Ariadne is a much better-developed heroine than we get in most of the Fleming stories, and Litsas serves more than adequately in the "sidekick" role. That said, there are some pretty strong characters, and as the scope of the conspiracy Bond is trying to unravel widens, they serve to keep the story centered. Fleming had a way of delivering numerous details without it seeming like an infodump, a skill that is very difficult to duplicate, and Amis doesn't really pull it off here. Fleming had a way of imbuing his stories with a sense of headlong energy that propels the reader forward, affectionately referred to by fans as "the Fleming Sweep." Amis does a good job with this novel overall, but it is definitely lacking that crucial trademark of Fleming's. There are some nice bits of action in the middle portion, but that section of the novel is rather slow overall. The opening is one of the best and most memorable from any Bond novel, Fleming's included. The novel follows Bond as he pursues a group of mysterious kidnappers into Greece, seeking to recover his boss, the head of MI6, M. (That will certainly be an ongoing theme as these re-reads proceed!) Fair warning, while I always endeavor not to blow the whole plot in my reviews, there are SPOILERS AHEAD! When I revisited it a few days ago, I remembered almost nothing from the story, and had no idea how well it would hold up.
I liked it quite a bit, and deemed it a worthy follow-up to the work of Ian Fleming himself.
(That may seem odd, but was easy to be missing key information like that in those pre-internet days- the internet existed, sure, but it wasn't ubiquitous, and I certainly wasn't able to access it whenever I wanted.) I devoured it, blazing through the entire book in an evening. As mentioned before, I had no idea this book existed before I happened upon it in a used book store, despite hunting down all the 007 books I could. Published in 1968, Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis (using the pen name Robert Markham) is the first non-Fleming Bond novel, and continues the story of the intrepid agent quite well.
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