One of the first movies I remember really being captivated by was the James Bond film ‘Thunderball.’ I saw it on television when I was about 11, and though I knew little about James Bond at the time, I thought the flick was about the coolest thing I had ever seen

Thunderball was made in 1965, a year after Bond creator Ian Fleming died. It was the fourth in the Bond film series, coming after Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (‘63), and Goldfinger (‘64). By the time it was made, Sean Connery had become a big-name actor who was getting a little bored with the franchise. The film was loaded with the Bond movie hallmarks, and assembled with the largest budget of any picture in the series to date. It broke box office records on its release, although many critics dismissed it as rather meandering, and lacking a resonant-enough villian.

Actually, I disagree. Although it doesn’t have the characters of a movie like Goldfinger (Oddjob, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger himself), it has a neat plausability about it; a warplane with nuclear weapons is highjacked by bad guys. As for the villians, there is no superstar megalomaniac, but rather a series of Mohammed Atta-like role players. It is as a whole, rather than as individuals, that they add up to something menacing. In this respect the film nicely defies the usual Bond formula.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point (and there is one, I assure you). I started monitoring the TV listings for old Bond films after seeing Thunderball, and soon enough started reading Fleming’s novels. Written in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, they are steeped in a Cold War ambience that many of the films play down or eschew altogether. In many cases the plots of Fleming’s stories bear only passing resemblance to those of the movies produced in their name. For instance, the outer-space nonsense of the movie Moonraker, surely the shittiest film ever made, is a far cry from the book, which is set entirely in England and revolves around a British arms-maker who is a Soviet agent.

In a sense, Fleming’s books are a bit of a rogue cousin to the Cold War spy stories spun by the likes of John Le Carre and Graham Greene. But where Le Carre and Greene gave us exquisitely-crafted plots and genuine characters, Fleming gave us...

Well....sex, violence, chicks with cool names, Italian handguns, more brand-name alchohol than a Pamela Anderson/Kid Rock hotel suite, more faraway locales than the entire Lonely Planet series, all powered by fast-moving narratives and underpinned by Fleming’s flair for detail.

One of most enjoyable of all the James Bond books is called ‘Colonel Sun.’ Described by one reviewer as “especially violent,” ‘Colonel Sun’ takes place mostly in Greece, and has a plot that involves, among other things, Red Chinese spies and bisexual Albanian girls. It has a vivid but but grim feel to it, more so than many of Fleming’s books. The thing is, it isn’t written by Ian Fleming. It’s written by a guy named Robert Markham.

I first came across ‘Colonel Sun’ as a boy, shortly after becoming a Bond guru. The kid next door had a copy.

“How typical,” I thought to myself when I spotted it among his collection of half-finished model planes and non-scholarly books on dinosaurs, “He doesn’t even have a real Bond book. He has some imitation Bond book.”

It was only recently that I discovered that Robert Markham, like some sly Bond villain, is not really Robert Markham. Robert Markham is Kingsley Amis.

Yeah, Sir Kingsley Amis, the Booker Prize-winning icon of post-war British literature. Amis rose to fame in 1954 with the publication of his first novel, ‘Lucky Jim,’ which is regarded as one of the great comic masterpieces in English writing. By the 1960’s he was a well-established cornerstone of the British literary establishment.

What happened was this. Amis liked Ian Fleming’s books. He liked them because they were entertaining. Amis hated books that weren’t entertaining, regardless of their supposed literary merit. When Ian Fleming died in 1964, Amis began discussing with Fleming’s publisher the possibility of continuing the Bond series under a pseudonym. He did not want to become a permanent substitute for Ian Fleming, but simply wanted a crack at writing a Bond novel in the Fleming style. Mindful that his own now-famous name might skew the reception of the novel, he adopted the pen name of ‘Robert Markham.’ His Bond novel, ‘Colonel Sun,’ was published in 1967.

There are some things to be learned from Kingsley Amis. Chief among them, I think, is his realization that he had things to learn from others, including those considered by many to be beneath him in stature and ability. Ian Fleming, for instance.

All of the crazy Bond characters--Pussy Galore, Dr. No, the megalomaniacal Blofeld, the Japanese agent-vixen Kissy Suzuki--may have been fantastical, but they were also great fun. All of the referances to Chesterfield cigarettes, and Stolichnaya Vodka, and Beretta pistols may have represented a “fetish for brand-names,” but they were also pretty cool, and were a huge bridge to the reader; ie. "Bond drinks Stoli. Maybe you’ve tried it too." Fleming may not have been Shakespeare, but at least he knew how to have a good time, and he knew how to connect with his audience.

In short, Ian Fleming knew how to do some things that Amis felt were worthwhile; it was a challenge for Amis to see if he could pull the same tricks out of his own sleeve. Amis had wit, craft and intellect. But he never took for granted that all of that made him a good read.

Maybe it’s a hallmark of real artists that they are always ready to learn, and don’t mind who they learn from. Freed up from the ball-and-chain of absorbing only what is ‘critically’ acceptable, an artist can actually study all manner of work that may be useful or relevant to his own stuff.

As a rocker, one of my favorite examples is Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and his admission of a strong Black Sabbath influence in his music. Like Ian Fleming, Black Sabbath were always highly-regarded among fans of their genre, but to much of the rock critic establishment they were not to be taken too seriously beyond that. Cobain, though, recognized that the groove-soaked heaviness of Sabbath, if combined some melody and delivered with his own punkish abandon, could render a formidable result. He was right. Good thing he didn’t, like many of his posturing punk contemporaries, write Sabbath off as a bunch of dinosaurs and decide that they had nothing to offer him.

But what I love most about the Cobain/Sabbath thing is the way rock critics--from the start great champions of Cobain--began upwardly-revising their views of Sabbath as Cobain’s regard for them became known. Typical, eh?

Similar, I suppose, to the way I upwardly-revised my own view of Robert Markham’s work once I found out he was actually Kingsley Amis.