James Bond (Kingsley Amis) Books in Order

Kingsley Amis's Bond corner is small, but it is unusually revealing. This page brings together two very different books, The James Bond Dossier and Colonel Sun, which show him first as a sharp-eyed reader of Ian Fleming and then as a writer willing to take on Bond for himself.

One book takes Bond apart, the other throws him back into the field.

The James Bond Dossier is the critical half of the story. Amis looks closely at Fleming's novels and asks what makes Bond work on the page. He writes about Bond's habits, tastes, women, enemies, plots, and recurring patterns, but the book is more than fandom. It is also a practical study of popular fiction by a novelist who understood pace, tone, and readerly pleasure very well.

Then comes Colonel Sun, the fictional half. Written by Amis under the name Robert Markham, it became the first Bond continuation novel after Fleming's death. The book sends Bond after M's kidnappers and into a hard-edged Mediterranean plot full of espionage, political maneuvering, and physical danger. The tone is closer to the literary Bond than to the larger-than-life film version, which makes it especially interesting for readers who want to stay in the atmosphere of Fleming's novels.

Amis knew exactly what he admired in Bond, and that gives both books extra interest.

Read together, they show a fan-critic turning into a continuation writer. The stakes in this mini-series are the usual Bond ones, loyalty, state power, violence, betrayal, survival, but there is also a second level of pleasure in watching Amis think through the machinery of the franchise. If you want to see Bond as both cultural object and working thriller hero, this is a very good place to do it.