COLONEL SUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I stared at a story from yesteryear. COLONEL SUN: putting James Bond through his paces after his battle against a man who owned a golden gun. But I also looked at my own short story in that area. I can only call it James Bond Tourism. That’s as kind as I’ll be to my past self. Throw Bond into a familiar setting, drop in references to past misadventures, and wrap it up in a pastry of heat and violence.
   Having had a crack at that sort of nonsense myself, I’m in a position to say that Ian Fleming’s style is easy to observe yet hard to pin down on the page when typing in the manner of that far-off country of the past. The precise detail involving food, drink, places, and vehicles. That ability of Fleming’s to want to write fiction by dressing it in real clothes…is taxing.
   If you desire to invent guns, cars, and meals, why, turn to science fiction and be done with it. Have your hero drive a 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. He should be a detective named Marlowe, in a space zoot suit, with a goldfish bowl for a helmet. Google is his friend. Or digital assistant. Something along those lines.
   Fleming and Chandler wrote about worlds containing real guns. Yes, movies featuring James Bond are full of product placement. This is true of Fleming’s books. He packs the stories with guns, cars, food, and drink. All real. Why invent, when the genuine article adds a layer of reality to an otherwise fanciful tale? Bed the fiction in a garden of real items, and make your outlandish saga somehow more reasonable.
   Writing like Fleming is, indeed, taxing. And that’s for reasons of product placement, alone. James Bond’s taste at breakfast is not Bond’s. Strictly speaking, it isn’t exactly Ian Fleming’s. No. The devil in the detail at breakfast comes from Fleming’s friend William Plomer.
   This set me wondering. Fleming surrounded himself with people who were contacts when it came to story details. Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his book about Commander James Bond? Let’s have a bit of clarity. Novel.
   Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his James Bond novel? For Amis had already tackled Bond to the ground in an ungentlemanly game of rugby elsewhere. Amis drew on Ian Fleming’s books and also Fleming’s knowledge when it came to compiling a dossier on James Bond.
   Not a novel. A book. And he met Fleming, who was near the end of his life, just to cover details in the dossier. Fleming pointed out a few slips. The Bond author was used to those, having taken both barrels from the acid wit of Noël Coward.
…what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue.
   Fleming had the same brand of acid flowing through his veins, when it came to Noël Coward.
   It’s interesting. When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.
   Amis analysed Bond from the stance of a fannish reader who knew the dossier assignment called for a bit more work than just liking the fiction and regurgitating facts. His own level of criticism may have had Amis shaking in his socks moments before meeting Fleming. But the Bond author didn’t gut the new boy.
   And Amis was the new boy. Soon enough, he, too, would be a Bond author. When Fleming died, leaving The Man with the Golden Gun short of the revision and polish required to bring it up to ramming speed, Amis was offered a crack at it.
   History differs as to what happened next. Amis made recommendations, but they weren’t carried out. Alternatively, Amis made changes uncredited. He rewrote the book. Or he wrote the book. What do we know about any of this wilderness of mirrors?
   Fleming wrote the book. He complained about it to his editor, William Plomer. There were plans to finish the job. But Fleming’s time was marked, and his heart gave out. Amis was asked to look at the manuscript. Money changed hands. He was hired on as a consultant.
   Yes, he made recommendations. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over an actual manuscript. Amis provided a page of notes. You only review twice, Mr Amis. Once when you read the manuscript in private, and once when you publish a bitchy review that questions why some of your own ideas weren’t taken up throughout the story.
   For that is what Amis does in his published review. He asks why Fleming didn’t exploit this point or that part of the plot. Then he offers his own alternative motive for the absurdity of the assassin Scaramanga taking James Bond on as a partner in crime. Scaramanga fancied him something rotten.
   Not according to William Plomer, who’d been closely involved with the book. At the end of his life, Fleming struggled to complete the story. Complete it he did. But not to the level of detail Fleming demanded of himself.
   Amis decried the thinness of the book’s plot. We’ll return to that when I stick a knife in the back of Colonel Sun. And so, to Colonel Sun. It’s easy to mock by calling the book…
   The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim Bond.
   Take a (Bond) Girl Like You.
   The Old (Foreign) Devils.
   Amis has a bit of a fixation with setting Bond up as a hero in the Byronic fashion. Whatever the fuck that is. It’s just Amis being Amis. Or Markham, which was his cover for the Bond assignment. A cover Amis immediately blew.
   Why is Kingsley Amis, of all people, writing a special introduction to this guy Markham’s book? Although Kingsley’s name is shorter on the cover, his name appears in larger type. What’s that about? Some kind of fix was in.
   Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow and keeper of the sacred flame, hated Bond. But she managed to love Ian Fleming, no easy task, and hated Kingsley Amis even more than she detested her husband’s violent creation.
   She didn’t want this slipshod fair-weather commie writing the further adventures of a character she couldn’t stand. Never one to let her snobbishness get in the way of her snobbishness, Ann joined a long list of people who had nothing good to say of Kingsley Amis.
   How did Amis do, in the Bond stakes? Well enough that his work filtered down into the movies. The World is Not Enough borrows the central point of Colonel Sun: M is kidnapped.
   Die Another Day doesn’t have Colonel Sun in it, but there’s a Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. Just far enough from the character Amis gave us to avoid having to pay out cash for the use. However, the movie is a camouflaged version of Moonraker and has little to do with Amis, beyond half-pinching a character name.
   Spectre, though, puts Amis deep in the closing credits for dialogue that appears in Colonel Sun. This is a torture scene. Congratulations. Amis made it into the worst Bond movie. Spectre is, in my view, fucking lamentable. That’s a highly technical term. Film has its moments, but moments don’t lead to a satisfying cinema-going experience.
   They’d done a deal. Spectre was back on the menu, after the legal dust settled – for the last time. Kevin McClory’s long-running dispute over ownership of various story elements died with him. After that, it was much easier to settle on a deal.
   Okay. Resurrect Spectre. And the boss, Blofeld. But make it meaningful. How? Oh, show flashbacks to other Bond characters in the opening credits. That’s where the welding starts. Taking the Daniel Craig movies and fusing them into one long integrated storyline that shows…Spectre was behind everything, all along.
   No. It does not work. Thanks for asking. The movie is the story of two boys who know each other. One grows up to be James Bond. And the other…what, creates Spectre just to get back at Bond? Er…
   Where the fuck was I? Amis successfully wrote and delivered his one Bond novel. The opening is good. There are vivid scenes. His one failing is the plot, which is practically non-existent. Think it over for two seconds, and it falls apart. Why is the villain doing this? For all his talk of trying something new, by going into a Greek setting, Amis rehashes Doctor No as a far less interesting Colonel Sun.
   A fleet of books followed, guided by other hands. Had Amis lived to see his credit in Spectre, well, first, he’d have been a hell of a fucking age. Second, he’d have derided much of the movie. You can see his ears perking up at the dialogue in the torture sequence. Numbers flash over his eyes as he calculates whether any payment for usage felt worthwhile.
   Amis wrote Bond for the money. Fleming wrote Bond to create excitement as he typed page to page, staving off boredom. Ian Fleming, thrilled at the thought of creating a scene in a story. That stays with me, long after Amis typing for cash saw his Colonel disappear at the first sunset.