialogue in the scene was written by Amis for Sun, resulting in an acknowledgement to Amis' estate in the end title credits, though no mention of the book itself. Chapter 19 ('The Theory and Practice of Torture') was adapted for the torture scene in Spectre (2015). 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, whilst the villain of the 2002 film Die Another Day, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, owes his name to Colonel Sun Liang-tan. Despite keeping a format and structure similar to Fleming's Bond novels, Colonel Sun was given mixed reviews.Ĭolonel Sun was serialised in the Daily Express newspaper from 18 March 1968 to 30 March 1968 and adapted as a comic strip in the same newspaper in 1969–1970. 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. 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.Īmis drew upon a holiday he had taken in the Greek islands to create a realistic Greek setting and characters.

During the mission he discovers a communist Chinese plot to cause an international incident. 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. 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 is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's 1964 death. Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published by Jonathan Cape on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym ' Robert Markham'.

Colonel Sun by Robert Markham