Who was Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun based on (and a query on the 1970 Pan cover art)?
Silhouette Man
The last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
I suppose that the famous Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen) was possibly where Kingsley Amis came up with the name but I was wondering what inspired Amis to make a Chinese Red Army colonel the main villain for his James Bond continuation novel. Red China had of course exploded an atomic bomb in October 1964 so I suppose the focus moved to them and their increasingly poor relations with Soviet Russia which forms the political background plot for the novel Colonel Sun (1968).
What Chinese colonels could Colonel Sun Liang-tan be said to be based on at all, if any?
As an aside, I wonder who portrayed Colonel Sun for the 1970 Pan paperback cover? What do you think of it as a cover? One thing to note is that Colonel Sun is here portrayed as having a moustache but as far as I can remember he did not have one in the novel. Drawing on the "Yellow Peril" of thrillers of old I suppose the idea was to make Sun look more fiendishly Oriental and a moustache is facile shorthand for that. Also, it kind of seems like a mash-up between the literary and the film Bond worlds - the white jacket and rose recalls the highly successful film version of Goldfinger in 1964 (and after Colonel Sun's publication by Pan in the film version of Diamonds Are Forever from 1971 too) for example whereas the sun is more literary and symbolic in nature. It's an early example of the "Scary Shiny Glasses Man" (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScaryShinyGlasses) meme too (see Columbo: Death Lends A Hand for a 1971 example of this)*:
First printing Pan Colonel Sun cover from 1970:
Close-up of the cover image:
*Robert Culp as another "Scary Shiny Glasses Man", Investigator Brimmer in Columbo: Death Lends A Hand (1971):
The same effect was later used in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972) where the killer (played by John Cassavetes) Alex Benedict's incriminating buttonhole flower was reflected in his sunglasses. It follows the Colonel Sun Pan paperback in that the character's eyes are completely obscured by the image reflected in them:
I find this a fascinating subject and, as ever, I'd love to hear your views on it! Thanks in advance!
What Chinese colonels could Colonel Sun Liang-tan be said to be based on at all, if any?
As an aside, I wonder who portrayed Colonel Sun for the 1970 Pan paperback cover? What do you think of it as a cover? One thing to note is that Colonel Sun is here portrayed as having a moustache but as far as I can remember he did not have one in the novel. Drawing on the "Yellow Peril" of thrillers of old I suppose the idea was to make Sun look more fiendishly Oriental and a moustache is facile shorthand for that. Also, it kind of seems like a mash-up between the literary and the film Bond worlds - the white jacket and rose recalls the highly successful film version of Goldfinger in 1964 (and after Colonel Sun's publication by Pan in the film version of Diamonds Are Forever from 1971 too) for example whereas the sun is more literary and symbolic in nature. It's an early example of the "Scary Shiny Glasses Man" (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScaryShinyGlasses) meme too (see Columbo: Death Lends A Hand for a 1971 example of this)*:
First printing Pan Colonel Sun cover from 1970:
Close-up of the cover image:
*Robert Culp as another "Scary Shiny Glasses Man", Investigator Brimmer in Columbo: Death Lends A Hand (1971):
The same effect was later used in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972) where the killer (played by John Cassavetes) Alex Benedict's incriminating buttonhole flower was reflected in his sunglasses. It follows the Colonel Sun Pan paperback in that the character's eyes are completely obscured by the image reflected in them:
I find this a fascinating subject and, as ever, I'd love to hear your views on it! Thanks in advance!
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
I guess some are interested....I've never given any thought as to whom Amis based Sun on...doesn't mean I'm not interested...just I've never thought about it... -{
so a Chinese villian would have been fitting for the times. I can't think who it might
have been based on ( if anyone).
paper with the news of Bond's death in them ? Any connection ?