Colonel Sun - Background

Background

The original creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, died in the early morning of 12 August 1964, eight months before the posthumous publication of The Man with the Golden Gun. After his death, Glidrose Productions (now Ian Fleming Publications) held the rights to Fleming's works. The company decided to publish two short stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights", on 23 June 1966.

As the Bond character could not be copyrighted, and in order to retain rights in the Bond product, Glidrose decided to commission a sequel. Initially the company approached author James Leasor to write a continuation novel, but he declined. Glidrose then commissioned Amis, who wrote Colonel Sun. Fleming's wife, Ann, did not endorse any further Bond works and disliked Amis, saying that he would create "a petit bourgeois red brick Bond".

In 1965, Amis produced The James Bond Dossier—a critical analysis of the Bond books under his own name—and The Book of Bond, a tongue-in-cheek manual for prospective agents, using the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William ("Bill") Tanner. Amis followed these books with the 1966 novel, The Anti-Death League which had a plot filled with popular fiction elements and helped Amis prepare for Colonel Sun.

Amis and his wife Jane spent September 1965 holidaying on the Greek island of Spetses and Amis used his experiences as the background to the novel. Amis followed a tradition set by Fleming of using the names of people he knew or had met during the researches for his book and Amis drew on the names of people he met in Greece for Colonel Sun. The boat Bond uses—The Altair—was the name of the boat Amis and his wife used on holiday, whilst the Bond girl's fictitious colleagues, "Legakis" and "Papadogonas" were friends who helped Amis in Greece, whilst the doctor who treats Bond in Chapter two was named after Amis and Jane's own doctor.

In a 21 May 1967 letter to Philip Larkin, Amis mentioned that he had already finished writing the Bond novel.