In the first couple of pages of Colonel Sun (released in 1968), Kingsley Amis writes that the story takes place in September the year after The Man With The Golden Gun affair (1964), which would place it in the year 1965. Meanwhile, during the run up to the release of Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks and/or IFP said his story occurs in 1967, so there you go -- The Man With The Golden Gun then Colonel Sun then Devil May Care.
That doesn't work because, as already mentioned, in Chapter 14 of Colonel Sun Ariadne says: 'You remember Oleg Penkovski, the GRU colonel who spied for the West with that English businessman, Greville Wynne, and committed suicide in prison in 1965.' This means that the earliest CS takes place is in 1966. 'You remember Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008' is not something anyone will say until 2009 or later.
Amis' reference to the Scaramanga adventure taking place 'last summer' is simply convention. Bond does not live in real time. An extreme example is the films - do you really think that the active agent who took on Dr No can still have been serving after the Cold War ended, over four decades later? The books work the same way, but it's easier to fudge because there's fewer years. Each book takes place 'a few months' or something similar after the last one. But together they all take place over a much longer period of time. There are two timelines, both of them hazy. That's how most series work, and I'm amazed so many Bond fans don't seem able to grasp it!
Faulks' book doesn't work as you've described either, because Bond starts the book recovering from the events of Golden Gun, not Colonel Sun. If it were the latter, you would expect him to do just as Amis did when referring to Scaramanga's slug in the abdomen, and refer to the rather brutal torture he's most recently been through. Similarly, M would be the more likely man to have gone on a sabbatical after Colonel Sun, and one would expect at least a passing reference to the fact that he was recently kidnapped. We don't have any of this. Here's a quote from an interview with Faulks in the Times about this:
'"The way I attacked it was trying to think of something the villain could do that wasn’t gold, wasn’t diamonds, wasn’t bird droppings – which is what Dr No is incredibly into. And I thought, well, what about drugs? Because I’d already decided it was going to be a period piece. And I figured the last novel was set in 1965, and Bond was in a very bad way and needed time to get back on full form, so it had to be 1967."'
I think this quote reveals precisely the problem with doing this sort of thing: the author is not using the same logic at all! By the last novel, does he mean Golden Gun or Colonel Sun? It can't be either. Fleming died in 1964, and there's absolutely no reason for thinking he had broken the habit of the rest of the series and written something set in the future. Colonel Sun has to be 1966 at the earliest, as explained above. But Faulks probably just looked at the publication date of Golden Gun, and went with that. The next piece of logic is equally thin - he was in a bad way after it and needed time to get back to full form 'so it had to be 1967'. Two years - why? Why not four months? Why, frankly, didn't Faulks go for 1968, which was a year of massive social upheaval, precisely 40 years before the publication date of his novel, and which would have given him a real opportunity to use his most loved location, Paris? Because he's a writer, and he thought of something else, that's why.
A close examination of the Bond novels doesn't reveal a consistent chronology: it reveals very starkly that neither Faulks nor Amis nor Fleming thought very closely about the issue.
