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Unfinished Ian Fleming Manuscript Rumour about Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun (1968)?
Dragonpol
https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
I'm researching (and writing) something on Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun and I was wondering if anyone else had heard the rumour that it was supposedly Fleming's 15th book finished after his death. Of course I just want to make clear here in the OP that this rumour is completely false in nature.
Has anyone else ever read this rumour anywhere just out of interest?
If you can remember where you read it, that would be great too!
Thanks,
D.
Has anyone else ever read this rumour anywhere just out of interest?
If you can remember where you read it, that would be great too!
Thanks,
D.
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Comments
I could be wrong.
Is that the Sir Kingsley Amis forward to the Coronet edition, dated 1991 in London? It's just that my edition definitely does not say that at all. What is your exact source for this information, @Risico007?
It is the 1991 one maybe I am misremeebering
Yes, I think you must be. Have a little look over it again.
Have you by chance heard this rumour?
The article is being written as I type!
All help is mightily appreciated! :)
I think I've found some of the sources of it although its first use probably still eludes me but even so there's enough there of interest to turn this into a new article.
And no, Amis didn't finish TMWTGG. He was merely paid to look over the manuscript and suggest places where it could be beefed up. It's my belief that he never actually edited any of it himself. My friend the Bond expert and spy author Jeremy Duns has also come to this conclusion based on the letter that is reproduced in Amis' Collected Letter, as edited by Zachary Leader. That said, yes that rumour is somewhat similar but I think that the Colonel Sun rumour probably started out in a fanzine like Bondage, the journal of the now defunct American James Bond Fan Club, possibly some time in the 1970s.
By the way, if anyone has early editions of Bondage magazine from the 1970s could they possibly check for any mentions of this particular Colonel Sun rumour and PM me if they find anything? I'd be most grateful...
This is a very good point which indicates that the rumours are almost certainly false.
You would at least put 'based on ideas by Ian Fleming' or something because who the hell is Robert Markham?
By the way does anyone know why it wasn't published under Amis's own name? It must have hurt sales surely to label it with the name of a non entity. Basically the exact opposite strategy they employ these days with their celebrity authors doing one book each.
Oh yeah of course. I need to get myself checked for Alzheimer's.
There´s no clear indication given when it was printed. There´s only something written about copyright and 1968, but that was the year the novel was first published, wasn´t it?
Thank you for that information, @boldfinger - that is very interesting from a marketing point of view!
And yes, Colonel Sun was published on 28 March 1968.
Thank you @Mrcoggins. I've not heard that before, but it makes sense as Ann hated Amis and Colonel Sun and the whole continuation Bond idea more generally of course.
My understanding is that Fleming wrote the first draft of TMWTGG in the winter at Goldeneye as he always did, but then died before he could rewrite it back in London.
When I send them a mail for having explainations about this, they never reply to me...
It was a completely independent and quite brilliant work from Amis that stands out as absolutely the best Bond continuation thus far albeit Horowitz is giving him a run for this accolade.
Using the pseudonym 'Robert Markham' was an idiotic marketing move from IFP (then Gildrose). Putting Kingsley's name on it would have quadrupled sales as he was a huge name in his own right.
PussyNoMore is the proud owner of a JC UK 1st edition and can confirm that there is no mention of Amis or indeed input from Fleming.
The original plan was to have multiple authors write continuation novels, all under the name of "Robert Markham," presumably chosen because it sounded like a nondescript nom-de-plume. But Colonel Sun did not sell as well as expected and the plan fell through, making Amis the only author to appear as Markham. Perhaps there's an alternate universe out there where Bond novels by a dozen different writers have been published continuously from 1968 to the present day, all under the pseudonym of "Robert Markham."
I can relate to Ann. As a teenager reading Fleming for the first time, I found when I got to CS, I didn't quite like it. Readable yes. Even thankful, that here was post-Fleming bonus Bond reading, but still I found it "off."
I am somewhat grateful that Amis was not conscripted to write another.
The Pearson effort released a few years later(1973) I found to be much more to my liking and quite Fleming worthy.
I was never really keen on CS either. Having read it again recently it became very apparent that Amis couldn't get inside Bond's head and thoughts like Fleming effortlessly could.
And the reason for this is because Bond is Fleming. Bond's thoughts are Fleming's thoughts. And this is why no writer since has managed to pull off a novel as good as the ones Fleming wrote.
I don't think you do--Ann's hatred for the book verged into illogical nastiness. She incorrectly predicted that “Amis will slip Lucky Jim into Bond’s clothing, we shall have a petit bourgeois red-brick Bond, he will resent the authority of M., then the discipline of the Secret Service, and end as Philby Bond selling his country to SPECTRE.” She further embrassed herself by adding "I think Amis should publish under his own name and show the world his left-wing intellectual pretensions were easily turned to money-grubbing--like everyone else." Whatever else one can say about Colonel Sun, it is hardly left-wing and does not reads in the slightest like it was written for the money.
But it is the only Bond continuation novel written by a great novelist (as shown in its prose style) who was a keen student on Fleming. Amis literally wrote the book on Bond and his knowledge and love of the subject show through every page of Colonel Sun and give it an authenticity missing from subsequent characterizations. The book skillfully combines the themes and strength of Dr. No and Moonraker into a new whole.
Pearson's book is great, but it's a much different work than a Bond novel and skillfully deviates from Fleming in many ways.
Agreed. I read Benson's first book and that was more than enough. Some good Bondian ideas, but wince-inducing prose and characterization. Still, he was a partial relief after Gardner's increasing dull and unBondian efforts.
Thank you for telling me what I might relate to.
What we are actually learning though, is that you don't relate to Fleming's wife's anti-Amis rantings.
She was a hot head. She and Ian were both kind of nuts.
I relate to Ann in the sense that I really didn't like the book, not when I first read it, and I didn't much like it either when I read it again, a couple of years ago.
Obviously Anne's politics clash with those of Amis, or at least she thinks they did.
Anne is over the top, but she's laying it on because she clearly didn't want Amis anywhere near Bond.
Amis' didn't do anything radical with Bond.
His Bond is Flemings loyal duty bound agent.
I am surmising her rant was a pre-emptive strike ahead of publication.
She's not wrong about Amis' left wing intellectual pretensions. This bent wasn't exactly a secret. She chose to fixate on it. She probably overstates it, as his politics were rather fluid. He did evolve rightist leanings, so I don't think the book had any real bent.
The book rather, infuses political blatherings into the narrative.
But the political lecturing in CS, as puerile as it may be, is at least consistent with Fleming, in that Fleming was never shy about peppering his prose with his own provocative world views.
Ariadne's marxist leanings are almost charming.
There is an earnestness about her.
I think Amis was using her and others as a mouthpiece, to get some food for thought out there. Spice things up.
Speaking of spicey, Ariadne sure had much appeal as a Bond Girl. A very raw, almost animal sexuality.
Darko Kerim might have felt a need to chain her under his kitchen table (FRWL)
:P