James Bond lives again!
'A literary event'
The Guardian
'An invention of whom Ian Fleming would have been proud'
The Irish Times
The life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency... until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces, unarmed, the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun in a test that brings him to the verge of his physical endurance.
Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis first published in 1968 under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Colonel Sun is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's 1964 death. 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 centers 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. 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.
Amis drew upon a holiday he had taken in the Greek Islands to create a realistic Greek setting and characters. He emphasized 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.
Colonel Sun was serialized 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. Elements from the story have been used in the Eon Productions Bond series: The 1999 film The World Is Not Enough used M (Judi Dench)'s kidnapping, whilst the villain of the 2002 film Die Another Day, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Will Yun Lee), owes his name to Colonel Sun Liang-tan.