Remember the James Bond movie in which 007 teams up with an enemy agent to defeat a megalomaniacal supervillain? Of course you do. How about the one in which M is kidnapped and Bond must save his boss’s life at all costs? Yeah, that sounds familiar too. And let’s not forget the rogue North Korean military leader who turns up in one of the more over-the-top Bond adventures — we’re sure that rings a bell.
But can you remember the book from which all these elements were taken? Here’s a clue: it’s not one of the 12 original Bond novels written by Ian Fleming. Nor are they inspired by one of his relatively few short stories. No, the plot points above were all borrowed from Colonel Sun, the first original James Bond novel written after Fleming’s death.
Published in 1968, Colonel Sun was written under the pseudonym Robert Markham by the esteemed British author and critic Kingsley Amis, who was a fan of Fleming’s novels (he wrote a book-length critical analysis of them called The James Bond Dossier) and had even been asked by the late author’s publisher to consult on the completion of Fleming’s last 007 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, which was released after his death in 1964.
A New Sun Rises for James Bond
With the Fleming estate and the publisher, Jonathan Cape, both interested in keeping the Bond franchise going in print (even as the movies were rolling out year after year), Amis was commissioned to write a new book despite the objections of Fleming’s widow Ann. Taking place about a year after the events of The Man with the Golden Gun, the book starts off with the kidnapping of M by agents of the sadistic Colonel Liang-tan Sun from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army – the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
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.
Colonel Sun Lives
Perhaps the most obvious example is the teaming of Bond with a Communist agent, which was the crux of 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. In that movie – which has almost nothing to do with the book of the same name – Moore’s Bond goes on a mission with KGB spy Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in which the two share a wary attraction as well as a mutual distrust, just like Bond and Ariadne in Colonel Sun. Meanwhile, Pierce Brosnan’s third film as 007, 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, featured the kidnapping of M (Judi Dench) as a pivotal plot point – the motivation is different, but it was no doubt inspired by the same idea in Amis’ tale.
The two biggest lifts from the book, however, concern its villain. For 2002’s Die Another Day – Brosnan’s fourth and final turn in the role – Eon actually wanted to use the name Liang-tan Sun for the primary antagonist, a North Korean colonel (Will Yun Lee) who uses gene therapy to transform his features and takes on the identity of British tech billionaire Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). But Ian Fleming Publications demanded a higher royalty rate for the use of the name, so it was changed to Tan-Sun Moon – with a nod to Colonel Sun still in there.
Finally, a climactic scene in Spectre (2015), in which Bond (Daniel Craig) is tortured by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) through the use of neurosurgery, was almost directly taken from the scene in Colonel Sun in which Bond is brutalized by the colonel, even down to some of the dialogue (some things are different: in the book, a masseuse slips Bond a knife with which to kill Sun, unlike the exploding watch of the movie). As Infinity noted, Eon Productions actually acknowledged the Kingsley Amis estate in Spectre’s end credits.
So while Colonel Sun never officially made it to the screen, its DNA is spread out among several of the James Bond movies like the nanobot weapon in No Time to Die. And who knows? With Amazon MGM now taking full control of the Bond franchise and Denis Villeneuve winning the coveted directing job for the next movie, they might turn to Colonel Sun again at some point.
James Bond will return.
The post The Forgotten James Bond Book That Influenced the Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.
