Bond tracks the kidnappers to Greece, where he liaisons with Soviet spies and learns that Colonel Sun is planning – with the help of a Nazi war criminal named Von Richter — to disrupt a major peace conference hosted by the Soviets and incite a world war. After the Soviet agents are all killed in an attack, Bond must team up with a Greek Communist (and sole surviving Soviet agent) named Ariadne to try and stop Sun and Von Richter, while also rescuing M.
A quick reading of the plot makes it clear that Amis had the 007 template down, although whether Colonel Sun could pass for a Fleming book is debatable. The Bond in this book is the battered agent of Fleming’s last several adventures and fairly humorless, which is how Bond started out in the first few Fleming books. He’s also quite violent, and is the recipient of violence as well, with Colonel Sun – who enjoys inflicting pain on people — brutally torturing him at one point.
Reviews of the book upon its release were mixed, with some critics saying that Amis captured the flavor and darker edge of the character, while others thought that his Bond was just a diluted copy, missing some of the sexiness and hedonistic lifestyle that Fleming deployed. Amis did not return to the series after his single outing.
Why No Colonel Sun Movie?
Colonel Sun sold well, both in the U.K. and the U.S., although strangely no other original Bond novels followed until author John Gardner began his series in 1981 with License Renewed. Colonel Sun itself stayed in print for many years and was considered part of the 007 literary canon alongside Fleming’s works. But even though the film rights automatically went to Eon Productions – the company founded by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman that produced every James Bond film right up through 2021’s No Time to Die – Kingsley Amis discovered that Eon had no intention of adapting his book to the screen.
The reason? A couple of years after Fleming’s death, Harry Saltzman brought his own writer, a South African journalist named Geoffrey Jenkins, to the Fleming estate and the publisher with the intention of having Jenkins pen a new Bond novel. But Jenkins’ manuscript was rejected; according to U.K. magazine Infinity, it was dismissed either because the quality of the writing was subpar or because the plot was too similar to earlier Bond stories. An incensed Saltzman later reacted by reportedly swearing that Colonel Sun would never be adapted to the screen.
And yet Colonel Sun did find its way into theaters – as part of other James Bond movies. As 007’s screen exploits grew less and less faithful to the original source material, Eon Productions would cherry-pick elements of one book for use in a different movie – for example, the keelhauling scene in For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which Bond (Roger Moore) and Melina (Carole Bouquet) are dragged behind a boat, was taken from the novel Live and Let Die. In such fashion, plot points from Colonel Sun surfaced in a number of Bond pictures – all the way into the 21st century.