131 replies to this topic

[Trident]

First of all, I have to state that I'm quite an enormous fan of 'Colonel Sun'. But I also have to confess that this fondness, on sober reflection, stems to a large deal on my fondness for Amis, on my fondness for a 60's period continuation, my personal liking of CS first few chapters and, perhaps most of all, on what CS (and possible further entries by Amis!) could have been. Wicked, isn't it? And to further the wickedness here, I'm going to make my point for/against CS by comparing it not to Fleming's material but to Peter O'Donnell's.

Now, if I take a closer look at CS I find the premiss at the start, M's kidnapping a particular strong and interesting new twist. Really endless possibilities and potential there. What do the kidnappers want? What kind of info can be extracted from M? How many politicians, how many agents must fear for their careers, their lives? Most gruesome possibility: was it an abduction at all? Or the covert exfiltration of a defector? Amis could have gone everywhere from there.

Unfortunately, he went nowhere. From the moment M is in his captors hands, all the potential of this situation is neglected. Sun holds the head of a major western intelligence service and doesn't make use of it! This is really incredible. Furthermore, he really only intends to use this asset as a corpse to make an phenomenally unbelievable plot even more mind-boggling. It's been pointed out already: the head of the SIS will hardly be an acting part of any field mission; and certainly not a black op like the assault on a Russian meeting in a third state. This is a really ed up idea that goes far beyond weapons-of-mass-deception and war-on-whatever into la-la-land. God, even Goldfinger's giant bank robbery looks sane and elaborate compared to this.

All along Sun himself shows little concern for the holes in this fairy-tale. His major concern is to get Bond into his hands and give him an extended version of the mother-of-all-SM-sessions, complete with a very private confession of his coming out and the ludicrous hope that Bond may be so kind as to share a little of Sun's feelings. While sufficiently wicked, lunatic and sadistic, the whole affair leaves readers (and Bond, for that matter) still relatively unshaken.

Now let's just take a look at Peter O'Donnell's 'The Silver Mistress'. It has the same basic plot idea, abduction of a major intelligence figure, but makes infinitely more use of it. Tarrant, the M figure, is kidnapped but this time his disappearence is covered as a fatal accident, the body missing, presumeably lost in a river. Nobody is looking for Tarrant after a certain point, giving his abductors ample time to break his resistance and extract all relevant information from their victim. How long can Tarrant withstand torture, hunger, humiliation? Is there any hope that his service, his friend Modesty is looking for him? Can they find a trace of the people holding him?

Meanwhile, there is Modesty Blaise, not giving up the hope to find out what happened to Tarrant, doggedly holding on to her belief that he's still alive. And in perilious danger. An of course she finds a lead to the place Tarrant is held. Plotwise, apart from the silly plan to bomb Russians and make it stick to the British, it's an almost mirror image to CS, abduction, hideout, torture, even a couple of professional hookers for fun, rest and recreation.

Where is the sadism? you may ask. Oh, it's there. Blaise and Garvin, once they identified their target, start a rescue mission. Not all things work out according to plan and they are confronted by Sexton, a martial artist superior to both Modesty and Willie. And Sexton relishes his superiority, sadism aplenty.

Not enough for your tastes? Sexton lacks sexuality and 'kink'? Ok, he doesn't seem to get off while he pierces eardrums or similar refined versions of sexual intercourse. But take a quick look at Mrs Fothergill from O'Donnell's 'Modesty Blaise'. She's the one to look for when in dire need of a sadistic psychopath. In fact I'm sure her number can be found on the walls of a few hundred phoneboxes under 'very special services'. She's not so much into toys and bondage, rather likes her passtime company to be free of ties. But she's still far more of a deadly villainous monster than Colonel Sun could ever hope to be.

I don't want to give away too much here. But if you really like 'Colonel Sun', as I do, you ought to give 'The Silver Mistress' a try. And in comparison I sadly have to note here that CS falls short IMHO.

[spynovelfan]

Nobody's denying Fleming had flawed prose - whose is flawless? I think Hitch's response was to Loomis saying 'A lot of Fleming's prose is awful'. Full stop. I'm perfectly prepared to have a discussion about Fleming's weaknesses as a writer, and see no reason why we can't do it here. But if I were to pop in on a collection of rampant Graham Greene fans and say 'A lot of Greene's prose is awful' I might be asked for a little more substance, too, don't you think?

As we've gone down this road... I think Fleming was a brilliant prose stylist whose work both went counter to and re-invented the thriller and was, independently of the films, hugely influential in its own right. I've shown examples in another thread, but I suspect there are many more that can't be proved because they came after the release of the film of DR NO.

I think The Times' 1968 review of COLONEL SUN astutely recognised many of Fleming's strengths: 'the patina of sophisticated hedonism that made Bond the great pop-hero', 'loving relish of food', 'sustained sexuality', 'carefully accurate, detailed descriptions of the big set-pieces (card game or ski-run)', 'off-beat kinkiness' of both heroes and villains, the latter of whom have 'final, chilling rococo touches'. 'Undoubtedly Ian Fleming created something completely original and captivating (underscored if anything by the violence of the anti-Bond faction); the adventures added new images to the language, created new taste-patterns, even. His touch was, for the most part, sure and inimitable.'

At the risk of irritating everyone, here's a little piece I wrote about how I think Fleming's prose worked, even when it might seem he was writing a meaningless digression. Some of you might have read it on page 13 of another thread, but some might not have done.

'James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet's. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. A fine à l'eau is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A quart de champagne or a champagne à l'orange is all right before luncheon, but in the evening one quart leads to another quart and a bottle of indifferent champagne is a bad foundation for the night. Pernod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its liquorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing — an Americano — Bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda he always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.'

This, of course, is from Ian Fleming's short story FROM A VIEW TO A KILL, published in 1960. In Chapter 20 of DEVIL MAY CARE, we have the following:

'[Bond] contented himself with buying a suitably risqué postcard for Moneypenny and went to a small pavement café on rue des Bourdonnais to write it. He ordered an Americano - Campari, Cinzano, lemon peel and Perrier - not because he particularly liked it but because a French café was not a place in his view for a serious drink.

It was surprisingly good, the zest of the lemon cutting through the sweetness of the vermouth, and Bond felt almost fully restored as he left some coins on the zinc-topped table and stood up.'

In its review of DEVIL MAY CARE(http://online.wsj.co...=googlenews_wsj), the Wall Street Journal pointed out the difference between Fleming and Faulks using precisely these two passages: 'Mr. Faulks chops all [Fleming's] delightful froth down to joyless paraphrase.' But I think it's more than that. There's purpose to the froth, and it's what drives the tension in Fleming's story. Faulks loses a few words but also the angle, and he doesn't provide a more interesting one to take its place. Fleming states that Bond feels the Americano is a 'poor drink', damning it with the bitingly faint praise that it is the 'least offensive of the musical comedy drinks'. Faulks tones down Bond's view: now, he merely doesn't particularly like it. A man can, of course, change his mind about a drink, depending on the cards life deals him, what mood he's in at that moment or how the café serves it, and Faulks does note that Bond finds the drink 'surprisingly' good. But it's still a little odd that he does. Fouquet's would have known how to make a decent Americano - why has this anonymous café's hit the spot? Why has Bond changed his mind about a drink he was so insistently and eloquently dismissive of a few years earlier? We don't know, because Faulks has moved on.

These brief passages show a great deal about these two writers, and the importance of seemingly minor details in thrillers of this kind. Faulks, a few lines later, tells us that Bond 'had time to kill'. That's a dangerous thing to write in a thriller. Fleming's Bond often had time to kill, and his passage, and most of FROM A VIEW TO A KILL, in fact, demonstrates it. But Fleming doesn't tell us that Bond has time to kill; he shows him killing it, rather spectacularly. Faulks deals quickly with the ordering of the drink, fails to give Bond any interesting reaction to it and then tells us that his main character is at a loose end. In a thriller, that's the last thing you want to be told by the writer. Fleming knew that he did not always hurry his action along fast enough. In his 1962 article HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER, he wrote:

'I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him.'

Fleming was interested in creating the exciting, memorable elements of spy thrillers – the fantastic villain, the extraordinary conspiracy, the beautiful girl; stringing them into a coherent and continually suspenseful story was less important to him. In HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER, Fleming discusses his use of brands at some length. He says he has two methods of making readers swallow his fantastic plots:

'First, the speed of narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. Real names of things come in useful: a Ronson lighter, a 4½ litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London. All are points to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.'

Fleming has often been credited with introducing the brand into the thriller, but the device had been used before - and to strikingly similar effect. In THE SCARLET IMPOSTOR by Dennis Wheatley, a best-seller published in 1940, British secret agent Gregory Sallust visits Paris on a mission:

'Whenever he stayed in the French capital he put up at the St Regis, in the Rue Jean Goujon, just off the Champs Elysées. It was a quiet hotel and Gregory preferred it to the larger places, although it was quite as expensive, because each of the rooms was furnished with individual pieces. Many of them were valuable antiques, giving the place the atmosphere of a beautifully furnished private house rather than of an hotel, and Gregory liked luxury and comfort whenever he could get it.'

Moments of great luxury and comfort have been mainstays in the lives of fictional secret agents since the birth of the thriller in the early 20th century, but Wheatley had to work much harder to make his often highly implausible plot developments convince; he did this with breakneck pacing supported by a carefully cultivated insider's tone. He was one of the first thriller-writers to give brands their real names; publishers generally saw the practice as free advertising and required authors to invent names. So E Phillips Oppenheim's novels featured the Milan Hotel, modelled on the Savoy, and Valentine Williams' characters smoked Melania cigarettes, a non-existent brand that could only be bought at London’s equally non-existent Dionysus Club. In Sax Rohmer's novels, real-life political figures were also disguised, so Hitler became 'Rudolph Adlon' and Mussolini 'Monaghani'. An exception seems to have been cars. Although Leslie Charteris' Saint drove non-existent Furillacs and Hirondels, and Dornford Yates' characters usually favoured the similarly fictional Lowland, many other thriller characters drove Rolls Royces, Daimlers, Mercedes-Benzes and Bentleys.

But Wheatley took the use of brand names to a whole new level. In THE SCARLET IMPOSTOR alone, Sallust drinks two Bacardis and pineapple juice (his favourite cocktail), some pre-1914 Mentzendorff Kümmel, a Vermouth Cassis and a few swigs of unspecified brandy. We learn that his gun is a Mauser automatic and his tailor West's of Savile Row. He escapes from pursuing Nazis on a twin-cylinder BMW motorbike and tells a beautiful German aristocrat he hopes to dine with her in the Ritz after the war. And he smokes Sullivans' Turkish mixture cigarettes, which he keeps in a 'plain engine-turned gold case with no monogram or initials'. With the case, the unbranded becomes the ultimate brand, the anonymity telling us this is a man who can appreciate a simple and well-crafted object, regardless of whether or not it has a name. But note that it is still gold and, the crucial telling detail, 'engine-turned' - that's solid exactitude. And, of course, the simplicity of the case gives credence to the special Turkish mixture cigarettes it contains: they weren't picked for the cachet, but for the same love of good quality. It's pure coincidence that they're that exclusive.

After checking into the St Regis in Paris, Sallust's mission soon requires him to woo a young Frenchwoman called Collette. He's not sure where to take her out to dinner. After considering and rejecting the Tour d'Argent, the Café de Paris and Pocardi's for various reasons, he remembers the Vert Galant, 'down by the river on the right bank':

'Quiet and unostentatious, it was yet one of the oldest-established restaurants in Paris, and the cooking there was excellent.'

Collette approves of his choice: 'Real French cooking - not the sort of messed-up things they make for you English and the Americans in the smart places - so I have been told. I have never been there and I'd love to go, but I'm afraid you will find it very expensive.'

Wheatley is hammering home the idea that his agent is not just wealthy (though he takes care to less us know he is that), but has a connoisseur's tastes - and in 1940 as now, knowing the place beloved by the locals is the ultimate insider one-upmanship.

In FROM A VIEW TO A KILL, published two decades later, Fleming upped the ante on this device even further. Bond doesn’t stay in a lesser known but nevertheless expensive hotel like St Regis: he stays in the Terminus Nord, 'because he liked station hotels and because this was the least pretentious and anonymous of them'. And, as in Wheatley, the restaurants Bond chooses to dine in are never the obvious ones:

'For dinner, Bond went to one of the great restaurants — Véfour, the Caneton, Lucas-Carton or the Cochon d'Or. These he considered, whatever Michelin might say about the Tour d'Argent, Maxims and the like, to have somehow avoided the tarnish of the expense account and the dollar.'

Such passages constitute Fleming's 'points to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure'. But here we see that brands also served another function for this 'meta-branded expert', as Kingsley Amis called him in THE JAMES BOND DOSSIER, which they did not for Wheatley or any other previous thriller-writer: revelation of character. Fleming used 'the real names of things' to show precisely what Sebastian Faulks has claimed Bond does not have, his inner life. Fleming may appear to be going nowhere in his rather long description of Bond drinking in a Parisian café, but in fact he is showing us a surprising amount about Bond's character. By giving Bond forceful, unexpected and intriguing feelings about such an apparently trivial matter as ordering a drink, Fleming brings it to life and puts it centre-stage: this is not a trivial matter to James Bond. This is, as Fleming put it, 'the poetry of things'. It's not just a scene in which a character decides what to drink at a Paris café, but a statement of intent, a philosophy, a weighted moment. A man's life boils down to what he drinks at a Paris café.

So it is not just a matter of the character using these brands; he also has an attitude towards them. They are sometimes very strong attitudes: Bond knows the best cafés in Paris and knows a lot about drinks - so much so that he's a close-to-insufferable snob about them. He condescends to have a 'musical comedy drink' in a famous Paris bar. He doesn't care what Michelin says about Maxim's - he knows what he feels about it, and that's all that matters. This is his life, his experience, and he has utter faith in his own taste. It would have been too obvious to have Bond unquestioningly adore everything about Paris (as Faulks does) - Bond resents it, wants more from it and feels he is its superior. He decides to give Paris 'one more chance', but really, it has no hope of convincing him:

'Sitting in Fouquet's, waiting for his Americano, Bond smiled at his vehemence. He knew that he was only playing at this fantasy for the satisfaction of launching a last kick at a town he had cordially disliked since the War. Since 1945, he had not had a happy day in Paris. It was not that the town had sold its body. Many towns have done that. It was its heart that was gone — pawned to the tourists, pawned to the Russians and Roumanians and Bulgars, pawned to the scum of the world who had gradually taken the town over. And, of course, pawned to the Germans. You could see it in the people's eyes — sullen, envious, ashamed. Architecture? Bond glanced across the pavement at the shiny black ribbons of cars off which the sun glinted painfully. Everywhere it was the same as in the Champs-Elysées. There were only two hours in which you could even see the town — between five and seven in the morning. After seven it was engulfed in a thundering stream of black metal with which no beautiful buildings, no spacious, tree-lined boulevards, could compete.

The waiter's tray clattered down on the marble-topped table. With a slick one-handed jerk that Bond had never been able to copy, the waiter's bottle-opener prised the cap off the Perrier. The man slipped the tab under the ice-bucket, said a mechanical "Voilà, M'sieur" and darted away. Bond put ice into his drink, filled it to the top with soda and took a long pull at it. He sat back and lit a Laurens jaune.'

Fleming used brands to establish a crucial part of Bond's character: that he is his own man. Bond brands everything around him, with his own taste. He doesn't pursue what is perceived to be the best, but makes up his own mind what is best. In doing so, he has often defined it - many of the brands Fleming picked out for his hero are still basking in the glow of Bond’s approval. It is hard won.

[spynovelfan]

First of all, I have to state that I'm quite an enormous fan of 'Colonel Sun'. But I also have to confess that this fondness, on sober reflection, stems to a large deal on my fondness for Amis, on my fondness for a 60's period continuation, my personal liking of CS first few chapters and, perhaps most of all, on what CS (and possible further entries by Amis!) could have been. Wicked, isn't it?

Fondness for Amis? I think when I first read it I was also a little drawn to the fact that it was rather arcane and forgotten. 'I know this Bond novel you don't know, and it was written by Kingsley Amis in the Sixties and it's really rather good' sort of thing.

Now, if I take a closer look at CS I find the premiss at the start, M's kidnapping a particular strong and interesting new twist. Really endless possibilities and potential there. What do the kidnappers want? What kind of info can be extracted from M? How many politicians, how many agents must fear for their careers, their lives? Most gruesome possibility: was it an abduction at all? Or the covert exfiltration of a defector? Amis could have gone everywhere from there.

Unfortunately, he went nowhere. From the moment M is in his captors hands, all the potential of this situation is neglected. Sun holds the head of a major western intelligence service and doesn't make use of it! This is really incredible. Furthermore, he really only intends to use this asset as a corpse to make an phenomenally unbelievable plot even more mind-boggling. It's been pointed out already: the head of the SIS will hardly be an acting part of any field mission; and certainly not a black op like the assault on a Russian meeting in a third state. All along Sun himself shows little concern for the holes in this fairy-tale.

The more I think about it, the more it would seem that Sun's attitude suggests that M was fitted in retro-actively. Say, for the sake of speculation, that Amis had originally envisioned writing something more like Modesty Blaise. He has a beautiful Greek heroine, Ariadne, and some kind of accomplice a la Garvin/Bond. The Garvin/Bond character is kidnapped by Sun, with all the ramifications Sun wants (reminiscent of FRWL). O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise strip MISTER SUN ran in the Evening Standard between June and December 1964: the plot features the kidnapping of Blaise's manservant Weng by the titular Hong Kong drug baron (and we know Amis liked Modesty Blaise). So, continuining the speculation, Amis gets working on his O'Donnell/Fleming-esque thriller towards the end of 1965. When he finally receives the contract from Glidrose, he rethinks. Bond takes centre-stage, and the kidnapped character becomes M. It would explain the gaping holes in Sun's logic - Amis simply forgot to fix that stuff.

I think something along these lines may have happened. If it had, how ironic the cross-influences would be! Modesty Blaise, of course, was the result of O'Donnell being asked to create a Bond-esque character. Amis is influenced by the character for COLONEL SUN (1968). O'Donnell in turn is influenced by Amis' plot for the Modesty Blaise novel THE SILVER MISTRESS (1973).

It would be very interesting to read Amis' notes for CS to see how the storyline developed.

[Safari Suit]

Bloody hell! Yes I think you've made your case

[Trident]

First of all, I have to state that I'm quite an enormous fan of 'Colonel Sun'. But I also have to confess that this fondness, on sober reflection, stems to a large deal on my fondness for Amis, on my fondness for a 60's period continuation, my personal liking of CS first few chapters and, perhaps most of all, on what CS (and possible further entries by Amis!) could have been. Wicked, isn't it?

Fondness for Amis? I think when I first read it I was also a little drawn to the fact that it was rather arcane and forgotten. 'I know this Bond novel you don't know, and it was written by Kingsley Amis in the Sixties and it's really rather good' sort of thing.


Btw: some splendid points about Fleming's style and routine. Again, very fine work!

Now, if I take a closer look at CS I find the premiss at the start, M's kidnapping a particular strong and interesting new twist. Really endless possibilities and potential there. What do the kidnappers want? What kind of info can be extracted from M? How many politicians, how many agents must fear for their careers, their lives? Most gruesome possibility: was it an abduction at all? Or the covert exfiltration of a defector? Amis could have gone everywhere from there.

Unfortunately, he went nowhere. From the moment M is in his captors hands, all the potential of this situation is neglected. Sun holds the head of a major western intelligence service and doesn't make use of it! This is really incredible. Furthermore, he really only intends to use this asset as a corpse to make an phenomenally unbelievable plot even more mind-boggling. It's been pointed out already: the head of the SIS will hardly be an acting part of any field mission; and certainly not a black op like the assault on a Russian meeting in a third state. All along Sun himself shows little concern for the holes in this fairy-tale.

The more I think about it, the more it would seem that Sun's attitude suggests that M was fitted in retro-actively. Say, for the sake of speculation, that Amis had originally envisioned writing something more like Modesty Blaise. He has a beautiful Greek heroine, Ariadne, and some kind of accomplice a la Garvin/Bond. The Garvin/Bond character is kidnapped by Sun, with all the ramifications Sun wants (reminiscent of FRWL). O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise strip MISTER SUN ran in the Evening Standard between June and December 1964: the plot features the kidnapping of Blaise's manservant Weng by the titular Hong Kong drug baron (and we know Amis liked Modesty Blaise). So, continuining the speculation, Amis gets working on his O'Donnell/Fleming-esque thriller towards the end of 1965. When he finally receives the contract from Glidrose, he rethinks. Bond takes centre-stage, and the kidnapped character becomes M. It would explain the gaping holes in Sun's logic - Amis simply forgot to fix that stuff.

I think something along these lines may have happened. If it had, how ironic the cross-influences would be! Modesty Blaise, of course, was the result of O'Donnell being asked to create a Bond-esque character. Amis is influenced by the character for COLONEL SUN (1968). O'Donnell in turn is influenced by Amis' plot for the Modesty Blaise novel THE SILVER MISTRESS (1973).

It would be very interesting to read Amis' notes for CS to see how the storyline developed.

Actually, the idea to kidnap the M figure is even a bit older. 'The Silver Mistress' recycles a plot originally used in the newspaper strip story 'Top Traitor' from 20. September 1965 to 12. February 1966. Basically the same idea to fetch and squeeze Tarrant plus the suggestions that he's defected. Modesty and Willie first find out the real traitor, then set out to free Tarrant who's held in a mountain castle in a kind of fairy-tale feudal Bavaria-Austria mixture. Just around the time Amis woud have worked on his own book. Interesting, isn't it?

Perhaps 'Colonel Sun' skips the obvious questions about M's abduction and the resulting possibilities for this very reason: Had this Sir Ranald Rideout(?) questioned M's reliability, the whole affair would have looked too much like a rip-off?

[spynovelfan]

Very interesting indeed, Trident. I think the crucial point here is that Amis went to Greece in the first week of September 1965, by his own account to start the novel that became COLONEL SUN. And yet not only did the novel not come out until 1968, we know that Peter Fleming only wrote to Ann Fleming to suggest giving Amis the green light on March 15 1966.

Even presuming that Ann had telephoned Peter to say 'Yes, fine' and the contract was drawn up and signed that very day, that still leaves Amis starting his novel over six months previously, with no contract, apparently featuring the world's best known secret agent, whose copyright Amis did not have any part of. It's stretching credulity to think Amis was naive enough to just write a James Bond thriller without permission, with no back-up plan in case he didn't get it. Amis was pretty canny: around this time he turned down a request from Playboy to write about detective fiction, and in his letter to his agents explaining why, he broke down precisely how long it would take him to do the job. About a month to read all the thrillers, then a week to write the piece. He stated that he needed to have an income of 30 grand a year, so dividing up the time, he'd need at least 3 grand from Playboy to justify doing it.

So this is not a writer who would idly embark on a long-term project to write a novel that he knew beforehand might never be published. Either he was writing a thriller of his own, which he then changed to a James Bond thriller, or he was writing a James Bond thriller that he knew he could easily change to something of his own.

Turning to the novel itself, Amis himself noted that most of the references to Fleming - Tanner, Sunningdale, the Hammonds and so on - take place in the first chapter. Bond himself is a fairly generic figure, somewhat overshadowed by Ariadne. It's not hard to see that the novel might have been a hybrid thriller, either waiting to have some Bondish elements stripped back from it if no contract arrived, or beefed up if it did.

The novel MODESTY BLAISE by Peter O'Donnell was published in June 1965, and reprinted three times in the next three months. The action culimnates on a Turkish island called Kalithos, and tonally much of Amis' novel seems closer to O'Donnell's work than Fleming's: there are no casinos or ski-runs, but an outdoors adventure with boats and blazing heat. Amis was an aficionado of thrillers, and later praised the Modesty Blaise novels. He had been thinking of writing a thriller for some time. And, as you have just outlined, a Modesty Blaise comic strip adventure featuring the kidnapping of the head of the British secret service began appearing in the Evening Standard in September 1965.

So... where does this lead? I suppose to a theory. COLONEL SUN may not have started out as a Bond novel, but an original thriller by Amis, perhaps influenced by Fleming and/or O'Donnell and/or others, which was then transformed after he received a contract from Glidrose into a fully fledged Bond continuation. This would explain the tone of the novel; the plot inconsistency of M's kidnap not overly worrying Bond or being interesting for the right reasons to Sun; Bond's blandness; and possibly the presence of such a dynamic 'Bond girl' as Ariadne, who might have been the original protagonist.

[Willowhugger]

The ludicrousness of Colonel Sun's plot to implicate M, I'm willing to forgive actually. Because, simply put, the whole point of the operation does not actually have to believable. Colonel Sun is a man that is attempting to show the decadence of the West and how his own sexual power as embodied by the Marquis De La Sade makes him stronger. Yes, almost immediately, everyone will find the whole idea of M being on site to blow up a Peace Confederance to be ridiculous.

However, Colonel Sun has STILL kidnapped and assassinated the head of the British Secret Service before putting him in the middle of a humiliating situation that will presumably be wrapped up by the media. It's a way of spitting in the face of his enemies and something that is being done for pure spite. Whether people believe it or not doesn't matter at that point.

Of course, Bondian plots also don't have to make sense to any significant degree beyond the level of their authors imagination. Sir Hugo Drax intends to annihilate London as a repayment for the indignities of his schoolboy youth in Great Britain. The fact that the Russians believe that they will not be annihilated by America in retaliation for outfitting the depraved Nazi with atomic weaponry is something that stretches credibility to the breaking point, as if an atomic attack of ANY kind won't throw the delicate power balance of the world into total anarchy.

The same attitude applies to Goldfinger. The implausibility of Goldfingers plot to rob Fort Knox doesn't actually matter whether it will suceed or not. It is the fact that he believes it will do so that makes so. The real implausibility is, were it to suceed then Goldfinger's robbery would quality every bit as much an act of war as Hugo Drax's atomic attack. One person suggested that the Crystal Skull was unbelievable because of Russian agents attacking a US base. I'd argue that doesn't have QUITE the same implications, even in the tense 1950s.

But yes, even in the context of the story, Colonel Sun is a lunatic. Almost certainly operating on his own initiative and a man that believes he can do no wrong.

[spynovelfan]

The ludicrousness of Colonel Sun's plot to implicate M, I'm willing to forgive actually. Because, simply put, the whole point of the operation does not actually have to believable. Colonel Sun is a man that is attempting to show the decadence of the West and how his own sexual power as embodied by the Marquis De La Sade makes him stronger. Yes, almost immediately, everyone will find the whole idea of M being on site to blow up a Peace Confederance to be ridiculous.

However, Colonel Sun has STILL kidnapped and assassinated the head of the British Secret Service before putting him in the middle of a humiliating situation that will presumably be wrapped up by the media. It's a way of spitting in the face of his enemies and something that is being done for pure spite. Whether people believe it or not doesn't matter at that point.

And had Bond said or thought that in the novel, it would have gone a long way to making it easier to read.

While I defend Fleming's prose and much else, I won't defend his plots, many of which were filled with just this sort of inconsistency. I think that Drax's motivation, while absurd by any standards or realism, is in fact within the bounds of the genre, and I think the threat is broadly speaking acceptable. It beggars belief, though, that an amnesiac foreigner would be placed in such a powerful defence position, and this is compounded by the fact that he is only unmasked by the chance of M being in the same club as him, and Bond revealing that he does in fact cheat at cards. That's Oppenheim territory, and not very well handled.

Neither Drax nor Goldfinger's plots intrude on Bond personally, though, as the kidnapping of M ought to a great deal more. And in both those novels and others, Bond is, as you say, trying to stop the outbreak of a war or something as dire. The kidnapping of M is a declaration of war, and should be seen as such by Bond and his colleagues, but isn't. In 1970, there was uproar when the British expelled a huge number of Soviet diplomats from London. It just wasn't done. The whole principle of spies being present, and untouched by the law, in embassies around the world, is one of tit-for-tat. Kidnapping the head of a Western intelligence agency would entail a great deal more than sending Bond with a four-point plan on the back of an envelope to sit and drink in Athens hoping something will happen, even if the first point on the plan states that he should find out who kidnapped M, chase them down, not get captured, and find and rescue M.

It's surely all in the execution. Fleming's books were so masterfully chock-a-block with odd facts, enticing language, colourful characters and exhilaration that he swept you along. After the first couple of chapters, Amis failed to. So while Fleming sometimes had plots as ludicrous in the logic stakes, he disguised them much better.

[Trident]

My problem with Sun's behaviour, his plan, his motivations is that nothing seems to fit properly together. It has an overall feeling of pieces that don't belong to the same picture. Ok, so the assault thing is highly improbable. Nothing new there, other plots have similar holes. But there is also a general illogical quality to the way Sun pursuits his plans.

Kidnapping M immediately lead to major activity by the SIS and maybe other western intelligence and security services. There is simply no way the Russians wouldn't have got wind of this. Plus, this hightened activity multiplied the chances for Sun's team to be identfied and tracked down. Plus, the lead to Greece pointed all relevant intelligence heads to the very place Sun's team hides. Plus, this general beehive entailed a high probability for the conference in question to be called off. Plus, Sun's craving to get his happy-hour with Bond endangers the entire operation from start to ed-up end.

All the while, Sun managed a major coup, yet doesn't even seem to realize this himself. After all, M may indeed have vital information regarding the PRC's security. He may be a means to both active and passive intelligence in the Asian theater as well as helpful in staging operations in Europe and the USA. After retrieving all interesting material for the Chinese, M could have been sold to the Russians or other interested parties. How often does one get such a major asset? Not using it in any way is close to utter lunacy.

'Colonel Sun's major drawback is in my view that it seems to lack pieces, while others don't make sense in the context of the plot. It really seems to have an in-between position towards its own plot, hovering undecidedly above its options. The hypothesis that the book was not originally conceived as a Bond novel and developed this attribute only after a large part was already written, would seem a likely explanation IMO.

[Willowhugger]

My problem with Sun's behaviour, his plan, his motivations is that nothing seems to fit properly together. It has an overall feeling of pieces that don't belong to the same picture. Ok, so the assault thing is highly improbable. Nothing new there, other plots have similar holes. But there is also a general illogical quality to the way Sun pursuits his plans.

Kidnapping M immediately lead to major activity by the SIS and maybe other western intelligence and security services. There is simply no way the Russians wouldn't have got wind of this. Plus, this hightened activity multiplied the chances for Sun's team to be identfied and tracked down. Plus, the lead to Greece pointed all relevant intelligence heads to the very place Sun's team hides. Plus, this general beehive entailed a high probability for the conference in question to be called off. Plus, Sun's craving to get his happy-hour with Bond endangers the entire operation from start to ed-up end.

All the while, Sun managed a major coup, yet doesn't even seem to realize this himself. After all, M may indeed have vital information regarding the PRC's security. He may be a means to both active and passive intelligence in the Asian theater as well as helpful in staging operations in Europe and the USA. After retrieving all interesting material for the Chinese, M could have been sold to the Russians or other interested parties. How often does one get such a major asset? Not using it in any way is close to utter lunacy.

Very true, except you've forgotten a very important fact....

Colonel Sun is completely off his gourd.

I remind people, you really shouldn't forget this. It's kind of important to the plot. Colonel Sun isn't a brilliant intelligence officer, he's an utter complete ****ing lunatic. It's not something we derive from the fact that his plan doesn't make sense. It's repeatedly drilled home in the context of the novel that Colonel Sun is not playing with a full deck. He's no more sane than Hugo Drax (who I remind folks is not actually an amnesiac foreigner. He's an amnesiac British War Hero as far as everyone is concerned).

Part of the fun of the James Bond novels is that with the exception of a few instances where SMERSH is shown to be intelligent, the fact is that quite a few of the villains hat Bond faces are psychos that have slipped through the security nets and risen to positions of high power. That's part of what makes them dangerous. It's actually pretty believable in the People's Republic of China given there were plenty of people that were acting totally from information out of the bounds of reality and promoting people to high positions with no experience or talent but sufficent idealogical zeal.

Remember, the final moments of Colonel Sun have him pretty much begging Bond for his belief because he only then realizes that everything he's done up until this point has been utter stupidity rather than genius.

[spynovelfan]

He's no more sane than Hugo Drax (who I remind folks is not actually an amnesiac foreigner. He's an amnesiac British War Hero as far as everyone is concerned).

Yes, but how likely is it that anyone would believe that? Did you believe Drax was a British war hero at the start of the novel? Bond even mentions the 'mystery about his real identity' and the fact that he was missing for three years after the war. And although he says the facts about the man are apparently 'pretty slim', then gives a rather full account, which if it's not enough to let any thriller-reader know we're dealing with the villain would certainly discount anyone from running a massive security operation!

'"Sorry, sir," said Bond. "But the facts are pretty slim. Well," he looked out of the window again and concentrated, "in the German break-through in the Ardennes in the winter of '44, the Germans made a lot of use of guerrillas and saboteurs. Gave them the rather spooky name of Werewolves. They did quite a lot of damage of one sort or another. Very good at camouflage and stay-behind tricks of all sorts and some of them went on operating long after Ardennes had failed and we had crossed the Rhine. They were supposed to carry on even when we had overrun the country. But they packed up pretty quickly when things got really bad.

"One of their best coups was to blow up one of the rear liaison HQs between the American and British armies. Reinforcement Holding Units I think they're called. It was a mixed affair, all kinds of Allied personnel American signals, British ambulance drivers - a rather shifting group from every sort of unit. The Werewolves somehow managed to mine the mess-hall and, when it blew, it took with it quite a lot of the field hospital as well. Killed or wounded over a hundred. Sorting out all the bodies was the hell of a business. One of the English bodies was Drax. Half his face was blown away. Total amnesia that lasted a year and at the end of that time they didn't know who he was and nor did he. There were about twenty-five other unidentified bodies that neither we nor the Americans could sort out. Either not enough bits, or perhaps people in transit, or there without authorization. It was that sort of a unit. Two commanding officers, of course. Sloppy staff work. Lousy records. So after a year in various hospitals they took Drax through the War Office file of Missing Men. When they came to the papers of a no-next-of-kin called Hugo Drax, an orphan who had been working in the Liverpool docks before the war, he showed signs of interest, and the photograph and physical description seemed to tally more or less with what our man must have looked like before he was blown up. From that time he began to mend. He started to talk a bit about simple things he remembered, and the doctors got very proud of him. The War Office found a man who had served in the same Pioneer unit as this Hugo Drax and he came along to the hospital and said he was sure the man was Drax. That settled it. Advertising didn't produce another Hugo Drax and he was finally discharged late in 1945 in that name with back pay and a full disability pension...'

Would you accept a super-atomic rocket to protect Britain from this man?

That said, look at the enormous amount of detail Fleming goes into to create the back-story, complete with Express articles and letters to the Queen and the history of columbite and Nigerian tin and Goodwood and a million other elements. It's utterly unbelievable, but he does his best to sell it to us. So Sun is mad. Okay, but that doesn't help the plot that much, does it? Are you really saying that you find the plot of the book as good as Fleming's, but that your objections are chiefly to do with the ideology behind it?

[Willowhugger]

Would you accept a super-atomic rocket to protect Britain from this man?

I imagine that the majority of governments in the world would accept and have accepted advanced ballistics from much more questionable characters to be honest. Ironically, SpyNovelFan.

I should point out that Britain and the United States might have accepted Sir Hugo Drax's Moonraker Missile from him if they'd confirmed the man was an actual Nazi. Let's not forget that much of the United States' progress in rocketry came from Werner Von Braun.

A great quote summarizes Werner's career. "A man who reached for the stars and hit London instead."

In fact, I have greater difficulty believing that the Soviet Union would give an atomic weapon to a former Werewolf Commando who was still obsessed with Nazi rhetoric and paraphenalia. One would think that the communist powers of the 1960s would be a trifle leery of an individual who was a rich German SS operative who had been living in relative luxury in Britain until this point.

It's utterly unbelievable, but he does his best to sell it to us. So Sun is mad. Okay, but that doesn't help the plot that much, does it? Are you really saying that you find the plot of the book as good as Fleming's, but that your objections are chiefly to do with the ideology behind it?

I actually have no objections to the plot. Colonel Sun is mad as a march hare and he's going to kidnap M to lure James Bond to have all manner of insane sexual torture before killing him. Everything else is pretty much secondary in the mind of the guy. That his cover plot makes no sense is almost an afterthought.

In fact, my objections is the fact that Bond arrives in Greece and hangs around waiting for something to happen before he finally arrives at Colonel Sun's place and dispatches the man. The objections to the racism and politics of Colonel Sun are only so prominent becase much of the book is Bond talking to his ridiculous Communist Roll in the Hay. A traitor to her homeland and a subversive. It's prominent in my review because that's where the majority of the book lay.

The chief flaw in Kinglsey Amis' book is really that the damn thing is so short of Bond's confrontation with his archnemesis for the work. To return to Moonraker, the entire fun of the work is the fact that Bond spends ample time in his archnemesis' presence. He knows Hugo Drax in and out before the man is finally dispatched in a manner copied for The Spy Who Loved Me. Really, to me, the book isn't ABOUT Colonel Sun and that is almost the biggest problem that I have with it. It's about Bond relaxing in Greece with his "liberated Communist girl" and lacking much of the back and forth that we expect a good villainous Bond yarn to have.

I've stated that I very much enjoy Colonel Sun but you could have doubled the length of the book and given us some more insight into our eponymous supervillain. All the ingrediants are there, which is why Colonel Sun is remembered over most Bond EU (Expanded Universe) villains. But they don't have time to develop because no sooner has Bond escaped his death trap than he's dispatched his foe.

[Hitch]

Excellent thread. It's been fascinating to watch Trident and Spynovelfan feed off each other and piece together a plausible explanation for Colonel Sun's puzzling faults.

Being lazy, I've cut and pasted a few extracts from hoary old posts of mine. CS first:

"Colonel Sun is almost very good. It gets off to a great start and then dawdles before recovering. The torture scene is most unpleasant, unsurprisingly, though I do feel that it's included as a tribute to Fleming rather than something that drives the story. Amis is a fine stylist: it helps that he and Fleming comes from roughly the same background, though Amis does explore Bond's political leanings more thoroughly than his predecessor. But where is the emotional attachment of Bond to M and vice versa? He should be busting a gut to find his chief, yet his search seems rather dilatory. And when he finally meets the old man there's just a little bit too much stiff-upper-lip. The reader has been gagging for Bond to find M but there's no emotional pay-off. I'm not asking for them to fall into a tear-drenched embrace, but please let us know that the two of them care about each other, though such a scene would be ripe for parody. It's a shame Amis wrote just the one Bond novel."

Or one might say that it's a shame Amis cut and pasted just the one novel! SNF makes a very good point about the first chapter. It is far and away the most "Bondian", in that it has Bond ruminating while playing golf; it makes use of familiar characters and locations; it sets up a thrilling adventure; and it keeps up a brisk pace. After that, well - I can see it now: after a decent lunch and some pleasant contract signing, Amis pulls the incomplete Lady, Don't Fall Backwards out of his bottom drawer, crosses out the title, writes a new title with a suitably Flemingesque twang to it and realises that he'd better nail a good chunk of a James Bond pastiche to the front of his Greek adventure. Bish-bash-bosh - done.

As for Fleming's prose, it has long been my contention that it was not solely the world of espionage, the exotic locations, the erotic women, the guns, gadgets and cars that drew readers to the Bond books in their droves - it was how he described it. Don't get me wrong, all of those elements are essential to Fleming's work. However, we can all walk into our nearest bookshop and buy a handful of novels that contain the same ingredients; very few of them will tell their story in anything like the powerful, sensuous, sly and immediate prose that Fleming did. I've droned on about this elsewhere:

"Fleming is fun. He writes to entertain. His pacing is brisk, his vocabulary piquant, his humour attractive, and he doesn't outstay his welcome. Profundity is not his remit nor, it is important to understand, his purpose - at least not at first. (You Only Live Twice is a thriller but its roots are sunk in very fertile ground.) As a journalist, a jobbing but talented writer, he knew what he was doing. Casino Royale may be an exercise in wish fulfilment, but every page speaks of a writer who knew how to provoke a response from the reader.

It's fascinating to see how Fleming develops his writing technique and how he deepens Bond's character over the novels and short stories. One can imagine him thinking, "Right, what can I do this time? This is going to stale pretty rapidly if I don't amuse myself." Some of his stories experiment with form and expectations, though he is not above using old-fashioned tricks like shock endings (FRWL, OHMSS) and very unlikely coincidences (Bond finding Blofeld in YOLT) to keep the reader turning the pages. It's a beguiling blend.

Fleming has many faults, but he takes the reader with Bond into essentially absurd situations because he paints such a vivid picture; we know we're in good hands and therefore willingly suspend our disbelief.

The second half of Casino Royale sees Bond, his mission completed, worrying about his virility and forming his pitch-black fatalism; Bond doesn't appear in From Russia With Love until we're screaming for him to arrive; in The Spy Who Loved Me we get to hear a different narrative voice; and the books that Bond nuts have dubbed "The Blofeld Trilogy" depict Bond's catharsis. Some of the short stories in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy use Bond as a framing device to tell tales of cruelty and betrayal far removed from the world of espionage, and in The Living Daylights we see Bond struggling to overcome his distaste for his mission.

It's not exactly the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am Bond of legend, is it? I'm sure many writers would like to develop and experiment in such a manner. There are many better writers than Fleming (though I dislike using the word "better" because it's such a subjective and therefore meaningless comparison), but he seems to have staying power. If his stories prove to have longevity, if people still read them a hundred years from now (even if prompted to do so by Sony's latest Bond film), then we can say with relative certainty that there must be something worthwhile in them.

His voice was unusual: tough but sensuous, realistic yet fantastical, sexy and romantic and macabre. His was the voice of an Old Etonian, a naval officer, a journalist, a (supposed) chauvinist and a frustrated man of action.

Bond's world is one of heightened sensuality. Because he knows he may be involved in a life-or-death situation at any moment he is determined to feel as alive as possible all the time. And so Fleming's thrillers are unusual in that they appeal so directly to the senses, as he made clear was his intention in various interviews."

Yesterday, I read the first twenty pages of Octopussy. Some readers have called Octopussy Fleming's extended suicide note, in that it features a middle-aged, borderline alcoholic ex-military man who suffers from heart trouble, lives in a beachfront house and is well aware that his days are numbered. In those twenty pages you'll find scene-setting, a withering dissection of the main character's state of mind, narrative development, a hint of danger, a cataloguing of the four medieval "humours", foreshadowing, humour, a brief digression into the habits of the scorpion fish, and the arrival of someone called James Bond. All that and one can still enjoy the sub-text of Fleming/Colonel Smythe taking a long pull of his drink, sitting back at Goldeneye and confessing his sins to his great creation. Though I'm well aware that Fleming isn't perhaps a "front rank" writer, whatever that might be, I'd give my front teeth to write prose as good as those twenty pages.

And so would Amis!

Sorry to have droned on.

[spynovelfan]

I should point out that Britain and the United States might have accepted Sir Hugo Drax's Moonraker Missile from him if they'd confirmed the man was an actual Nazi. Let's not forget that much of the United States' progress in rocketry came from Werner Von Braun.

Very good point - and I had forgotten that! Good point on the implausibility of the Soviets turning to Drax, too. I see what you mean about Sun being insane and the cover plot being an afterthought, but is that how you think it's intended to be in the novel? I think it's a way of getting past the incongruities of the plot, but I don't think it's really what Amis intended: here's Sun's daft plot that doesn't really work at all if you look at it, but he's mad. I think he just didn't think it through that much, and the fact that Sun is mad helps us retro-actively deal with that, if you see what I mean.

In fact, my objections is the fact that Bond arrives in Greece and hangs around waiting for something to happen before he finally arrives at Colonel Sun's place and dispatches the man.

Yes, absolutely. And I also agree that there's not enough 'face-time' between Bond and Sun for it to really work.

Hitch, excellent post. I agree with all of it, I think, and wonderfully expressed it is, too, apart from perhaps the idea that Fleming kept things at a brisk pace. I think one of his rather more unusual additions to the genre was to completely overturn the idea of pace. If you read earlier thrillers, they really do concentrate on pace and suspsense. In Sax Rohmer, Dennis Wheatley and even the very digressive Leslie Charteris, you had cliff-hangers coming every few pages. Cliff-hangers are very rare in Fleming's work, and the 'through line' of his plots, where you're hanging on biting your nails to see what will happen, is very rare indeed. I think some of the novels are brlliantly paced - FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, for instance - but more often he just abandons the whole idea.

I think Fleming had a serious problem with plotting - and it is one of the hardest parts! I don't think he was interested in it, and Fleming pursued what he was interested in. He took the almost unthinkable step of ignoring the main meat of the thriller - the thrilling plot - and concentrating on all the accoutrements. His novels are often collections of accoutrements for brilliant thrillers. He has the high living and the beautiful woman and the dastardly villain and the intriguing locations and so on... but none of them really gel together in the way they did in previous thrillers. I suppose in the way we're saying Amis' didn't, only Fleming managed to sustain our interest in other ways.

Fleming loved thrillers, but I think he loved the atmosphere and the ingredients of them more than finding out who the villain was or what his plan was or how it would be stopped. He just wanted to create all the most memorable bits of thrillers he loved in his own style with his own spin - and didn't care too much if it all added up. It's easy to think that poor plotting was just the norm, but those earlier writers, although they had inconsistencies in plotting, naturally, very rarely sacrificed pace. Pace was paramount. Fleming did the unthinkable and wrote thrillers in which the plot and pacing became the background, and the traditional background elements took centre-stage. The books aren't so much about James Bond's search to stop a villain as what James Bond's life is like while he's doing that.

[Hitch]

*slaps forehead*

That's it, of course; Fleming digresses where others dawdle. It was revolutionary of him to stop and smell the flowers. It serves me right for not comparing the advice in "How To Write A Thriller" to the practice of the Bond novels.

I really must read some of those older thrillers you've mentioned in the past. You make them sound so enticing.

[Loomis]

Amis pulls the incomplete Lady, Don't Fall Backwards out of his bottom drawer

Stone me!

[Willowhugger]

I see what you mean about Sun being insane and the cover plot being an afterthought, but is that how you think it's intended to be in the novel? I think it's a way of getting past the incongruities of the plot, but I don't think it's really what Amis intended: here's Sun's daft plot that doesn't really work at all if you look at it, but he's mad. I think he just didn't think it through that much, and the fact that Sun is mad helps us retro-actively deal with that, if you see what I mean.

Actually, I'd argue that Amis did intend for us to consider Sun's plot an afterthought and the same for Sun's opinion on it. I don't necessarily think he thought we'd consider it quite as ridiculous as it comes off in the work, but I think that the writing was fairly clear that Colonel Sun's plottage ws meant to come off as reckless and insane. Furthermore, it was actually just a lure for the true encounter that Sun wanted with Bond.

[Hitch]

Amis pulls the incomplete Lady, Don't Fall Backwards out of his bottom drawer

Stone me!

Kingsley Amis - the lad 'imself.

[spynovelfan]

Actually, I'd argue that Amis did intend for us to consider Sun's plot an afterthought and the same for Sun's opinion on it.

I'd argue the opposite. In Chapter 10, Dragon Island (the original title of the novel, incidentally), Bond explains to Ariadne and Litsas what he thinks is happening. First of all, he's sure it's a Chinese operation:

'The scale, the disregard for the unwritten rules of peacetime intelligence work, above all the recklessness...'

So reckless: yes. Insane? I don't think Amis wanted us to feel that. I think he wanted us to feel it was an extremely serious threat. I very much doubt he knew whether the Chinese were more likely to engage in larger-scale and more reckless espionage operations than anyone else. It's there precisely because he doesn't want us to see the plot as an after-thought, a ridiculous scheme by a madman, but as a serious and plausible threat, and he's trying to fudge the ridiculousness of it by making his voice of authority, British agent James Bond, tell us that actually the Chinese could kidnap the head of British intelligence and frame him for a major terrorist attack.

This exposition scene is stretched out over four pages, and Amis repeatedly tries to make his wholly daft plot idea sound as convincing as possible:

''The intention,' he said slowly, 'is to break up the conference by violence, killing as many people as possible in the process, and making the whole thing as public as possible. After that, the plan would have been to make it look as if my chief and I had done the job, and put us in a position to say we hadn't... The whole affair would stink to high heavens of being fixed, of course, and nobody who understands the British would be taken in, but that's a long way from being everybody...''

A page later, Bond is talking about Britain being 'fatally damaged', the eastern Mediterranean being laid open for Chinese penetration, and even a hint that it might lead to world war. It might stink to high heavens to some (including the reader, who may also be wondering if this is the best use a villain can put M to), but Bond tells us several times how worried he is that the scheme will work.

All of which suggests to me that Amis knew very well that Sun's plot was weak but tried very hard to make it less so. It's true that we eventually find out that Sun is so mad that we forget some of this inconsistency because, alright, he's mad - but that's so late in the book as to make little odds. Read this chapter again and I'm sure you'll see how earnestly Amis worked to try to get around the ridiculousness of the scheme and convince us as readers to believe in it, and worry that it might happen. Some of it's quite clever, brazen even: 'nobody who understands the British would be taken in', for instance, which suggests that it's the sort of plot that might be plausible for other nations, and that the average man in the street or newspaper would fall for it, and there's a touch of patriotic pride from Bond to round it off and make it more convincing. But, really, he's fudging. Nobody who understands anything would believe that the head of an intelligence agency would be involved in this sort of thing, whether they understood the British or not!

I suspect part of this was because Amis was desperate to use some of his own expertise, and that's the trench mortar. Back-drop from that and you have the framing device, influenced by FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. So even though it becomes clear Sun is mad toward the end, we're still being fed this framing plot as though it were plausible very late on, with tons of plausible-sounding (though not actually plausible!) detail. The weapon was selected, Sun tells Bond (quite seriously and sanely), because of its associations with the British. Amis even tries to get round the fact that Bond will both be framed and tortured, mentioned somewhere here as a plot hole. He tries to plug that with some stuff about Sun conducting experiments on corpses in Albania!

Some of it's ingenious, some of it's quite like Fleming, but the problem is that at heart it is still completely unbelievable, and that he wastes a lot of space explaining it, often rather dully. The result is that we're just not all that interested - we just want to reach the end.

[Trident]

I see what you mean about Sun being insane and the cover plot being an afterthought, but is that how you think it's intended to be in the novel? I think it's a way of getting past the incongruities of the plot, but I don't think it's really what Amis intended: here's Sun's daft plot that doesn't really work at all if you look at it, but he's mad. I think he just didn't think it through that much, and the fact that Sun is mad helps us retro-actively deal with that, if you see what I mean.

Actually, I'd argue that Amis did intend for us to consider Sun's plot an afterthought and the same for Sun's opinion on it. I don't necessarily think he thought we'd consider it quite as ridiculous as it comes off in the work, but I think that the writing was fairly clear that Colonel Sun's plottage ws meant to come off as reckless and insane. Furthermore, it was actually just a lure for the true encounter that Sun wanted with Bond.

Well, then that would indeed mean the whole affair was merely about a sexually obsessed sadist meeting his ultimate fetish? While undoubtedly very post-modern and suggesting any number of intellectual subtext, I'd still be more than a little put off that Amis wouldn't serve more than this frugal meal from his auspicious menue. Especially, as he himself pointed out a similar theory regarding TMWTGG's promising plot and it's lack of satisfaction in the final outcome.

[Hitch]

Well, then that would indeed mean the whole affair was merely about a sexually obsessed sadist meeting his ultimate fetish? While undoubtedly very post-modern and suggesting any number of intellectual subtext, I'd still be more than a little put off that Amis wouldn't serve more than this frugal meal from his auspicious menue. Especially, as he himself pointed out a similar theory regarding TMWTGG's promising plot and it's lack of satisfaction in the final outcome.

We can all talk a good game.

[Hitch]

Does anyone else long for the days of copperplate handwriting, eight postal deliveries per day, wax seals, thick ivory paper, inkpots and letter-knives with richly enamelled handles?

No? I knew I was weird.

I'm the last one to know that, aren't I? Now, that is weird. I'll shut up now.

[spynovelfan]

Well, then that would indeed mean the whole affair was merely about a sexually obsessed sadist meeting his ultimate fetish? While undoubtedly very post-modern and suggesting any number of intellectual subtext, I'd still be more than a little put off that Amis wouldn't serve more than this frugal meal from his auspicious menue. Especially, as he himself pointed out a similar theory regarding TMWTGG's promising plot and it's lack of satisfaction in the final outcome.

We can all talk a good game.

Indeed. I'm already quaking, especially as I have a missing head of MI6 as a major plot point in my first novel.

[Willowhugger]

Well, then that would indeed mean the whole affair was merely about a sexually obsessed sadist meeting his ultimate fetish? While undoubtedly very post-modern and suggesting any number of intellectual subtext, I'd still be more than a little put off that Amis wouldn't serve more than this frugal meal from his auspicious menue. Especially, as he himself pointed out a similar theory regarding TMWTGG's promising plot and it's lack of satisfaction in the final outcome.

Well that's really the plot of the Man with the Golden Gun movie, and I'm very fond of that film. Scaramanga in the movie sexualizes his gun repeatedly and uses it to arouse himself and also allow him to be able to perform with his woman, Andrea Anders. Any man who needs a gun and murder to perform with Maud Adams has serious issues.

Scaramanga in the movie faces down James Bond in the pistol like duels he has because he wants to continue to reprove his extreme issues with his masculinity. Bond is the other sexual dynamo secret-agent assassin in the world and it's all about the cahones as to who will emerge the bigger man in the contest. A better movie would have ditched everything about the solex, the comedy, and so on and solely been about the sexual subtext.

In Colonel Sun, the sexual subtext is pretty much a lot more nakedly blatant. Colonel Sun lives in a tower that he's filled with prostitutes that he doesn't enjoy. Like a Dragon hording over female human virgins and treasure. He's lured Bond's boss and father figure to the place and knows that they're going to send him to the location. Is Colonel Sun a homosexual? Unlikely, as Amis rights in. But he's also a deeply sexually repressed and hates Bond on a level that James doesn't seem to understand (or honestly particularly care about).

Colonel Sun is bitterly jealous and resentful of the world's greatest secret agent that he intends to break the man and only after he's done so, kill him. Fleming would make this subtext into text. However, we only get hints of it from Amis.

[Revelator]

But some little notes reveal antisemitism through those stereotypes (some silly things in CR about Le Chiffre's earlobes that "reveal" Jewish blood, for instance - I cannot remember if there was something said about Goldfinger's physique in that respect?)

No, Goldfinger is short, fat, and looks like he's made out of the parts of different people. Nothing racially coded in that description as far as I can see. The bit about LeChiffre's earlobes is outmoded fake-science, but who knows if it was once more widely accepted, and that Fleming was simply repeating it? If Fleming was truly trying to be anti-Semitic, even in a coded way, he wasn't trying very hard. LeChiffre, aside from perhaps his ears, doesn't have any of the character traits of stereotypical Jews. From what I can recall, the only two characters explicitly coded as Jewish are Meyer, a "nice chap," and the kindly doctor in Thunderball.

and Bond's absence of reaction when he's told that GF certainly wouldn't be allowed in the hotel if he was Jewish.

Why should Bond have a reaction? It was--sad to admit--quite normal for such country clubs not to admit Jews. Bond would hardly find this surprising or noteworthy. I'm not even sure if that sorry custom is totally dead yet--Larry David built an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm around it.

Ahem...

It's not the most conclusive of evidence--after all Thomas Jefferson apparently preferred Black slaves for his mistresses--but given the lack of evidence of Fleming's part for any anti-Semitic bias, I think it counts in his favor.

I wonder if the reason was that Fleming never set a foot in Korea, whereas before writing YOLT he spent some time in Japan? About Korea, he lived only on stereotypes and xenophobia, but about Japan he had his own travel experience to share.

That seems to be the most likely answer. Korea itself was much less likely to be visited by jet-setters like Fleming, who never imagined that some of his modern readers might have Korean girlfriends, or that some of his readers simply might be Koreans.

But I think to say that Fleming's work contained dodgy racial sterotypes, rampant sexism, overt snobbishness (all of which I think are pretty undeniable to be honest), ropey plots and flawed prose (both of which are pretty much just a matter of opinion) is not to label them worthless.

Especially since lots of works of literature contain attitudes unacceptable to modern audiences, do not always make perfect sense plot-wise, and are not always consistently written. And from what I remember, there aren't a lot of badly written passages in Fleming. As Amis says, he can sometimes fall into noveletteish prose, but on the whole the books are written to a high level. Sexism and racism are always regrettable, but they do not determine whether someone is or isn't a great writer.

[Willowhugger]

I wrote this over in another forum...

Colonel Sun is widely hailed as the only real sequel to the Fleming novels that is worth considering part of the James Bond "canon." The reason for this, is undoubtedly because that Colonel Sun is a sequel to the Ian Fleming novels and it's not a sequel to the James Bond movies. That's a pretty important distinction to be made and something that pretty much sets the mood for the entirety of the book.

As I mentioned, the book wouldn't be nearly so frustrating if not for the fact that it really is incredibly well written. I think of it in terms of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be honest. For the most part, the people who walk in from the various books and Bond are guys who are trying to act like James Bond. Everyone, even Daniel Craig's Bond, are extremely off from Fleming's Anti-Hero.

Colonel Sun's James Bond is recognizable as Fleming's James Bond. He's the same dapper British Man, going to die before he retires, smokes 60-70 cigarettes a day, weighs about 170lbs, and is a horrible jerkass to everyone (especially women). He's back from encountering that jerk Scaramanga in TMWTGG and it's really like he's never left. Except, for the fact he's subtlely wrong.

If Fleming had written Colonel Sun, you'd have to wonder if James Bond's brainwashing by the Soviets had long term consequences for the man. His newer and friendlier attitude to Communist Russia seems awfully strange for a man who (just a few months ago) had tortured him into attempting to murder M. Fleming may well have moved away from SMERSH but TMWTGG shows he didn't mind them doing horrible things for poor James' mind, presumably under severe torture.

James Bond occasionally says the wrong thing, does the oddest things, and acts in a manner that is never enough to just dismiss it as bad writing. It's the closest you'll ever come to Fleming's James Bond but it's on the other side of the Uncanny Valley. A James Bond that isn't quite perfect in replication but just close enough that it comes off as disturbing rather than easy to dismiss like the writing of Benson or Gardners' James Bond novels. I like Gardner and Benson's James Bond novels. However, they're sequels to the movie James Bond and that's alright with me.

Still, I recommend people to read Colonel Sun. It's just something that still annoys me at times.

[Superhobo]

Some of the arguments being leveled at Fleming seem kind of hollow. Apart from one instance, there's been no real dissection of these arguments. It was said that Fleming, "seemed more interested in the accouterments of thrillers than the plot itself," and then it has passed us.

As I said before in another thread, there are two types of Fleming novels - there are those that do stand up as works of great literature in their own right, those that eschew formula, and etc. - being Casino Royale, From Russia With Love, The Spy Who Loved Me, OHMSS, YOLT, and on. The others are, essentially, exceptionally well-written pulp fiction, and there is a great amount of cross-hatching going on between these two categories.

"Doctor No" is probably the most blatantly pulp, I'd go so far to say, with its' Fu Manchu-esque villain, "fire-breathing dragon," and et. al.

As far as "Colonel Sun" goes, it's probably the most enjoyable and well-written of the continuation novels, but several of the issues that have been expounded upon here, in-depth, have given me pause before.

Edited by Superhobo, 01 January 2009 - 08:48 AM.

[Safari Suit]

Some of the arguments being leveled at Fleming seem kind of hollow. Apart from one instance, there's been no real dissection of these arguments. It was said that Fleming, "seemed more interested in the accouterments of thrillers than the plot itself," and then it has passed us.

To be fair, aside from spynovelfan's truly outstanding essay, most of the arguments defending Fleming have been of an equal depth. I think some of us just don't want to never be able to criticise Fleming, and I get the feeling some others simply don't like to read criticisms of him.

[Willowhugger]

If anyone actually wants to criticize Fleming, I can think of some genuine concerns to be honest.

1) Values Dissonance

This is something you probably need to mention despite the fact that I don't really feel that I should criticize too harshly. I've mentioned that there's about 72 years seperating our birthdates and that I'd be pretty foolish to come down harshly on the man without acknowledging that. Still, it's going to be something that will always be the ugly elephant in the room of people reading Ian's work.

I think the rather disappointing element is that with a little foresight, Ian probably would have been able to make most of his grandiose and deformed villains without having to resort to crude racial stereotypes. I'm capable of enjoying Sir Ian's work beside these, but sometimes I wish he'd been slightly more imaginative in how exactly he was going to give his villains an edge.

2) Bad Plotting

Sir Ian is a wonderful writer but he has the weird ability to be unable to move around plot holes, so his strategy is to just ignore them and they go away. I don't expect Ian's plot to have Goldfinger remove all the gold in Fort Knox to have to make sense. That's asking a little too much from a humble Pulp-Noir Spy Fiction writer to come up with. Its little things that become really jarring as he desires to move on the plot without explaining some things adequately.

Oddly, the example I think of most is where Goldfinger decides to recruit Bond to his organization despite the fact that he knows he's an enemy agent (!?). The issue of course is, why does Bond not get shot in the head by Goldfinger? Because Sir Ian doesn't want him to die.

Likewise, Bond will investigate whatever Ian Fleming wants him to. Moonraker's investigation in Britain was difficult enough. Yet, Bond has a pretty consistent history of going well beyond MI6's concerns. Pirate treasure being the most egrevious example, even if it was Pirate Treasure related to Black Gangs.

3) Not All Fleming is Created Equal

This is something I think fans should acknowledge. Many of Fleming's works broke the mold and were tremendously well written. Others, on the other hand, were....not so much. Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Diamonds are Forever are the odd men out when set against the rest of the canon for example.

4) Characterization Problems

Only rarely occurs but does pop up often enough to be noticible. The worst example is, ironically, Blofeld. I don't think Fleming ever actually gave Ernst a personality except for being "the embodiment of evil." The character from Thunderball to OHMSS to YOLT is completely different with his final incarnation not so much Satanic Evil but Satanic Evil For Its Own Sake.

Ian is an awesome idea man and you can forgive that his ideas sometimes don't make sense because the journey is what really matters.

5) Purple Prose

Long and detailed descriptions are wonderful, if they warrant it. I'm sure Ian found Florida to be quite enchanting but I'm not sure that even his original readers were going to believe it was quite up to the same level as Istanbul.

Edited by Willowhugger, 01 January 2009 - 01:35 PM.

[spynovelfan]

Some of the arguments being leveled at Fleming seem kind of hollow. Apart from one instance, there's been no real dissection of these arguments. It was said that Fleming, "seemed more interested in the accouterments of thrillers than the plot itself," and then it has passed us.

If you don't agree with what I wrote and find it hollow, superhobo, nobody's stopping you from elaborating on why - you haven't really in your post here, and you've also missed out the rest of the point I was making, namely that the way in which Fleming combined the elements changed the nature of the thriller and meant that plot was not nearly so important. I agree, broadly speaking, with your categorisation of his novels, but don't really see how it addresses the above point.

Taken in context, I wouldn't classify it as an argument levelled against Fleming at all, and think that to say it does shows a kind of extraordinary hypersensitivity I've noticed some fans have about Fleming's work. I'd urge you to read the second post on this page, in which I made the same point about plot but in more detail, and tell me that I'm levelling arguments against Fleming! It's long, and rather hard to read such a thing on a screen, but if you do I think you'll find rather a spirited and, dare I say it, not all that hollow defence of Fleming's genius.