Kingsley Amis


Amis, [Sir] Kingsley (1922-1995). Novelist, wine writer, critic and journalist. Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, South London. He was educated at Oxford and served in the Royal Signals during the Second World War. He became a lecturer in English at Swansea University in 1949, a career he continued until the early 1960s, when he decided to write full-time. His comedic debut novel Lucky Jim (1954) won wide acclaim. Amis was an acclaimed 'Bondophile' who revised the manuscript of The Man With The Golden Gun. He wrote one of the earliest critiques of Bond, The James Bond Dossier, of which Fleming approved; althoughpublished in 1965, Fleming had seen the manuscript before his death. This was followed by the lighter reference The Book of Bond, and in 1968 Amis wrote the first official non-Fleming James Bond novel Colonel Sun [using the pseudonym Robert Markham]; all Amis' James Bond work was published by Jonathan Cape. A literary sensation, Amis won both the Somerset Maugham award and the Booker Prize (to which Fleming had unwittingly contributed in funding when he sold the majority share of the Bond novels to Booker Brothers). Kingsley Amis wrote Fleming's entry in theDictionary of National Biography.


Selective Kingsley Amis Bibliography:
Lucky Jim(the story of a lower middle-class anti-hero, 1954)
The Anti Death League(part-espionage, 1966)
The Riverside Villas Murder (a classic armchair mystery, 1973)
The Crime of the Century (a whodunit, 1975)
The Darkwater Hall Mystery (a Sherlock Holmes adventure, 1978)

Kingsley Amis' James Bond Books:
The James Bond Dossier[critique](1965)
The Book of Bond [reference] (1965)
Colonel Sun [novel] (1968)