commissioned Amis, who wrote Colonel Sun. Critic and future novelist Sally Beauman noted that it was "unusual, not to say unprecedented, for an established author to pick up the torch in this way," though she admits that "Bond [is] too big, and too profitable, a property to be placed in the hands of an unknown." Fleming's wife, Ann, did not endorse any further Bond works and disliked Amis, saying that he would create "a petit bourgeois red brick Bond". In 1965, Amis produced The James Bond Dossier—a critical analysis of the Bond books under his own name—and The Book of Bond, a tongue-in-cheek manual for prospective agents, using the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William ("Bill") Tanner. Amis followed these books with the 1966 novel, The Anti-Death League, which had a plot filled with popular fiction elements and helped Amis prepare for Colonel Sun. Amis and his wife Jane spent September 1965 holidaying on the Greek island of Spetses and Amis used his experiences as the background to the novel. Amis followed a tradition set by Fleming of using the names of people he knew or had met during the researches for his book and Amis drew on the names of people he met in Greece for Colonel Sun. The boat Bond uses—The Altair—was the name of the boat Amis and his wife used on holiday, whilst the Bond girl's fictitious colleagues, "Legakis" and "Papadogonas" were friends who helped Amis in Greece, whilst the doctor who treats Bond in Chapter two was named after Amis and Jane's own doctor. In a 21 May 1967 letter to Philip Larkin, Amis mentioned that he had already finished writing the Bond novel. Release and reception Jonathan Cape published Colonel Sun on 28 March 1968; the book was 255 pages long and priced at a guinea. The novel sold well – journalist and author Eric Hiscock claims that by 1980 it had sold over 500,000 copies worldwide – and was listed second best seller in the "Books in demand" list of the Financial Times for March and April 1968. Harper & Row published the novel in the US on 1 May 1968; the United States edition ran to 244 pages. Reviews Colonel Sun was broadly welcomed by the critics, although a number noted that despite Amis's abilities as a writer, Fleming's own persona was missing from the novel. Roger Baker, writing in The Times, noted that from