For to Ian Fleming's œuvre Amis brought the anatomising and categorising zeal he never had devoted and never would devote to more elevated works of literature'. look like a cheeky two-fingered salute to the academic world, a farewell raspberry blown at all things pedantically donnish, in a manner Lucky Jim would surely have approved. partly guys academic procedures and pretensions by applying them to low-cultural objects' and, as such, is deliberately provocative.

That was a controversial approach in the 1960s, because from early on, since the mid-1950s, the James Bond novels were criticised by some detractors for their violence, male chauvinism, sexual promiscuity, racism, and anti-Communism.ĭespite his intellectual respect for the Fleming canon, Amis's way of writing about it, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, '. As a mainstream novelist, Amis respected the Bond novels, especially their commercial success, believing them 'to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more ambitious kinds of fiction'. Written at the Bond-mania's zenith in the 1960s, The James Bond Dossier is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming's strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. More recent studies of Fleming's secret agent and his world include The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by the historian Jeremy Black. The James Bond Dossier was the first, formal, literary study of the James Bond character. Later, after Ian Fleming's death, Amis was commissioned as the first continuation novelist for the James Bond novel series, writing Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham. Amis dedicated the book to friend and background collaborator, the poet and historian Robert Conquest.

The James Bond Dossier (1965), by Kingsley Amis, is a critical analysis of the James Bond novels. The first edition published by Jonathan Cape has artwork from their previous Bond books: For Your Eyes Only (top), Goldfinger (left), You Only Live Twice (centre), The Man with the Golden Gun (right), Thunderball (bottom)

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis